As thinly drawn as their teatime-TV ancestors, they are heroes as mechanical as the robots, pre-programmed with personal issues (chiefly dead relatives), too easily overcome. These humans rarely rise above the risible. Within their cockpit heads, the two heroes enact hooks and jabs like deranged puppeteers. You get a barrage of sensation, scaled against crumbling cityscapes, but are left guessing how one battle is won and another lost. But like many sci-fi visions liberated by CG, the geography of destruction is hard to follow. This primitive dynamic, however ludicrous (what about hurling big missiles from a safe distance?), provides a physical rush made doubly vivid by the unsteadying effect of 3D. The putative plot has the robots battering their way towards the glowing deep-sea rift to slam it shut.
Lumbering automaton-Stallones and mechanised-Schwarzeneggers (with heaving chests and tiny heads), 25 storeys tall, the Jaegers essentially wrestle their awful foes (another Mexican thing?) - although they also boast retractable swords and spinning saws - in a succession of massive scraps. The marketing department, well out of earshot, might add the visceral mechanics of the Transformers movies, and all the hi-tech hurly-burly of videogames. The DNA of their older brother, Godzilla, is self-evident, but del Toro would insist his new film also splices in the genealogy of mythical sea creatures and Goya’s unearthly masterpiece The Colossus. In fact, the director is again mining his childhood for inspiration, tapping a vein of Japanese monsters versus robots shows, like Ultraman and The Space Giants, imported on the cheap to pick up the slack on Mexican TV. This is a spectacular brute of a film where size rather than technique matters. It’s as if del Toro has reverse-imagined his movie from how awestruck boys might stage mock-battles between toy lines. In other words, get on Pacific Rim’s wavelength and there is a primal gratification in its blunt remit of very big metal things fighting very big scaly things in order to prevent an apocalypse. While it is never made entirely clear what this means (boiling down to a nebulous you-feel-me kind of thing), to enjoy Guillermo del Toro’s super-sized version of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em, it might help to be Drift compatible. Indeed, before they can so much as dim the headlights on the Crimson Typhoon, Striker Eureka or Gipsy Danger, three of the pimped-up iron giants on show, the intertwined heroes must be “Drift compatible”. To master a Jaeger, the steeple-tall, nuclear-powered robots built to defend Earth from the Kaijus (huge monsters with fluorescent blood, enormous horned heads and the sole intention of eradicating mankind), it takes two daring pilots neurally linked via a mysterious technology known as The Drift.