Pacific Rim – review

"Go big or go extinct!" is the poster tagline facing audiences as they file into the cinema for Guillermo del Toro's monster-mash blockbuster. And just as they're forming the thought: "Hang on, I think technically the dinosaurs did both …" this film hits them upside the head with a deafening clang. No further pondering is feasible. This is a high-decibel CGI spectacular with a great premise. Enormous creatures have been let loose into the ocean from the earth's core by a tectonic-plate convulsion; they're lurching out of the surf and threatening famous buildings in countries all around the Pacific Rim from the US to the far east, and the only way to battle them is using gigantic automatons internally piloted by buff hotties working in pairs. It's monsters v robots.

But straight monster-on-robot action accounts for less of the film than you might hope, and the action is distended with all kinds of solemn character journeys, laugh-free comedy figures, lumbering set-pieces, tiresome sub-Christopher Nolan innerspace adventures, unzinging dialogue, and really little of the imaginative and visual flair that Del Toro has shown in the past. Only when Ron Perlman (star of the Hellboy films) shows up in a cameo do you remember that this is, at least notionally, a Guillermo del Toro movie. Perlman's muscular presence triggers a startling interest-spike, a sudden tang of flavour, and makes you realise that the rest of the time the humans, the monsters and the robots have all had one thing in common: a lack of personality.

The sea monsters are known by the Japanese term kaiju (strange beast), and the robots by the Germanic term jaegers (used here to mean "hunter"). The film appears to emerge from a weirdly indeterminate cross-cultural sludge, a homogenised, vaguely imagined zone in which the monsters are, for me, bigger but blander than in the classic Japanese monster movies of old. In fact, the main jaeger here looks not unlike Emperor Zurg from Toy Story.

Charlie Hunnam plays Raleigh Becket, an experienced jaeger pilot who carries a terrible burden of trauma and guilt. His tough, careworn commander Stacker (Idris Elba) is exasperated with this troubled, young hothead, but knows his worth, and teams him up with a dynamic and beautiful Mako (Rinko Kikuchi). These two are hardly an obvious match from the military-Jaeger perspective, but their explosive chemistry might be just the thing to kick some kaiju ass. There are also two wacky boffins, Newton (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman), who go into a comedy routine perhaps intended to embarrass the kaiju into going away.

But it's not just a question of the two working in pairs at the controls. The point is that a pilot is expected to achieve a kind of mind-melded harmony with the robot to operate it, and because the resulting "neural load" is too onerous for just one person, he has to work with a partner and achieve "drift" with them too, intermeshing with the other's consciousness. So we get many internal glimpses of each jaeger pilot's mental world, and Inception-lite delving, which slows and hobbles the action-enjoyment without deepening it. Although I have to admit I found myself pondering the general application and thinking it might be interesting if, say, Group Captain Guy Gibson during the Dambusters raid in 1943 was required to "drift" with his Lancaster bomber and co-pilot Harold "Micky" Martin.

Pacific Rim cheekily disses Transformers in the opening scene – slightly ungracious treatment of a film franchise to which it is indebted. It could also have wanted to pre-emptively stamp its big metallic foot on the recent Hugh Jackman movie Real Steel, with a similar story about battling robots. That was pretty ropey, but in the light of Pacific Rim, it actually has a kind of unassuming modesty, and at least tried, in its way, to create real human sympathy.

That's not to say there isn't interest. The effects are ambitious, and one spectacular urban catastrophe wittily concludes with a collapsing wall nudging a Newton's cradle just hard enough to set it in motion. Yet smart touches like that are rare. I have been mixed about Del Toro in the past: enjoying the ferocity and bite of the Hellboy pictures and his Blade 2. I found the much-swooned over Pan's Labyrinth over-rated but it had a real inventiveness not obvious here. Maybe director and co-writer Del Toro took this job in a detached, impersonal spirit and it can't fully be considered one of his films in that authorial sense. At any rate, as a film genre, the big summer blockbuster toy tie-in spectacular remains untransformed.