Del Toro fans might recall how Hellboy 2 unceremoniously ditches the bland human audience-identification character from the first film, having Hellboy and the other monsters go rogue from their government organization to have wild pagan monster adventures. Imagine if they killed off Hellboy instead. That's also this film.
The grievous sin of Pacific Rim is that both the monsters and robots have no personality. They don't. Gipsy Danger 'should be' a character, displaying a combination of traits from both pilots in its actions and mannerisms. This only occurs, however, in the actually-good sword scene. Mako presses a huge red button labelled SWORD, causing the limp blade to flop out of its sheath. She then yells "for my family!" and her rage causes the flaccid sword to literally grow erect so that she can thrust it into the kaiju. No other scene actually shows the psychological connection between pilot and machine in the same way that Mako's rage sprouts from the machine as a gleaming metallic phallus.
The next closest shot is when hero guy's brother holds a holographic boat gingerly in his hand, establishing that the blue augmented-reality interface represents the 'mind' half of some mind-body dualism. We are never provided with a Jaeger POV shot. What do they see? How do they see? The little blue boat is the closest thing, and the only. There's little other indication that the jagers are powered by psychological health. Since we don't know why they succeed, we don't know why they fail. (Was Cherno Alpha's crew just not vengeful enough?)
Consider the 'soulmate' imagery and the throwaway line about 'angering the gods' in the context of Aristophanes's speech from Plato's Symposium, in which humanity is imagined as a four-legged race of siamese twins:
Symposium posted:
Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, attempted to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.
Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.
He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.'
The resulting compulsion in humanity to reunite its halves is called 'love':
Symposium posted:
So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, seeking to make one of two, and to heal the state of man.
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.
This is what the film is about, but this imagery of humanity being punished by the gods 'for a reason' is absent from the film. There is a line about global warming, but there is no imagery of global warming (outside of a quick-and-easy reference to Blade Runner in the design of the bone slums). We are told the apocalypse is coming, but there is little apocalyptic imagery because the film is already basically post-apocalyptic). The kaiju don't have the weight of a monster from Revelations - they aren't awesome in the original sense of the word. They're already commonplace - evoking malaise, not catastrophe.
Someone joked earlier about the kaiju being all female, but it's true. Being clones, the kaiju lack sexual difference - and there is an obvious theme of things squeezing in and out of yonic slits. The rift itself is a 'throat' that 'dilates' at regular intervals. A baby kaiju is birthed by Cesarian section, then Ron Perlman crawls out of a wound in its belly, covered in fluids. One kaiju gets Mako's erect sword rammed so hard down its throat that it's bisected. This is all Very Obvious.
But the kaiju, besides being gooey and female, don't do anything. There is maybe five minutes total of monsters attacking cities in the movie, and most of it takes place in a dream sequence. With a kaiju, what they destroy and how they destroy it is characterization. Consider how Clover decapitates the statue of liberty while screeching with wide-eyed terror in his film. I defy anyone to describe the actions of any kaiju here in even such basic terms.
What unsettles me in the film is that we open with the quick WWII montage - people used to believe in the fight (Rosie the Riveter!), but that iconography has been reduced to cliched fodder for action figures and videogames. You get the additional scene of the kid complaining about the old, crappy robot toy to cement this. But the message isn't that crass consumerism is bad. It's that we need new and better products to consume. The scene on the beach is a very obvious statement of 'this ain't your daddy's giant robot movie!' - which is definitely crass, no? It reminds of the mean-spirited scene in the Clash of the Titans remake where toy robot Bubo is thrown away, declared worthless now. Clash Of The Titans and Pacific Rim have the same screenwriter.
While I don't doubt Del Toro's genre intelligence (see the above reference to Plato), the end product seems mostly for the kind of 'fan' who says "of course I love star wars; I own all the actions figures!" and "of course I love kaiju films; I devoured that stupid shit when I was 12 years old!" You see this in the praise the film's unabashedness but not its quality. In cartoons, long scenes of characters back in base describing what's going on are a product of budgetary limitations. It's expensive to animate an expressive robot battle that conveys all the themes via punching. When Del Toro uses that 'anime style' here, it's like when deviantart people draw characters with anime side-mouths. It's an unnecessary compromise.
The fact is that Man of Steel deals with near-identical themes, but they show the ID4-hivemind terraforming laser, and they show humanity staring up in confusion as it looms over them. They show the mind-meld dream sequence where the apocalyptic plan is made visual. When Charlie Day has his encounter with the kaiju brain, he sits in a chair and tells us how cinematic it was - describing a zoetrope effect, 'like blinking your eyes really fast.' Thanks, Charlie! But why couldn't we see the kaijus battling T-Rexes on the cinema screen?
And when you really get down to it, Superman isn't a PMC.
(Now, watch as people use my demand for kaiju v. dinosaur big battels as evidence that I 'hate fun'.)
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