Film Carew

It's strange that a Guillermo del Toro movie about giant robots battling giant alien monsters has come out with a title as bland as Pacific Rim, which has all the hallmarks of committee-thinking and corporate conservatism. It's so banal that it seems euphemistic, like a wink-wink term for a lurid sex act; this effectively the Cleveland Steamer of movie titles (which is coincidental given how casually, how easily, you can just call it Pacific Rimjob). The title's a misnomer, though, as the film with the bland corporate handle sidesteps the blandeur of recent end-of-the-world movies. America's interminable Summer Movie season has brought with it another slate of glowering superheroes, po-faced sci-fi sagas, and tenuous cinematic excuses for explosions; and, sadly, that has also meant sitting through Will Smith and Henry Cavill out to out-stoic all other contenders. But as much as Pacific Rim(job) traffics in awful father/son clichés of stern, disapproving dads, unspoken masculine bonding, and cod-glorification of military valour, del Toro - the guy who once bought us blockbusters gleefully idiotic (Mimic) and deliberately silly (Hellboy), before being erroneously tagged as proper auteur with the wildly-overrated Pan's Labyrinth - has no interest in delivering another brooding parable on dark times. Instead, Pacific Rim's a movie where giant robots battle giant alien monsters, with the B-movie idiocy of the premise understood by all.

The 'mythology', if anyone is sarcastic enough to call it that, goes: from a crack in tectonic plates beneath the Pacific, giant alien monsters are coming out, like Prometheus horrors squeezed from a volcanic vagina (seriously: it's called “the breech” and when an alien comes through, the breech gets “dilated”). Cities across the pacific are laid to waste, from Lima to Manila, Seattle to Sydney; all of this told in staged newsreels and an endless procession of locations teletyped with plinking green cursor. To combat them, humans build giant robots controlled by the brainwaves of superstar pilots, whose 'piloting' rather resembles playing a game of Dance Dance Revolution on an elliptical trainer inside the robot noggin. Yet, as the robots grow less effective and the monsters more plentiful, the funding is pulled (you know a film is high fantasy when it involves money being taken away from the military), and all that's left to defend Earth from the apocalypse is... a rag-tag group of misfits!

No one could possibly be menacing in that outfit.

There's cavorting Hong Kong triplets who shoot hoops day-and-night and a pair o' peroxided Russians that snarl like left-over Ivan Drago clichés; sharing not a line of dialogue between the lot, lest you care when they get killed off. There's a couple of rough nut Aussies played by two not-Australians (ex-EastEnder Robert Kazinsky, US TV salaryman Max Martini), whose atrocious accents bringing back misty water-colour memories of Point Break's immortal “we'll get'im when he comes back in!” Given every second popcorn blockbuster seems to feature a Summer Bay alumnus speaking in an American accent, it's charmingly ironic on one hand, but local viewers will find each scene they're in insufferable. And then there's hero/heroine Charlie Hunnam (shades of Undeclared; save when he talks about his “brother Yancy”, then it's shades of Philip J. Fry) and Rinko Kikuchi (easily the blandest role in her wonderfully strange career), whose tragedy-scarred back-stories are as perfunctory as their telegraphed kiss-at-pullaway-close: he the Footsteps Falco-esque fallen-former-star who once choked under pressure; she the samurai-movie orphan seeking bloody vengeance, yet needing to cleanse her soul before she can find equanimity in battle. They're presided over by Idris Elba, all geometric jug head haircut and '80s-cricketer moustache, who is pitched as part compliance-demanding military commander, part inspirational coach, but largely just serves as unforgiving father (at one point he literally barks “because I said so!”; evoking the last-word of dads eternal) for that whole rag-tag group of misfits.

But Pacific Rim's tone is moreso set by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, who play a pair of wa-hey-zany scientists: Day channelling Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters as a glasses-clad weenie who opens a portal into the alien hive-mind; Gorman a panto parody of tweedy Englishness played as flesh-and-blood C3PO, wobbling his head with furious disapproval as he totters about taking tiny, campy steps. At first they seem like garden variety comic relief, but soon an entire B story is handed over to them: Day achieving a crypto-erotic 'mind-meld' with the brain of a dead alien (when Hunnam and Kikuchi achieve the same psychologically-wed state, it's so much foreplay), and then going off to black-market Hong Kong back-alleys in search of another brain; which leads him to del Toro's old favourite Ron Perlman, who quickly turns from menace to more comic relief.

So, in a film that peers unblinking into the apocalyptic darkness - Elba's 'inspirational' coach-speech to get Hunnam back on the team is basically: the world is ending, how do you want to die? - we see it through a pair of novelty rainbow glasses; or those ones where the eyeballs are attached to springs. Figuratively speaking, of course. Literally,we're looking through the standard-issue 3D glasses, watching all those obligatory times when rain or ash drifts at camera, squinting at the horrible scenes where one giant CGI concoction has a fistfight with another giant CGI concoction, flattening whole cities in the process. In the dour, dishonourable Superman Returns, Zach Snyder shamelessly leant on the imagery of September 11 as he toppled so many pixels for popcorn entertainment, but thankfully, here, there's no such huff-and-puff serious stuff. Del Toro, instead, summons the spirits of Mothra and Harryhausen, with all the toppling buildings and screaming pedestrians the stuff of C-grade B-movies. Many may take offence at the idea of a $200mil B-movie that'll cost you $20 a pop; but after a run of explosion-movies operating with unearned, ill-advised 'gravity', Pacific Rim seems vaguely refreshing in its royal stupidity.

Much Ado About Nothing comes with a friendly genesis story: Joss Whedon, in the midst of Avengers mania, took some of his endless millions and shot a take on Shakespeare in palatial Santa Monica pad. He and his wife had spent years hosting boozing readings for the cast members of Buffy et al, and, here, feeling the desire to escape from the world of gargantuan super-hero movies, rolled digital-video on a cast filled out with old friends and recording collaborateurs; the Hollywood player keeping-it-real with a low-budget, DIY take on the classic. Shot on the black-and-white setting and letting in bright-and-sparkling light, Whedon makes a portrait of ol' Billy as the forefather of zany sitcom contrivance: his tale of the travails of the heart, and match-makery both noble and villainous, is loaded with a million mix-ups, ruses, and dramatic reversals; the set-ups -masked balls, mistaken identities, overheard conversations, all manner of ruses both dastardly and high-comic - those that would soon become standard, their sharp wit dulled from the long, slow assault of a million laugh-tracks. The tone is duly breezy and the ensemble clearly delight in their roles; and those viewers used to Whedon's own parrying dialogue won't, as is the goal, by rankled by the vernacular. It's a minor take on Shakespeare, but, then again, that's kind of the home-made charm.

It's a hard life, being a Buffy alum and all.