How Guillermo del Toro achieved the humanist blockbuster in ‘Pacific Rim’

It paints a purely unironic portrait of heroism: one focused not on individual exceptionalism, but on what we can achieve if we stand against the darkness together

Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam as General Stacker Pentecost and Raleigh Becket in the first film in the series (Rex)

Guillermo del Toro has always had a knack for finding heart in the strange unusual, though no greater validation could have come than on Oscar night, when his love story shared between woman and aquatic creature won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

His imprint comes to screens in a different manner this month, as Pacific Rim Uprising delivers a sequel to his 2013 blockbuster, though with Steven S. DeKnight now in the director’s chair.

An apt time, then, to revisit the original: a worldwide hit that earned more than $411 million globally, yet shares the same emotional generosity that charmed Oscar voters – one that runs through all of del Toro’s films.

On paper, Pacific Rim exudes the traditional Hollywood “words out of a hat” combination of giant monsters vs. giant robots – here more elegantly reframed as Kaiju (the Japanese word for killer beast) vs. Jaeger (the German word for hunter). Yet, in del Toro’s hands, it carves a striking place in the landscape of the 21st century Hollywood: it’s a true humanist blockbuster.

Pacific Rim understands that the pleasure of spectacle doesn’t have to be burdened by superficiality. Even robots punching monsters, in all their fancifulness, can contribute to how stories shape how we see ourselves and our interactions with others. It’s a film that still adheres to the overriding theme of del Toro’s work: the vital quality of empathy.

Many of his films may communicate that message through the structure of classic horror, creating monsters that are fair of heart, pitted against villains that are fair of face, but monstrous of heart (The Shape of Water and The Devil’s Backbone illustrate this well); Pacific Rim, however, approaches the subject from an angle that emphasises the importance of global unity and respect.

He strives here for the utopian depiction of future Earth, the antithesis to sci-fi’s predilection for shattered worlds, where all nations can pool their resources, political differences cast aside, to protect the planet from a monster of its own creation: Kaiju, attracted through an interdimensional breach by the potential spoils of an Earth decimated by atmosphere ozone depletion, carbon monoxide, and polluted waters. As much as Godzilla was birthed out of the nightmare of the atom bomb, Pacific Rim’s Kaiju force humanity to reckon with its own destructiveness.

Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, teams up with Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) to operate a Jaeger (MovieStore/Rex/Shutterstock)

It’s a film, indeed, that’s always refreshingly conscious of the global ramifications of its own narrative. While blockbuster-style filmmaking lapses often into the idea that audiences will be too focused on a hero’s exploits to care about the residents of whichever city’s been chosen in the apocalypse bingo, here the ever-looming threat of civilian casualty is never far behind. Though it never endangers its own sense of adventure, there’s a sense of weight to each action here.

An idea which extends even to how its battle scenes play out. This isn’t the improbable weightlessness of Michael Bay’s machines in Transformers, who cause mass destruction but fly through the air with the delicacy of a paper airplane. These towering Jaegers visibly disrupt the environment around them, casting aside rain and ocean waters.

Their punches are slow and laborious; as an audience we can feel the strain of crunching metal, the power of its impact. On one level, del Toro has kept faithful to spirit of the Kaiju genre, in which those first Godzilla battles were played out by actors in suits. Yet, this physical heft can also give way to emotional heft – we can feel the perilousness of humanity in the face of these almost godlike figures duking it out.

We see also a global population that actually react to its presence, though del Toro here lets slip a less flatteringly optimistic portrait of humanity to backdrop his heroes. A pattern of apathy is set out in the film’s opening moments: after the first attack, “we mourned our dead, memorialised the attack, and moved on”.

When humanity finally bands together to create the Jaeger and fight back, the world becomes apathetic in its own victories. The Kaiju become a token of pop culture: in toys, in chat show mascots. The responsibility of protection is shifted onto the Jaeger pilots, these idealised heroes.

And so, when the first strike of failure hits the Jaeger program, the world fractures. In fear responsibility will shift back to them, international governments are swift to pull funding as a new saviour – the coastal wall – is ushered in. The population, still enamoured by their mechanic guardian angels, reacts through mass rioting. Fear and distrust are a cycle so exemplary of the world we live in now, but this is what Pacific Rim dreams of saving us from, just as much as the rampaging Kaiju.

However, del Toro’s clear answer to global unification is not only universal empathy for our fellow humans, but to allow those ideas to narrow into the personal. A “think local, act global” approach on an interpersonal scale. To him, the first step is to find trust in our own neighbours, an idea so beautifully and succinctly summarised by the idea of “drift compatibility”; Jaegers are piloted by two people creating a neural connection formed through their own memories, so that they can share the burden of operating such gigantic machinery.

Mutual trust and respect becomes not only vital to the operation of the Jaegers, but to the safety of humanity. It carves out so many of the relationships in Pacific Rim: between father and son, or in two scientists putting aside their intellectual rivalry to think only of the common good. General Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), particularly, finds himself at odds as a man who tries to put professional authority at the forefront of everything.

To think only of the common good, he must come to understand that the personal can’t be suppressed at will, no matter how hard he may try to conceal his connection to Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), the daughter-like figure he saved from a Kaiju attack when she was a child. By refusing to recognise his own instincts to protect her, he risks removing one of the Jaeger program’s best pilots from the field.

The world’s population are enamoured with their heroes such as Mako (Legendary Pictures/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

At the film’s centre are Mako and Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), the latter in search of a new co-pilot after his brother died operating a Jaeger. After going through several trials of physical combat in order to test out potential candidates, he demands Mako is given a chance, despite Stacker’s hesitation. It’s here that we become privy to what “drift compatibility” really represents.

The fluidity of their fighting has an almost spiritual quality to it, as if we’re seeing two different souls communicate as one. This is the concept of total, overriding empathy – we understand later that when Raleigh’s brother died, the two were still connected on the neural bridge, meaning he experienced every emotion that passes through before death. In turn, these emotions are passed on to Mako.

It does seem significant that despite these two characters being clearly positioned as romantic interests for each other, we’re never satisfied as an audience with a final reel kiss. For del Toro, perhaps, their relationship represents something beyond the tangible realms of sexual or romantic attraction.

Pacific Rim paints a purely unironic portrait of heroism: one focused not on individual exceptionalism, but on what we can achieve if we stand against the darkness together. It’s a film that examines global trauma on both the political and personal scale, but sees their equal importance in providing hope for the future.

As del Toro himself told Rolling Stone: “I wanted a robots and monsters movie that ultimately provided the message that if we stick together – all of us – we have a chance of making it. A lot of the time I find myself craving a movie that gives you a good thrill ride, but also gives you a thrill ride that is life-affirming. That is beautiful.”

Pacific Rim Uprising hits UK cinemas on Friday 23 March.