The impact of the 3D in Warner Home Video’s Blu-ray of “Pacific Rim” ($44.95) is as dynamic and engaging as the opening minutes of the film itself, from the very first frames where the depth space between swimming fish is obvious, followed by the news footage of giant alien Godzilla-like monsters called Kaiju attacking San Francisco bridges.
Equally simultaneously compelling in story and spacial depth are the scenes of giant robots called Jaegers operated by two humans created to combat the monsters, with cameras swooping through factories, elevator shafts, and steel girders. The first 17-minutes of back-story before the titles even includes fun tracking helicopter sequences.
As the movie then shifts to present day five years later, the 3D remains equally effective even in medium and close-up shots of actors simply eating in lunch hall and one walking with his bulldog, as well as martial arts training battles.
Although main characters Raleigh and his unlikely female Japanese Jaeger partner Mako and her mentor are compelling and well-acted, there is nothing really original about the next nearly two hours of the film which slowly loses its appeal with each pasing minute. Although director Guillermo del Toro dedicated the movie to the memory of “Monster Masters” filmmakers Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda, and thus clearly some of the Godzilla-like footage is thus intended to be an homage to those filmmakers, nearly every scene feels like it is pulled from some other movie:
- Mind melds a la “Star Trek”
- Creatures that look and act like the velociraptors of “Jurassic Park”
- “Iron Man”-like red circle nuclear power center in the chest suits of the Jaeger robots
- Giant creatures fighting amid skyscrapers and showing punches going through the inside of one level of an office floor reminiscent of scenes we also saw this year in “Man of Steel”
- A pregnant monster that feels very much like “Alien”
- Monster eyes underater that look like Jules Verne’s Nautilius submarine in Disney’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
- Certain general story and action elements that feel like “Starship Troopers”
And when it doesn’t feel familar, it sometimes seems kinda goofy, with these giant creatures engaging in little more than galactic fist fights.
As a result, “Pacific Rim” feels about 40-minutes too long but the acting and the 3D is compelling and fun enough to stick with for the 131-minute duration.
The bonus features are mildy enjoyable, particularly the three-minutes of bloopers and del Toro’s audio commentary even though it’s mostly tech talk.
Rare and refreshing compared to most filmmaker commentaries, del Toro expounds about shooting in 3D. Interestingly, he notes that he rarely used a close-up in the film.
“”Shooting with wide lenses makes it very friendly for the foreground to exist in a 3D movie and I’m constantly putting objects in the foreground moving around,” he says. “The key with 3D is to just give you a sense of depth – particles of silt and bubbles floating around in the water; gives it a lot of depth.”
He enthusiastically embraced the challenge of 3D but only under certain demands:
“I wholeheartedly embrace 3D conversion under three conditions I asked of Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment:
1.) “Give us sufficient time – three times the normal time (James Cameron gave me a lot of comments and time about his conversion of ‘Titanic’ – he said you need at least 40 weeks)
2.) “I supervised every single element of 3D conversion – 7-days a week with StereoD
3.) I needed effects house to convince me they could convert VFX. We proceeded to torture StereoD for 40-plus weeks into doing this properly. I am proudest of this conversion.”
— By Scott Hettrick