"Fortune favours the brave."
Hello everyone!
Aka, long story short, I dug up my copy of Pacific Rim (which had also been showing on television for a number of times that week, and the week after) and popped it in to watch.
Now, I will admit, I originally watched this on a whim five years ago, thinking it was just going to be a lark to pass the time with.
Little did I know I'd be proven wrong on all counts.
There are of course things that could always be improved in every movie, but for Pacific Rim, especially, you can probably say there's very little of it.
Without further ado, let's go check out what the Breach is doing, shall we?
General note: I'm not a big fan of Charlie Hunnam. I'm not entirely sure why or how it happened, but he just doesn't really strike me as someone I'd want to watch by dropping everything and making sure I catch it all, whatever he's doing.
Obviously, as he's the main actor carrying this particular movie, then, you'd have thought I wouldn't be as keen about it as I am.
But somehow ... he works, and the movie works.
At some point in the 2010s, the Breach happens in the Pacific, being a sort of opening between our dimension and another one, from which spring big ass Godzilla-like monsters called Kaijus. Or well, the humans end up calling them that.
The Kaijus seem to be on a rampage for no particular reason, and someone or something has to stop them.
This is where the Jaegers come in.
Built to look like oversized humanoid robots, they're piloted by a team of two connected through brain waves, and big and strong enough to take on the monsters and send them back into the deep.
Unfortunately, however, the success doesn't seem to be happening fast enough for the people, as is usual for our species because we want everything YESTERDAY, and so the Jaegers are being decommissioned and a wall built surrounding the Pacific instead, because building walls makes sense and nobody's ever watched a Gozilla movie before.
Humans: LET'S BUILD A WALL! WE'LL HIDE AND BE SAFE!
Kaiju: HAHAHAHA U CUTE.
See what I mean? The wall doesn't even make the monsters blink.
Meanwhile, a brother pair, Yancy and Raleigh, are one of the more successful pilot teams, until the day when Yancy is killed by a Kaiju and Raleigh manages to bring their Jaeger back to shore on his own (something mostly considered impossible because of the size and complexity of the robot), before ghosting and heading into the building business to help bring the wall up.
But of course, once it proves ineffectual, the leader of the Jaeger program, or what's left of it, Marshal Pentecost, comes to ferret Raleigh out of his hole again because ...
Wait for it.
He's going after the Breach itself.
Yep, he'll hit them where it hurts, regardless that his two scientists, Newt and Gottlieb, disagree on whether or not this will even work. They're kind of leaning towards the no on it, and Newt even tries drifting with a Kaiju brain to figure out what makes them tick.
Pentecost orders Raleigh to find a pilot he'd be compatible to drift with, and eventually they settle on Mako Mori, Pentecost's adopted daughter whom he saved back in the initial days of the Kaiju invasion.
Not that Pentecost is happy about it, but they're getting a double breach and need to hustle.
Especially since they lose two Jaegers of the four left, including both teams, AND the remaining digital ones are knocked offline by a pulse from the beasts. This leaves Pentecost no choice but to send in Raleigh and Mako in Gypsy Danger, who is nuclear as opposed to digital, and they smash their way through the Kaiju.
Of course they then figure out the monsters are after Newt, who'd drifted with them, but Newt is convinced he needs to drift again, so he hunts down Ron Perlman to get him another Kaiju brain. This achieved (and Perlman getting eaten in the process), Newt and Gottlieb drift together even as Pentecost is forming a plan to drop a nuke into the Breach to seal it.
The two scientists catch them just in time, but already underwater, to say this won't work: the Breach is DNA-coded, and only Kaiju can come through.
This prompts Pentecost, who'd actually gone into the Jaeger despite knowing it may kill him (because when they first started the Jaeger program, the nuclear reactors were bleeding all over the place and he was exposed to the radiaion), to sacrifice the original nuke (and its Jaeger) to give Mako and Raleigh a chance at getting through the Breach.
Which they do, with a Kaiju corpse, setting the reactor in their robot to go boom while the pilots eject, and the world, for the first time in probably a decade, finds itself without Kaijus - or Jaegers.
And oh, Ron Perlman? He kicks his way out of the Kaiju, demanding to know where his golden shoes went.
FIN
Or well, not quite fin, as we'll be covering Uprising next week, but it's fin for this week's blog.
The movie is fun, filled with suspense, great action sequences, and a whole lot of butt-kicking in big robots. The sci-fi behind all this is kind of far-fetched, but that aside, the actors, specifically Idris Elba as Pentecost, deliver with their performances, and you have to hand it to them considering they probably spent most of the filming process pretending they were in big robots in front of a green screen.
It's a neat way to spend an evening without having to worry too much about the who and why and where, so I highly recommend you see this movie before watching it's sequel!
xx
*images and video not mine
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