The basic plot of the film is very simple, as the distributors say, "Giant Kaiju monsters emerge from the sea and wage a war on humanity that will claim millions of lives and burden humanity for years. To fight the Kaiju, a special weapon has been developed: massive robots called Jaegers, which are simultaneously controlled by two pilots whose brains are linked by a neural bridge. But even these robots seem almost helpless in the face of the indestructible Kaiju. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending humanity finally have no choice but to turn their hope toward two unlikely heroes: a former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an inexperienced rookie (Rinko Kikuchi) who team up to pilot the famous, yet clearly obsolete Jaeger. Together they will face the impending apocalypse as humanity's last hope."
This very simple premise is the entire story of the film. The screenwriter Travis Beacham surely didn't take much time and creative thinking to add many new features to such a simple story. Each of the characters that appear in the film is marked by either a deviation or a childhood trauma that greatly scars them. The main character, who is the driver of the massive machine (Jaeger), due to the fact that his identical twin brother died in an event, has a very big trauma. His future partner for the action, a Japanese woman, in turn has trauma from her youth when the city was slaughtered by the great Kaiju.
I don't know if it's the writers' desire for action people with trauma, but I can't remember a time when only normal people who don't have severe trauma have been in action, which would absolutely shake normal people.
Taking the film as a whole, its main story is just simple. I completely agree with the opening recap of the history of the fight against monsters from another dimension. Most action movies could and do have such a light recap of what happened before the main story appears. It could even use a few digressions in the story to explain more context as part of stretching the length of the film. It's good for the screenwriter that even these digressions make sense, and that through them, we also learn things that allow the fighting to end. Without these digressions, the story would have been bearable too, but the story would have had to be simpler.
Guillermo del Toro has dreamed up new robots, monsters from other dimensions. You can see that he has all the visuals of all the robots and "Godzilla-like" adversaries exquisitely thought out from the bolt and from the individual cell. It's a shame, though, that any big money ruins the film. After all, the director had to submit to the studio's easy dictates in order to make this film. And so the film is neither typically G. del Torro nor typically mainstream American, rubbing shoulders with robots and monsters. And so it's very possible that this unclassifiability is the reason for the film's low profits.
It's a shame, too, that action movies no longer have a normal hour. Ramin Djawadi as a composer doesn't sound good at all. At times, it just felt like automatic music sucked out of a computer slot machine. Where are the days when the themes of a film were easy to remember without having to think about it. Maybe it's the time that only machines compose in movies anymore and not the love of music, where the composer hired an entire symphony orchestra to play the entire movie.
Original release of this article on 31 May 2019 – Kritiky.cz
