Elysium

ELYSIUM

** SPOILERS **

As its theme, Elysium borrows a title, but nothing else, from Hemingway: to have and have not. 140 years from now, Earth is a ruined dustbowl of a slum populated by the Have Nots, most of whom are depicted as the sweaty, unwashed, Spanish-speaking masses we today consider minority races. The wealthiest Haves skedaddled from Earth and seemingly pooled their vast resources to build a multi-kajillion dollar space station in which to live; a heavily guarded orbital haven they for some reason dubbed "Elysium." Oh, it's wonderful up on Elysium, young orphan Matt Damon assumes as he gazes up at that silver wheel floating yonder overhead from his shanty down in what's become of Los Angeles (South Africa doubling for LA). Up there, they have magical bio-beds that can heal any illness, and everyone has a swimming pool in the backyards of their McMansions, like the kind you'd see in modern day Santa Barbara and Malibu. Elysium is more or less Epcot Center in space. The food court must be pretty awesome on Elysium.

The creamy pantsuits running Elysium's security are worn by Jodie Foster, sporting a weird pseudo-French accent. Foster schemes to have the duly elected President of Elysium kicked out of office so she can run her space station without being called to the carpet every time she shoots down a transport shuttle full of illegal immigrants trying to sneak onboard. Foster is harsh and ambitious but not bright. She enlists the Tony Stark of Elysium, billionaire weapons magnate William Fichtner, to rewrite Elysium's computer codes to shitcan the President and put her in fully in charge, in exchange for a 200 year exclusive contract. It's weird because doesn't Fichtner have the exclusive contract anyway? There don't seem to be any other competing billionaire weapons magnates on Elysium. Foster also doesn't trust any of the rejects from the Robert Palmer "Simply Irresistable" video working for her and secretly employs skeevy mercenary Sharlto Copley to do her dirty wetworks on Earth. Clearly, Foster makes excellent choices that don't end up stabbing her in the neck.

Meanwhile, Matt Damon grew up to be a convicted carjacking felon who toils on the line in one of Fichtner's robocop assembly factories. Damon is chagrined to make his meager living slapping together the droids that in turn harass him and break his arm when he's waiting for the bus to go to work. Through the negligence of his superiors, Damon is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. His medical droid informs him with hilarious bedside manner that Damon will undergo catastrophic organ failure and die in five days. Desperate to live, Damon's only hope is to get to a medical bed on Elysium and be magically cured. To do that, he takes a job for the local crime lord and has an exo-skeleton fused to his body, giving him superhuman strength and the endurance to conveniently ignore his fatal disease for most of the movie, unless the plot calls for him to remember he's dying of radiation poisoning. The mission: to kidnap Fichtner and steal the data in his head via bio-link download file transfer whatever. The mission goes sideways when Copley and his crew of roughnecks intervene, Fichtner is killed, and so are most of Damon's guys. Damon also had no idea exactly what he downloaded from Fichtner's head, which turns out to be the code to reboot Elysium completely and make everyone a citizen. 

A lot of chasing and bloodletting in the form of cyberpunk ultraviolence ensues as Damon rather easily gets Copley to take him to Elysium, only to learn his childhood sweetheart Alice Braga and her daughter dying of leukemia are also headed to Elysium as Copley's prisoners. Looking like a cyborg version of Bane, the bald, jacked up Damon turns into an unlikely revolutionary, trying to stop Copley's #OccupyElysium movement when Copley decides he should be in charge of Elysium. Bit by bit, Elysium lets the audience in on what's really on its mind: universal healthcare and the idea that everyone on Earth is entitled to citizenship and thus all the magical healing capabilities withheld from them by the rich people of Elysium. No one bothers to ask any of the inhabitants of Elysium how they feel about any of these political issues, but then Elysium seems oddly underpopulated and the people we do see appear too concerned with posing for photoshoots for the Elysium version of Vanity Fair. So as it happens, Damon succeeds in his sloppy, violent revolution and the code of Elysium is rewritten so that everyone on Earth has a chance to have a medical droid hit them on the knee with a ball peen hammer and cure what ails them. It's a happy ending, at least until someone else rewrites the computer code and sets Elysium back to the way things were.

Kick-Ass 2

KICK-ASS 2

** SPOILERS **

Justice Forever

In Kick-Ass 2, writer-director Jeff Wadlow (Never Back Down) takes over the reigns from the original's director (now producer) Matthew Vaughn and writer Jane Goldman. Glad to say, Wadlow doesn't Schumacher it. Or Ratner it. If Wadlow doesn't quite transcend the material, which he adapts almost warts and all (a rape scene and a dog killing are wisely excised) from the graphic novels "Hit-Girl" and "Kick-Ass 2" by comic book maestros Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., or bring much shocking and new to the Kick-Ass movie universe, he admirably maintains the same ribald, downright offensive joie de vivre that made Kick-Ass the best and most shameless superhero surprise of 2010. The ending of Kick-Ass screamed for more Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass 2 is the More Kick-Ass we wanted.

Kick-Ass 2 continues the misadventures of the eternally naive and earnest Dave Lizewski (an impressively buff Aaron Johnson), the green-and-yellow wetsuited boy wonder the world knows as the superhero Kick-Ass. His exploits to rid New York City of the crime lord played by Mark Strong in the original has inspired others to take up the noble cause of spandex and protect New York City from evildoers. Which is great, because after all the ass-kickings he's endured, being a lone crusader fighting crime on the mean streets terrifies Kick-Ass. He's better equipped to kick some ass this time around; he's been trained by the deadliest and greatest superhero alive, Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz, now a taller teen and owning the movie every second she's on camera). This training includes Hit-Girl gleefully shooting him in the chest and in the back. But that's no more than she herself endured from her beloved daddy, the late Big Daddy, who, Hit-Girl is proud to point out, is the true first superhero of this world, not Kick-Ass like the public believes.

Meanwhile, Kick-Ass's hilariously unhinged arch enemy Chris (the scenery-chewing Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the former superhero Red Mist, has reinvented himself as The Mother Fucker, the world's first supervillain, clad in his late Real Housewives of Long Island mother's black latex S&M accoutrements. The Mother Fucker's sole goal in life is to spend his vast inherited fortune to kill Kick-Ass, and also destroy the city, because that's what a supervillain does according to all the comic books he's ever read. To wit, The Mother Fucker charges his personal Alfred John Leguizamo ("Did you just call me your butler?") to help him assemble a cadre of murderers he can outfit in garish supervillain costumes, complete with race-baiting codenames, which Leguizamo scolds him about to no avail. The Mother Fucker's greatest find is Mother Russia - imagine a female Ivan Drago from Rocky IV but wearing a revealing red leather bikini and more than willing to brutally massacre a dozen police officers.

Kick-Ass finds the camaraderie he seeks when he is recruited into Justice Forever, the world's first superhero team, banded together in the New York City warehouse basement of their leader Colonel Stars and Stripes (a subdued Jim Carrey flawlessly translating the upright character from the comic books). These harmless do-gooders include Dr. Gravity (neither a doctor nor a master of gravity, played by Donald Faison), Battle Guy (revealed to be Kick-Ass's nerdy high school chum Marty, played by Clark Duke), and the fetching Night Bitch (Lindy Booth), Kick-Ass's sexy new squeeze. Kick-Ass and Night Bitch's back alley sexual liaisons (masks always on) recalls Spider-Man's rooftop romps with The Black Cat. (Kick-Ass's girlfriend Lyndsy Fonseca is quickly written out of the sequel after a misunderstanding, but I believe she is brutally murdered in the comic book, so she thankfully got off easy here.) The world's greatest superheroes Justice Forever are not, but they do somehow manage to effectively fight crime and they have a really cool logo emblazoned on their headquarters' meeting room table.

Hit-Girl, however, can't be part of Justice Forever, as she attempts to assimilate into normal high school life at the urging of her kindly guardian, played by Morris Chestnut. Moretz more or less headlines her own movie within a movie, a Kick-Ass parody of Mean Girls, as Hit-Girl makes a genuine attempt to become one of the Plastics of her high school. (One of the side effects Hit-Girl discovers of being a normal teenage girl is a sudden, unexpected attraction to guys with smoldering pouts and ripped abs, a sexual awakening Big Daddy never trained his favored child for.) Facing down an alley full of thieves and murderers is no problem for Hit-Girl, but the bitches bullying her in high school is a new dilemma she can't solve with martial arts and samurai swords. Luckily, Hit-Girl has other wonderful toys at her disposal to teach the Queen B and Wannabes a lesson.

The specter of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, sorely missed) hangs over Hit-Girl as Kick-Ass 2 plumbs new themes of living up to your parents' wishes for its three primary characters. Hit-Girl is torn between fulfilling the destiny her father trained her for and following her ersatz father's wishes to attempt to have a normal life free from spandex and killing. The Mother Fucker's entire existence is all about getting revenge on Kick-Ass for exploding his father with a bazooka (his fearsome uncle imprisoned in Riker's Island played by Game of Thrones' Iain Glen is introduced, setting the stage for Kick-Ass 3). Meanwhile, Kick-Ass himself deals with his own father discovering his crime fighting secret and then protecting his son from The Mother Fucker's vengeance, at the cost of his life. In the end, Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl, and The Mother Fucker are all orphans, as all classic comic book characters must be. Kick-Ass 2 also directly asks the question of what good superheroes actually do in the real world ("If we're trying to make the world a better place, why is it so much worse?") Kick-Ass 2 reaches the reasonable conclusion.

While the gleeful novelty of the original Kick-Ass and viscera-soaked shock value of eleven year old Hit-Girl somersaulting around and dismembering bad guys while cursing like a sailor is unavoidably lost, Kick-Ass 2 succeeds in its escalation of the world and the stakes therein.  The final balls to the wall superheroes vs. supervillains showdown - West Side Story in spandex - is appropriately ultraviolent, with Kick-Ass and The Mother Fucker leading the charge in the fight of their lives. The super smackdown between Hit-Girl and Mother Russia (Hit-Girl scoping out the baddest dog in the yard and taking her on personally) is actually more brutal and satisfying than both times Batman fought Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Everything in Kick-Ass 2 is more personal for all of the main characters. Without Nicolas Cage and Mark Strong's sturdy anchors, Johnson, Moretz and Mintz-Plasse rise to the occasion and take full ownership of the franchise; three masked teenagers hellbent on tearing shit apart and shoehorning themselves into a world that doesn't actually need them, except to save it from each other.

Total Divas 1x2 - "A Tango With Fandango"

"The thing I like about being in John Cena's house is I feel like I'm in a rap video." - Brie Bella, with the blisteringly apt line of the episode

There's a lot to like about John Cena's enormous mansion in Tampa, Florida. To get there, he flies by private jet with all the sushi a Bella or a Daniel Bryan can eat. And then, we learn Cena lives in a  massive Ce-Mansion, with a waterfall indoor pool, a private elevator to his master bedroom, and a huge white closet where he keeps all his kicks, jorts, and wide array of John Cena T-shirts. And John Cena lives alone in this palace, though Brie implies Nikki Bella spends a lot of time also living there. (But not permanently and legally with a wedding ring.)

Contrast to Bryan Danielson's rustic home in Aberdeen, Washington - as Total Divas cleverly did - which is the house Bryan grew up in and Brie and he plan to own after they retire from WWE. After three days in the lap of Cena luxury, Brie and Bryan return the favor by taking Cena and Nikki to experience living like The Beard. Nikki is totally concerned about her twin sister being forced into living in the lap of not extravagant luxury. Which is not to say it's not a perfectly nice house. But even Brie has qualms. A lot of qualms about what Brie is giving up to live in Aberdeen. Nikki: "The house needs to be torn down and redone." I mean, Bryan doesn't even have a cigar room like a gentleman. Then came the wood chopping competition between the boobilicious Bella Twins and the main event of Summerslam, which the Bellas won. It should also be noted how easily and happily John Cena is distracted by Nikki's rack.

Meanwhile, Eva Marie is this week's Total Divas top heel. She's a piece of work. Eva Marie decides she wants to be Fandango's dance partner, back when he was rotating his weekly dance partner with a bevy of heel ballroom dancers before Summer Rae became his permanent partner. She makes a big pitch to her bosses, lying about having ballet and ballroom dance experience, and then tries to bamboozle Fandango, who's a total player.

"I'm gonna shower now. I'll be thinking of you... in the shower." - Fandango. That must be Fandango's version of Fandangoing.

Oh, and apparently, Eva Marie has a boyfriend named Jonathan she never mentioned to anyone before, and Jonathan appears at her door bearing donuts and an engagement ring. And of course, Eva Marie says "Yes!" and then promptly hides the ring to have a "business meeting" which ended up in a club with Fandango. Also, she has no dancing experience. And this goes about exactly as you'd think. The appalled and aghast facial expressions by the Divas were pretty great. Stephanie McMahon personally dressed down Eva Marie with her mean face, but Eva's just lucky it wasn't Vince McMahon making her join a Very Special Club. Eva Marie got off easy.

As for the Funkadactyls, Ariane took it upon herself to get her team new sparkly lime green ring gear that Trinity was not down with. Ariane's negotiating tactics with Sandra, the WWE seamstress to tweak the outfit is highly dubious. For telling Ariane to step off, Sandra is a heroine. She should be made General Manager of RAW.

Jojo's role in the episode was basically to scoff at Eva Marie's lies, but that was still more than Natalya got to do.

Total Divas Revelation: Fandango kisses his own hand when greeting a lady.

I thought @trishstratuscom's house was luxurious but compared to @JohnCena's CeMansion it seems like @WWEBrayWyatt's shack. #TotalDivas
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) August 5, 2013

Total Divas 1x1 - "Welcome to the WWE"

The most surprising thing about Total Divas is that  it wasn't nearly as godawful as I thought it was going to be. Oh sure, it had the reality show manipulation, editing, commercial breaks to juice "tension" and "revelations", and everyone came off as some level of bitchy (except Brie Bella, actually, she came off all right and I guess Jojo since she was mostly a non-factor.) But I really did expect, and dread, much much worse. The backstage stuff, manipulatively edited as it was, still was interesting because I find WWE backstage stuff inherently interesting. Total Divas is actually a slick, occasionally illuminating production about the rarely spotlighted female side of WWE.

Nikki Bella is the top heel on the show, that's clear. Everything negative you can paint a woman to be she pretty much gleefully inhabits: jealous, petty, vindictive, egotistical - yet, all she really truly wants in life is for her perfect man, John Cena, to pop the question. (Cena is recently divorced - it may not even have been finalized as of the filming - and is naturally not eager to leap into another marriage. He's John Cena, not Ric Flair.) Cena was pretty funny with his "I can't even talk to you with your lips and your boobs out there" line, whether or not that was him trying to be funny for the camera crew there for their intimate, private dinner. Brie on the other hand seems to be a part time heel and full time perfectly happy woman in her two-plus-year committed relationship to (Daniel) Bryan Danielson. Bryan was great: every time you saw him, he had a giant grin on his face.

I thought Trinity (Naomi) came off well overall, "married" to Ariane (Cameron) in the Funkadactyls. Trinity is engaged to Jon (Jey Uso) and is the level-headed professional of her team. Ariane is a shrill drama queen and I'm not entirely sure what she brings to the table besides being the other Funkadactyl who can also dance. Brodus Clay apparently reamed Ariane out at their WrestleMania match dress rehearsal for some unspecified screw up the show did not depict, which set Ariane's goombah boyfriend Vincent off. The guy wanted to fight Brodus, completely not understanding pro wrestling locker room etiquette. Or maybe it was all for show for the cameras, who knows?

The show painted Natalya as a whiner and complainer, bitter, always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Some of that was just how she was edited, but then again, she did say the things she said and I thought she came off horrendously.  Does she have a point in that she's the most talented in-ring performer in the Divas locker room? Sure. But they made her into a complainer. Or maybe Nattie really is a complainer and the show just captured that and ran with it. Maybe that's why her last best push was the farting gimmick. Plus the whole thing with the blonde hair - as if she has a lock on being the only blonde woman in the company? Nattie Neidhart came off terribly to me. (Jim "The Anvil" got a cameo, though. That was cool.) 

Meanwhile, there are the other two "newbie" Divas no one had ever heard of before this show came into our lives: Eva Marie and Jojo. Eva Marie's storyline is about the company ordering her to go blonde and she instead rebelled rebelliously like the rebel she is and died her hair crayon red. And she got away with it, but with a stern "toe the line" order to go along with it. Otherwise, Nattie had to babysit these two noobs, while Brie and Nikki made a show of "hazing" them by making them get them champagne, not unlike when Wade Barrett asked Nikki's boyfriend to go get him a glass of water when they were in The Nexus. I believe it was Nikki who did have the zinger to the noobs: "You don't need to be taking pictures, nobody knows who you are."

All of this leads to WrestleMania and the untold story of why The Bellas and Team Rhodes Scholars (completely absent from the show, perhaps Damien Sandow wisely opted against signing the E! release forms?) vs. Tons of Funk and The Funkadactyls was cut from WrestleMania 29. The show made it seem like it was because the elderly African American seamstresses backstage were unable to sew the Funkadactyls' sequined bottoms up in time, but no, after manipulative commercial breaks, we learn it was simply because "the match before them" (Triple H vs. Brock Lesnar) went long.

This was a tragedy. No, I'm not being facetious, I remember being pissed because I did want to see that match.

And thus Total Divas ended in crushing disappointment for the Bellas and the Funkadactyls. But there's a whole season of redemption to go...

TOTAL DIVAS REVELATION: Up until the filming of episode one of Total Divas, it seems John Cena had never seen The Notebook.

#TotalDivas > Sharknado
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) July 29, 2013

The To-Do List

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Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE FLASHPOINT PARADOX

** SPOILERS **

Flash! Ah-ha! Savior of the Universe!

To be fair, the Flash (Barry Allen, voiced by Justin Chambers) is also the destroyer of the universe. Or rather, the "old" DC Universe. Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (a mouthful of a title) adapts the 2011 mega-event "Flashpoint" written by Geoff Johns, in which the DC Universe is completely remade and obliterated to make room for the current rebooted "New 52" DC Universe. Story wise, it involves the Flash using his superspeed to time travel and prevent the rather ghastly murder of his mother in her own home, unwittingly upending the universe in strange, significant ways:

The rocket that carried baby Kal-El to Earth landed not in Smallville but in Metropolis, causing a catastrophe that killed thousands and ended with the infant Kryptonian held in captivity for 30 years by the US Government. In Gotham City, the Waynes are mugged by a gunman, but it is 10 year old Bruce Wayne who dies in Crime Alley, leaving behind his grieving father Thomas Wayne. Meanwhile, a peace accord between Diana, Queen of the Amazons and Arthur, King of Atlantis leads to a sexual tryst discovered by Arthur's wife Mera. Which leads to Mera trying to murder Diana, Diana killing her instead in self defense, igniting war between Atlantis and Themyscria that engulfs Europe. Also, Barry Allen discovers he no longer has superspeed and that all of this is his fault. All because he used his powers to save his mommy.

Allen recruits the ultra violent Batman of Gotham City to help him regain his powers (in hilarious fashion: strap Allen and a bunch of chemicals to a lightning rod so he can get struck by lightning). Expecting to find his friend Bruce Wayne in the Batcave, Allen instead finds the Batman is now Thomas Wayne (ably voiced by Kevin McKidd), an alcoholic living like the Unabomber in the caverns beneath the demolished Wayne Manor. Still, they form an uneasy alliance with each other, and with the government superheroes lead by Cyborg (Michael B. Jordan), who works for President Barack Obama (not voiced by Barack Obama)! Aquaman (Cary Elwes) and Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall) are about to plunge the world to its imminent end with their war. Meanwhile, Allen discovers the real culprit behind this bizarre DC Universe is his arch enemy Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash (voiced with menace by C. Thomas Howell).

The Flashpoint Paradox is a grim exercise in "what if?" alternate reality storytelling. It's not for young viewers: sex and adultery are key plot points, Batman and the rest of the superheroes swear like sailors, and boy, are these superheroes bloodthirsty. By the end, millions of people are dead, including most of the superheroes, who brutally use their powers to kill each other in cold blood. It's exciting to see such unapologetic bloodletting to a degree, but it also makes for depressing viewing. No one is actually "heroic", no one learns anything of value. The kicker of course is the Flash manages to run at superspeed back in time to reverse all of this so that none of it ever happened, but to do so means he lets his mother get murdered in her kitchen. So yeah. It's also strange that, like in the comics, The Flashpoint Paradox is designed to transition from the previous DC Animated Universe to an animated New 52 Universe, but the previous DC Animated films mostly did not share continuity. Does this mean all future DC Animated films will solely be based on the New 52 comics? That seems unnecessary. Ultimately, so does The Flashpoint Paradox.

Pacific Rim

PACIFIC RIM

** SPOILERS **

"We are canceling the apocalypse!"

Guillermo Del Toro's heavy mecha wet dream Pacific Rim hits the sweet spot for anyone who ever grew up watching Japanese cartoons of giant robots defending the world against fearsome monsters. Hits it with a rocket punch. A loving, intricately-detailed homage to "mecha" anime and to the Godzilla Vs. genre of monster movies, Pacific Rim posits a terrifying future of just a few years from now where the Earth is routinely invaded by 500 feet tall alien monsters, the "Kaiju" (Japanese for "strange beast"). "To fight monsters" Mankind "created monsters of our own", giant robots called the "Jaegers" (German for "hunter"). This is all helpfully explained at the top of Pacific Rim in an action-packed Jaeger vs. Kaiju prelude that doubles as a relentless download of information about the concept of the film. 

A "Breach" at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean opened a doorway to another dimension filled with Kaiju monsters. They rise up out of the Pacific and attack our major cities. All of the world governments pooled their resources to create the Jaegers, developing a technology that requires two pilots to mind-meld with each other and the giant robot to control its functions. The Jaegers were an incredibly successful first line of defense until the Kaiju coming through the Breach became more and more powerful. (Kaiju are ranked by category like hurricanes.) The category 4 Kaiju wreaked havoc on the mighty Jaegers until only four Jaegers remained. The world government decided the Jaegers weren't doing the job anymore and inexplicably put all their marbles into building a giant wall around the Pacific Rim, which the Kaiju just tore through like it was the ticker tape at a finish line. (After the wall fiasco, the government has no other ideas and is never heard from again in the movie.) Meanwhile, any attempt to seal the Breach with a nuclear weapon also met with dismal failure.

This is the shit storm Major Idris Elba finds himself in as Commander of the Jaeger program. Four Jaegers, not enough pilots, no more governmental support, more and more Kaiji penetrating the Breach, and the end of the world counting down. His comic relief science advisers, mathematician Burn Gorman, and Kaiju expert Charlie Day, have grim predictions about a double and triple event: two or three Kaiju coming through the Breach together. Sure enough, this is what happens. Elba recruits burned out Jaeger pilot Charlie Hunnam, whom we watched battle a Kaiju in Pacific Rim's action extravaganza opening sequence, losing his co-pilot brother in the process. Hunnam is one of only two pilots who ever successfully operated a Jaeger and kill a Kaiju solo (guess who the other is) but he's still reeling from the trauma. Nevertheless, Hunnam still has all his skills and sure seems glad to be reunited with his refurbished old Jaeger, Gipsy Danger. All of the Jaegers are different and have goofy code names. There's also Crimson Typhoon, the three-armed Chinese Jaeger operated by Chinese triplets, and Cherno Alpha, the Russian Jaeger piloted by a man-woman team of Russian bears. Since they hardly get any dialogue or character development, the fate of these pilots and their Jaegers isn't hard to surmise.

Meanwhile, Day, taunted as a "Kaiju groupie", is the only one interested in the details of why the Kaiju behave as they do, and how they can penetrate the Breach while humanity's weapons can't. So he gets the crazy idea to use the same mind-meld technology humans use with the Jaegers to communicate with a salvaged Kaiju brain. Day seeks out the world's most famous dealer of recovered Kaiju body parts, Ron Perlman, to purchase a complete Kaiju brain. This leads to a hilarious sequence where Day is convinced the Kaiju know who he is because of the mind meld and that a Kaiju is tearing apart Hong Kong coming to get him. Pacific Rim, which spends most of the movie with the Jaeger pilots in their "Shatterdome" base, uses this time in the "Bone Slums" of Hong Kong to intriguingly show how humanity has taken Kaiju bones and debris and built their cities around them. The survival and coping methods of humanity after a dozen years of Kaiju attacks is interesting stuff Pacific Rim only gives cursory examination to. But then, Del Toro is well-aware what people want to see is the robots fighting the giant monsters, which Del Toro delivers after a great deal of human intrigue at the Jaeger base.

In between being hazed by his resentful fellow Jaeger pilots, Hunnam meets his Jaeger soul mate in Rinko Kikushi, Elba's assistant and right hand. She's skilled in martial arts and obviously capable of piloting a Jaeger but Elba refuses to allow it. (Kikushi embodies the usual Only Woman In The Movie tradition, but in the non-traditional way of being Asian. In fact, no hot Caucasian women seem to exist at all in the world of Pacific Rim. Maybe the Kaiju ate all the hot white girls first?) The gradual reveal of Kikushi's relationship with Elba and the reason for her bond, shown in traumatic flashbacks of Kikushi as a little girl surviving a Kaiju attack on Tokyo, is surprisingly touching and deftly handled. As are the familial bonds of the other Jaeger pilots. Despite plot machinations and setbacks, there's no doubt Hunnam and Kikushi's partnership is a match made in giant robot heaven. For some reason, though, all of the Jaeger pilots are harboring little secrets from each other and engaging in petty rivalries when there are far more pressing giant monster matters to concern themselves with. But then, who are we to question the pressures these Jaeger jockeys are under on a daily basis fighting disgusting giant monsters?

When the Jaegers are deployed and do battle with the Kaiju, Pacific Rim delivers the heavy metal mayhem with aplomb. These battles are awesome spectacles, as the giant robots punch and smash the Kaiju, who rip and tear the Jaeger armor with their horns and claws. Most of the battles take place in the ocean and in the rain, which often obscures clarity but does heighten the tension of not always knowing where and how the Kaiju are attacking. Armored but standing in a wide open control cockpit inside the Jaegers' chest cavities, the pilots rely on imaging screens to "see" what the Jaegers "see", and this seems both limiting and dangerous. Indeed, Jaeger pilots don't live long at all, and as the Kaiju grow more powerful, they seem to have little problem with ripping right into the Jaegers' torsos and snatching the pilots out of their shells. Despite being armed with missiles, plasma cannons and - finally - swords, the Jaegers often seem slow and outmatched, using those weapons sparingly and relying on rock 'em sock 'em robot fisticuffs. Occasionally, Jaegers will pick up ocean liners and use them as clubs. The Kaiju, which spew acid and can even emit an EMP pulse, fight more ferociously with guerilla tactics. The debut of a flying Kaiju really highlighted how ill-equipped and limited Jaegers can be, but this also lead to the single best visual in the movie of Gipsy Danger slashing a Kaiju in mid-air in the best Voltron tradition.

The finale of Pacific Rim is a desperate, last-ditch assault on the Breach personally lead by Elba. A heroic kamikaze in which the last two Jaegers take on three category 5 Kaiju at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. One thing about the Kaiju, they're vicious enemies, but they are also considerate enough to know when to lay back and not attack in order to let the Jaeger pilots' human melodrama play out. The secret of how to destroy the Breach is discovered by Day, but is it too late to save the world? Listen, of course not. Elba goes out like a hero, Bruce Willis in Armageddon-style, while Hunnam and Kikushi's Jaeger falls into the Breach and actually enters the Kaiju dimension to detonate a nuclear weapon. When the Kaiju see the Gipsy Danger Jaeger drop into their dimension, one imagines they were as confused as the aliens in Independence Day were when Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith popped by their mothership. Do the Kaiju, which we learn have a hive mind, ever stop and think how many of their fellow Kaiju have died crossing over to Earth to be destroyed by Jaegers? I mean, their track record for destroying the Earth is actually pretty lousy when you think about it. The Kaiju have a 100% casualty rate. Oh, it doesn't matter. Thanks to Hunnam and Kikuski, the One to Grow On lesson Pacific Rim really imparts to both human and Kaiju is that when a Caucasian male and an Asian female team up, they can truly work wonders.

Only thing @PacificRim lacks is a scene on a bus a la Almost Famous where all the Jaeger pilots sing "Hold me closer, Gipsy Danger".
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) July 11, 2013

Hope @PacificRim changes things so that when you order Jaeger at a bar, you get 2. Gets you into "the drift" faster that way. @travisbeacham
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) July 11, 2013