MAN VS BEAST IN SCI-FI WAR
from the onslaught. If the international defence coalition here had only seenWorld War Z, they’d know high fortifications just aren’t going to work.
But after so many years and with the knowledge that Kaiju come up from the sea, wouldn’t it have made sense to first evacuate obvious coastal targets such as Hong Kong and Sydney, which get stomped on during the course of the action here, thus forcing the Kaiju to march inland and be exposed? Have Paris, Moscow, Tehran and Mexico City been assaulted? Nope.
That said, the initial Kaiju/Jaeger showdown, along the Alaska coast during a nocturnal hurricane, is a doozy, as hotshot pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his older brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff) take on an aggressive beast with a stabbing snout and enormous jaws capable of biting through metal. Then there are two intriguing keys to the setup: because it takes two to control a Jaeger, the minds of the pilots sync up by way of The Drift, which opens up a total mental exchange between two brains; furthermore, because of the evolving nature of the Kaiju, it’s determined that some sort of rational intelligence is behind the monsters’ attacks, that there’s more to them than just random viciousness.
The film’s title only appears on screen after this 18-minute action prologue has tragically concluded with Yancy’s death and the disillusioned Raleigh dropping out. Desperation subsequently stirs Jaeger force commander Stacker Pentecost (where did that name come from?), played in strikingly macho fashion by Idris Elba, to dredge Raleigh out of anonymity to co-pilot one of the four remaining Jaegers in a last-ditch effort to vindicate the programme and save the world from smart dinosaur descendants. Reluctant to share his mind with someone other than his brother, Raleigh has a balky, recalcitrant manner that’s magnified by Hunnam’s notable resemblance to Steve McQueen, who specialised in this sort of attitude. However, it’s only a matter of time, and after a stick-fighting martial arts contest he’s paired with beautiful Japanese candidate Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, of Babel), who has a secret with Pentecost that must be exorcised before she’s cleared to fly.
There’s some cliched macho competitiveness worked in involving a father-son Aussie pilot team (Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky) versus Raleigh, while the Russian and Chinese Jaeger units get very short shrift. By contrast, the two key scientists, who are at odds over the source and nature of the Kaiju and how best to deal with them, are amusingly brought to life by a manic Charlie Day and an eccentric Burn Gorman, whose high-comic oddness positions his character as a theoretical grandson to Dr Strangelove. Topping off the cast for sheer bravado and wayward weirdness is Del Toro regular Ron Perlman as a sort of flashy Dr Mabuse of the Hong Kong underground.
To kill time between action set pieces, Del Toro has done an aboveaverage job of avoiding tedium via some flavoursome casting, passably interesting plot contrivances and, above all, by maintaining strong forward momentum. Unlike so many similar crash-bang action spectaculars, this one feels lean and muscular rather than bloated or padded; the combat is almost always coherent and dramatically pointed rather than just splashed on the screen for its own sake. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter