Minutes into Pacific Rim, I felt my eyes watering. About halfway through, after Gipsy Danger triumphantly brings down a kaiju on the edge of Hong Kong (midway through one hell of a setpiece), they came back. The movie made me cry tears of joy. I don’t think any movie has done that to me in some time. After being let down by Iron Man 3 and Star Trek 2 Much Crying, this is exactly what I needed.

 I don’t want to write a full-fledged review, or go into a plot synopsis or anything, you can go literally anywhere else to read something like that. I just want to talk about how this movie worked on a personal level for me and throw out a bunch of random thoughts that I’ve had in my head all weekend.
I grew up on Godzilla movies and Power Rangers. Giant monsters were just the coolest thing ever to me at 8 years old, so this stuff is just in my blood. When I hit my teenage years, that passion moved into giant robot anime, specifically shows like Gundam Wing, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Big O. Recently I’ve been getting heavily back into the old Godzilla movies I liked as a kid, along with the 90’s Gamera trilogy, tokusatsu shows like Super Robot Red Baron (which I wrote at length about here), basically anything I can get my hands on, and you can tell it's been influencing my art a lot too. So it goes without saying that I was excited for Pacific Rim. I feel like this movie was made JUST for me. I started grinning the moment that kaiju started tearing into the Golden Gate bridge and I don’t think the grin ever left my face until well after it was all over.

Yeah, yeah, the movie is cheesy. That’s exactly how I wanted it to be, though. I wasn’t sure how Guillermo del Toro was gonna handle the movie at first, but from the moment I saw Raleigh and his brother strutting down that corridor in leather jackets like rockstar fighter pilots, I knew the movie was in good hands. There are certain clichés in the movie, yeah. Idris Elba plays your stereotypical hard-headed military commander that’s in every Gundam anime I’ve seen, and he plays it perfectly. I would’ve been disappointed if there wasn’t macho posturing, bickering, and fighting between any of the pilots, and I believe that every kaiju movie NEEDS a ship trapped in the middle of a raging storm, mistaking the giant monster coming at them for an island. Okay, it was all a bit predictable, but really, tell me, what kind of human drama were you expecting? I didn’t want darkness and cynicism and crying, and thankfully neither did del Toro.
The WWII influence is all over the place. The leather jackets, the kaiju kill stamps on the Jaegers along with painted logos, the design of the computers that the characters interact with are all heavy, colored buttons, switches and microphones in metal casing as opposed to fancy touch-screen tech that we’re used to seeing EVERYWHERE now. I approve of that aesthetic, it’s much more physical. It IS a little weird that in a movie taking place more than a decade into the future, everyone dresses like they’re from the mid-to-late 20th century, but the costumes suit the rest of the production design and makes it all feel a bit timeless and more, well, heroic feeling in a way I can’t quite articulate. I love del Toro’s films for their visual aesthetics and this movie did not let me down at all.
That first Jaeger in the prologue, the blue one with the fin on its chest? That design just SCREAMS Go Nagai. Seriously looks like it almost belongs in Mazinger Z or an episode of Super Robot Red Baron, fitting for a first generation Jaeger. I wish we’d gotten to see more of it in action. Cherno Alpha, another Mark I that we see, is yes, SUPER RUSSIAN, but also brings to mind some old-school Japanese mech designs that have the kind of dome heads with no neck. Like this dude from Red Baron:
Also, the Jaeger designs in general feel more to me like Armored Core and Virtual On than Gundam or Evangelion. Yes, the computer voice is absolutely GLaDOS from Portal, no mistaking that, but that voice is also VERY similar to the announcer in Virtual On. “ROUND ONE, GET READY” is a thing that’s embedded in my brain from putting so many quarters into that game.

THE MUSIC. The main theme is great for getting you pumped up and rooting for the Jaeger pilots, and the darker stuff, when the kaiju were attacking, was remarkably similar to the music I’m used to hearing in kaiju films, especially Koh Otani’s scores for the Gamera trilogy and Giant Monsters All Out Attack. Bravo, Ramin Djawadi.

All of the kaiju, while pure CG, looked like you could conceivably cram a guy in a suit and make it work. The way they moved, too, while more natural and animalistic, still had little touches that made them feel like guys strapped into heavy rubber suits from time to time. My ONLY complaint about the movie is that I wish the kaiju had been more colorful, or had more markings on them. I can only handle so many greyish tones and blue bioluminescence. Individual roars, while not necessary, would have been great. Each kaiju in a Toho movie has its own unique cry, easily distinguishable from one another, and a nod towards that would’ve been great.

The names! Mako Mori, Newton Geizler, Hercules Hansen, Stacker Fucking Pentecost! Those names alone are enough to inform you of what kind of movie you’re going into. You just don’t let people with average names like mine pilot a 250 foot tall robot designed specifically for punching the crap out of giant monsters from another dimension.
The only characters who really curse in the movie are Chuck Hansen and Hannibal Chau, which is very fitting for both characters. And most of the swearing is of course from Hannibal. I just thought that was a nice touch. While I'm at it, let's take a moment to appreciate how ballin' Ron Perlman is in this movie, brief as his appearance is.

Clifton Collins, Jr. I’ve only seen him in two other movies, Scott Pilgrim and Crank 2, but I dig that guy. Not sure why he was dressed as the Eleventh Doctor, but I have no complaints. And the balding, long-haired dude running Hannibal’s shop, is that the same actor who played that vampire in the beginning and end of Blade 2? And why was that old guy with the metal detector so familiar to me?

…So yeah, it’s safe to say I loved it. I’ve seen it twice now, the second time in 3D, and plan on seeing it at least once more. The last movie I saw more than twice in theaters? Hellboy 2. Funny how things like that work out.