Guillermo del Toro’s
Pacific Rim and its sequel film are nonsensical smackdowns inspired by classic tokusatsu stories and giant-robot anime. They’re premised on an endless conflict between giant military-owned robots called Jaegers and equally enormous monsters called kaiju. Both movies featured paper-thin plots, designed to bring these two forces to blows.
Once the creatures and mecha are locked in combat, the films provide a fun spectacle filled with cheesy lines and campy
Power Rangers-esque villains. The films gleefully center on cliché action-movie lines like “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse.” Main characters can be sacrificed at a moment’s notice, as long as their deaths read as heroic.
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Half-hour anime; three episodes watched for review
Pacific Rim: The Black is a far cry from its source, ratings-wise. The overwrought fun of the first film was a PG-13 wrecking wonderland;
The Black is a violent, dark, hard R. Within the first five minutes of the pilot, Jaeger pilots are directly killed by a kaiju monster; after 10, an entire city population has been wiped out. And it gets only more dour from there.
Pacific Rim: The Black is a much more depressing, bleaker take on the franchise, and arguably is better for it. Here, Australia is the setting for these oversized battles, but unlike the films, the battle between humanity and monsters is effectively over. A last-ditch effort involves the parents of Taylor (Calum Worthy) and Hayley Travis (Gideon Adlon) co-piloting a Jaeger to fight off the last batch of beasties as they also guide a bus filled with passengers (adults and children) to safety. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps,