Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, and Charlie Day
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Runtime: 131 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2013

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Rating notes: Science fiction violence

This American science fiction film is directed and co-written by the Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, one of the foremost living exponents of fantasy cinema today. The film is a fantasy-display of giant robots, piloted by humans, battling with alien giant monsters which have risen from the depths of the sea. The time is somewhere in the near future.

Del Toro directed the much awarded “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), and his fantasy creations are typically idiosyncratic, visually arresting, and highly imaginative. This film illustrates all three. It was shot for 3D viewing and employed a team of people, who were responsible for the special effects associated with the Star Wars trilogy.

For del Toro, violence and fantasy frequently go hand in hand. In this film, huge monsters identified as “Kaijus” rise up from crevasses in the Pacific Ocean and invade Earth, causing death and destruction everywhere. The special effects for Kaijus are insect-inspired in their creation. Kaijus are sculptured to look enormous, dangerous and menacing animal monsters. To combat their attack, the military consider that a different type of weapon is needed for use against them, and it seems natural that “huge” is chosen to fight with “huge”. The new weapon is the Jaegers. They are massive robot machines controlled by two humans inside them, whose minds are locked together. The two pilots in a Jaeger control their machine through a psychic bond formed with each other.

The Jaegers like the Kaijus are 25-stories high. The Kaijus rip away at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and even attack the Sydney Opera House. Unable to be stopped by military fighter planes or conventional weapons, the Jaegers struggle to beat them, and the movie builds to a final show-down, where the biggest and best Jaegers of all try to ward off the inevitable.

A special team of people is needed to pilot Jaegers. A former Jaeger pilot, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), is pulled out of retirement, and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), an untested trainee, is chosen to co-pilot Becket’s machine. Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) is Becket’s commanding officer, and he reluctantly agrees to Mako working with him. Stacker has worked previously with Becket, and his record of noncompliance has not engendered a great deal of trust. However, he places his faith afresh in Beckett and allows Beckett and Mako to join their minds together to co-pilot a Jaeger.

The artwork behind the Kaijus and the Jaegers is superb, and the tension of the movie is well maintained throughout the film. The combat scenes between the monsters and their metal adversaries are relentlessly intense, and the film creates an atmosphere of constant peril. The visual effects in the film are spectacular, and pay homage to Japanese Pop culture – the term, “Kaiju”, referring to “unnatural creatures of immense size” in Japanese.

The closest thing to this movie is Michael Bay’s “Transformers” (2007), but, in this film machines are given human-like attributes, or qualities. They inhabit a world fuelled by de Toro’s rich imagination, and the machines seem to have a will of their own, but their actions are always mediated by others. Many other science fiction movies have shown big things fighting other big things, but del Toro gives a creative twist to what might have been tired imagery in somebody else’s hands. His direction is typically wild and unconstrained. There are some moments of good dramatic tension in the acting, and moments of complete silliness, and they are mixed together indiscriminately with patchy dialogue. The film is clearly more concerned with its spectacular creations than with any consistent development of human character.

This is highly imaginative science fiction. The movie gives few philosophical revelations about the nature of the human condition, and it does not tap deeply into scientific knowledge. But, typical of del Toro, the film provides constant visual displays that are bizarre, richly imaginative, and remarkably distinctive.