Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro has made the film a twelve-year-old would draw on the back of a maths book. Monsters come up out of a crack in the seabed, the world builds robots to hit them, and the robots need two pilots holding hands in their heads. He and his co-writer Travis Beacham are not embarrassed by any of this, and the film’s chief virtue is that it takes its own silliness seriously. It is a good evening. It is also a film in which the machines are written with more care than the people.

The world is the thing. Andrew Neskoromny and Carol Spier build the Hong Kong hangar as a working shipyard: rivets, grease, gantries, a clock on the wall counting the days since the last attack. The Jaegers have dents. Gipsy Danger wears the paint of an old bomber; Cherno Alpha, the Russian one, is a rusted grain silo on legs. Kate Hawley puts the pilots in clanking armour and Ron Perlman’s black-market dealer Hannibal Chau in gold-tipped shoes and red-tinted spectacles. Guillermo Navarro lights the hangar in cold blue and lets the monsters light themselves, veins glowing orange and turquoise through the skin, so that in the dark you see the thing before you can tell what it is.

The Hong Kong fight is the reason the film exists. Two kaiju come ashore, the rain arrives with them, the neon stays on, and del Toro stages a brawl from the harbour into the streets that we could follow shot by shot. Gipsy Danger picks up a container ship and swings it like a bat. A fist stops a foot short of an office window and sets a Newton’s cradle ticking on somebody’s desk. We grinned like fools: this is a child’s game played by a director who remembers how the game goes. Peter Amundson and John Gilroy hold the shots long enough for the weight to land.

The other fights are less clear. Del Toro puts nearly every battle at night, in rain or under the sea, and the scale the design has worked so hard for goes soft. When two shapes the size of tower blocks wrestle in black water we know it matters and cannot always see why. Ramin Djawadi’s score, a guitar riff over a wall of brass, hammers in the fights and hammers everywhere else too, so that a conversation in a corridor arrives with the force of an invasion.

Hunnam is handsome and stands where he is told; Raleigh has a dead brother and a jaw. Mako Mori watches Raleigh from behind a door, wants a Jaeger she has been forbidden, and Kikuchi plays the wanting without a speech. Her one memory sequence, a small girl in a red shoe in a ruined Tokyo street while something enormous looks for her, is the only scene here that belongs with The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and it moved us more than the rest of the film put together. Elba gives Pentecost a stillness that makes the noise around him seem like an argument he is above. When he finally raises his voice, in a speech about cancelling the apocalypse, he nearly sells it.

Charlie Day and Burn Gorman play the scientists as a bickering double-act, one manic and tattooed, one hunched over a blackboard with a cane, and the pitch is set at shrill in their first scene and never lowered. Perlman is the only person who seems to know how funny the film is. Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky are the Australian father and son, and the son’s hostility to Raleigh is explained in one line and resolved in another.

Against the director’s own record this is his loudest film, and the critics who miss the hush of his Spanish films have a point. But Hellboy (2004) showed he could love a comic without talking down to it, and this is the same love at a larger scale. Watch it with the volume up and the lights off, and forgive the people. It runs 131 minutes, carries a 12A, and roughly half of it is exactly what it promised.