I went to see Pacific Rim over the weekend and, to be perfectly honest with you, I think that it was the best movie that I’ve seen all year. I’m not trying to say that it was a deeply powerful movie like Pulp Fiction or Shawshank Redemption. It is, however, just plain fun.
I went into the movie expecting to see giant robots fighting giant monsters, and that’s exactly what I got. It was doubly exciting for me because I got to take in all of the amazing eye candy. The robots and the monsters (called “jaegers” and “kaiju,” respectively) looked absolutely amazing. The fight scenes were a far cry from the shaky camera what-on-earth-am-I-seeing visual overload that you get in Michael Bay’s Transformer movies. The artists who worked on these fight scenes clearly poured their hearts into the project, and Guillermo Del Toro did an amazing job of showcasing the artists’ talent.
One of the really cool things about the movie is that the jaegers and kaiju were all very visually coherent, but at the same time the artists gave each jaeger a unique personality. The massive Russian-built Cherno Alpha looks like a tank with legs. The three-armed Crimson Typhoon from China was sleeker and more agile, hinting at the martial arts roots of the Chinese. Gipsy Danger of the US was like an all-American soldier — simple but effective. Normally you don’t get this kind of service out of defense contractors what with scandals and bureaucratic red tape, but I think more people would be willing to throw tax dollars at the military if we had 30-story tall robotic death machines to show for it.
Similarly, the kaiju were all united by a common theme. They had a Godzilla-like feel, and many of them had some sort of defining feature on their heads, such as a horn or a massive bone plate. They also had creepy blue blood and gave off a soft blue-green glow in their mouths and eyes. Some were built more like gorillas and others were shaped like pterodactyls, but it was always clear that the kaiju came from the same gene pool.
To all the 3D artists out there, I highly recommend that you go see this movie. Will you like it? Well, there’s no way to tell for sure. Based on Rotten Tomatoes, there’s about an 87% chance that you’ll come out of the theater with a big smile on your face. Either way, you’ll be blown away by the visuals. Del Toro did a refreshingly excellent job of showcasing the jaw-dropping visuals in the fight scenes with beautiful framing and stable cameras. Hopefully, the movie will inspire you to come up with new artistic styles. Take a page out of Pacific Rim’s playbook: invent your own signature style and then go wild.