3. Del Toro Saves The Best For Second To Last
OK, let's look at the score card, Mr. del Toro. You blew up half of your mechs, destroyed a good portion of Hong Kong, and had your main mech kill a kaiju in spectacular fashion. Then, the last Jaeger standing fights the last kaiju standing. The Jaegar seems to be winning, but then the kaiju cocks its head and seems to think "Oh hey yeah, I've got wings!" The kaiju then uses said wings, picks the mech up off the ground, and flies it damn near into orbit. The pilots inside the Jaegar make the only sensible solution to the classic conundrum of being in low orbit thanks to the death grip of a giant winged monster that's trying to bite your face off: it whips out a 100 foot-long sword and slices the kaiju in half. Now, of course, there's the little problem of gravity, as the Jaegar plummets back to earth. Through some good piloting and a safe landing zone - a giant soccer stadium - the mech hurtles back to earth safely. The pilots not only land the giant mech, they land it in a cool pose. Sounds good, right? But here's the problem. You've still got a climatic action scene to go. How do you top this scene? The simple answer is you don't. Del Toro doesn't even try to, really. He lets the last scene rest on the characters' sacrifices and general derring-do, which would work if we cared more about these characters. The final monster is fearsome enough, but the final battle is the hardest to follow. I never got a real sense of the scale or threat of the last kaiju. It's not a bad scene, just a little too anti-climatic. But damn, is that battle in Hong Kong ever amazing.