Pacific Rim Is Guillermo del Toro in Full Blockbuster Mode

The great Guillermo del Toro has one of the most fascinating careers of any modern genre filmmaker, because he’s been able to explore so many different things in a relatively short period of time. After breaking through to Hollywood with horror films produced in his native Mexico, Del Toro directed creature features (Mimic), superhero movies (Blade II, Hellboy), Gothic romances (Crimson Peak), and monster love stories (The Shape of Water), all delivered thoughtfully and with his trademark attention to the details of his various monsters. 

Del Toro has made his career his own, working on films both big and small, but if you want to see what it looks like when this particular filmmaker gets behind the wheel of a blockbuster behemoth, look no further than Pacific Rim, his 2013 love letter to Kaiju cinema that’s airing on SYFY this week. It wasn’t the first time Del Toro played with blockbuster, popcorn cinema elements, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it remains the best example of the director playing in pure action blockbuster territory, and that makes it something to be savored.

The gargantuan beauty of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim was conceived by screenwriter Travis Beacham, who dreamed up a world in which giant monsters known as Kaiju keep appearing through a rift beneath the ocean and threatening coastal cities around the world. To combat the threat, humanity has constructed massive coastal walls, and built gargantuan mechs known as Jaegers. Each Jaeger is so massive that one pilot alone can’t control it, so the “drift” system was introduced, allowing two pilots to neurally link to each other, essentially sharing one mind while they pilot the Jaeger. 

It’s in this scenario that we meet Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a former Jaeger pilot who’s backed away from the program after the death of his brother during a mission. As the Kaiju attacks escalate, and the world feels on the brink of collapse, the Jaeger program needs all the help it can get, and Raleigh will have to learn to drift with his new co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), whether he likes it or not. 

There is a lot of classic action cinema meat here, from the reluctant hero who has to get back in the game to the rising star hero who has to prove herself to Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), the hard-nosed leader of the whole Jaeger program. There are even a pair of mad scientists (Burn Gorman and Charlie Day) at the heart of all the info dumps, and of course, it’s all driven by over-the-top action, as giant robots fight giant monsters in city-shaking battles. 

These battles, as with every setpiece he’s ever constructed, are a fascinating view of Del Toro’s imagination. He obviously loves monster movies, and he throws himself into Kaiju lore in particular to craft beasts of epic proportion, building on the genre’s roots going all the way back to Godzilla. It’s a dazzling showcase of his talents when the budgets are big and the effects are constant, but that’s not what makes Pacific Rim so special. Or at least, it’s not the only thing.

Yes, you can come to Pacific Rim for giant mechs and giant monsters, and you’ll get a film that delivers the goods, but Del Toro is also interested in exploring humanity’s relationship to these giant metaphors for cataclysmic change in our world. Godzilla was created out of postwar anxiety and nuclear trauma in Japan, and kaiju characters still retain that kind of thematic punch in the right hands. Del Toro takes that punch, then asks what humanity would do if our only choice was not just to fight these monsters, but fight them together. Jaeger’s don’t work without the drift, and humanity doesn’t work without cooperation. It’s a simple metaphor, but it’s one the film explores to its fullest extent, adding texture and undeniable emotional punch to a visual effects showcase.

Pacific Rim airs this week on SYFY. Check the Schedule for complete listings.