INTERVIEWS

Travis Beacham and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim

share:


by Michael Welles Schock

It is a simple equation. The more fantastic or unusual the world of a story, the clearer and simpler that story’s narrative premise must be. Star Wars: A New Hope presented a fantasy universe filled with Jedi, droids and intergalactic combat. Yet its plot is very simple. It is about a group of heroes trying to sneak stolen plans out of enemy territory. The first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy introduces a world of such imagination that it would take volumes to describe it all. Yet its plot is simply about taking an object from Point A to Point B. The Matrix presents a mind-bending new slant on reality, but is still a simple story of a young man reluctant to follow his destiny. The point is, when audiences are thrown smack-dab into a bizarre new world, they already have enough information to handle. Add a convoluted plot, and things quickly become a dense, confusing mess.

I was not sure what to expect from Pacific Rim. You see, there are left-brained storytellers and there are right-brained storytellers. The left-brained are great at analysis and structure, yet struggle to find original ideas. The right-brained are endlessly creative, but have difficulty organizing their ideas. Guillermo Del Toro leans far to the right. Without a left-brained collaborator to balance the ship, a radical right-brain like Del Toro risks succumbing to imagination overload, producing a visually spectacular, yet narratively incoherent mess. Del Toro managed to keep his plot very simple in Pan’s Labyrinth, and reaped the benefits. For the most part, the first Hellboy keeps a clear narrative spine as well. However, when given freer rein for its sequel The Golden Army, Del Toro became a kid run amok in a toy store, resulting in a confused, convoluted plot that became little more than a series of excuses to get to the next monster scene. Pacific Rim could have gone either way. Unfortunately, Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans), with whom Del Toro shares writing credit on the film, does not appear to be the right partner to give Del Toro’s imagination the structure it needs.

Kaiju in Pacific Rim

Kaiju in Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim is about the struggle to save humanity from an invasion of Godzilla-type beasts (known as Kaiju) by duking it out with them man-to-monster (using massive human-piloted robots called Jaegers). You would think a sky-high concept like this would provide more than enough drama to power single feature film without the need for additional material. But no, Pacific Rim rejects the clear, straightforward narrative found in the likes of Star Wars or The Matrix for one cluttered with so much pointless junk. It turns out the war with the monsters gets only half the film’s attention.

Pacific Rim

Human Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim

The rest is gunked up with a spider web of subplots; one on the hero Raleigh Becket’s (Charlie Hunnam) loss of his brother in a long-ago Kaiju battle (so is this a story about dealing with personal loss?), one on military commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) fighting higher command’s decision to scrap his outdated Jaeger program (so is this a story about self-respect in the face of obsolescence?), another on the partnering of the supposedly has-been Becket with the unpredictable rookie pilot Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) (so is this a story about harmony amongst an unlikely partnership, The Cutting Edge with robots, if you will?), yet another follows the runnings-around of Kaiju expert Newt (Charlie Day) that manages to add a lot of techno-babble, but little to the story’s resolution.

Idris Elba as Pentacost in Pacific Rim

Idris Elba as Pentacost in Pacific Rim

On top of this, we have even more, smaller lines of action: Mako struggling with a childhood trauma, Mako’s father issues with Stacker, Stacker’s deteriorating health, the argumentative relationship between a father-and-son team of Australian Jaeger-pilots… lost in the shuffle is the supposed protagonist Becket. Despite being the “hero,” Becket never gets the lion’s share of attention, turning him into just another underdeveloped face in the ensemble. To make things worse, none of these secondary lines of action ever develop to a satisfying degree. Instead they just get in each other’s way and interfere with narrative clarity. Storylines need space to grow. They cannot do that when six or seven are sitting on top of each other. Keep it simple! Pick one subplot and then use it to add an emotional component to the events of the main plot (a.k.a. what the audience really cares about).

Convoluting the story further is a concept called “drifting.” Supposedly, the massive Jaegers need two pilots to operate, requiring them to join in a sort of high-tech mind-meld. This one element opens yet another can of narrative worms, filling the already crowded subplots with arguments over which pilots are “drift-compatible,” who they can trust to meld with their mind, how they should deal with their partner’s intimate thoughts and memories, even the question over whether it is possible to drift with a Kaiju. Is any of this really necessary? Couldn’t the narrative have been far sharper, clearer and more entertaining without this mumbo-jumbo tacked on? “Jaegers versus Kaiju” is a fresh concept. There is so much new territory this film could have explored by sticking to the simplicity of its original idea. Maybe if there had already been several Hollywood Kaiju films made recently, adding the concept of drifting would have added something new to the mix. But there is no point in adding this at this particular point in time!

Poster for Pacific Rim that says it all --

Poster for Pacific Rim that says it all — Jaegers vs. Kaiju

Whether a film has an out-of-the-world premise or is absolutely mundane, no story can survive without a clear Story Spine to give its narrative drive and focus. There must be a clear Story Problem. A clear Story Goal, clear actions that must be taken to reach that goal, clear conflict and stakes. Pacific Rim does not have this, particularly in the area of the Story Goal. We enter the story at a point where the goal of the Jaeger program is no longer victory, but “resistance.” In other words, the characters have accepted the notion that the Kaiju will never stop coming, so the only thing to do is maintain the status quo. This is not a dramatic goal. A Story Goal must be a clear objective that once achieved will accomplish real and permanent change. A strong, clear goal then gives rise to a series of strong, clear actions the heroes must take to reach that goal. Instead of taking such actions, the characters of Rim seem to do nothing but wait for another monster to show up so they can have another battle that ultimately does nothing to change the basic situation. Sure, there is a vague plan floating around Pacific Rim’s narrative soup that might stop the Kaiju for good, but the characters do so little to put this plan into motion. Mostly they wait around, hoping things will work out on their own. Yes, there are spectacular battles in Pacific Rim, but battles are ultimately meaningless unless the characters are fighting to accomplish something more significant than the battle itself.

Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim

Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim

Clearly, Pacific Rim came about through Guillermo Del Toro’s wish to replicate the Japanese monster movies he loved as a boy. Pacific Rim certainly does this—but both in the good sense and the bad. Just as I remember watching Japanese Kaiju films in my own childhood, I loved Pacific Rim’s monsters, I loved its fights. But I also remember how when the monsters were not on screen in the old Japanese movies, I never cared about anything else that was happening. The humans never provided anything of equal interest. Unfortunately, Pacific Rim mirrors this trait as well.

share:

image

Michael Welles Schock (aka 'Scriptmonk') is script consultant and narrative theorist. He is the author of the books <i><a href="http://amzn.to/2ciFXKL">Screenwriting Down to the Atoms</a></i> and <i><a href="http://amzn.to/2d2NxYq">Screenwriting &amp; The Unified Theory of Narrative</a></i>. <br>For more, visit his blog: <br> <table> <tr> <td><a href="http://scriptmonkindustries.com/"><img src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/website-2-small.png" style="height:25px"></a> </td> <td><a href="http://scriptmonkindustries.com/">scriptmonkindustries.com</a> </td> </tr> </table>

Improve Your Craft