Though a few brave robot-jockeys continue to fight the good fight, the program is largely mothballed, with the governments of the world instead investing in the construction of a giant 'Wall of Life' intended to keep out the transgalactic interlopers. Within five years, the Jaeger program is all but abandoned. But in 2020, the balance of power shifts as a new and more formidable species of Kaiju surfaces. This arrangement works out nicely for several years, with the implicit contest between Japanese Godzilloids and German engineering consistently favoring the latter.

Humankind quickly comes to the conclusion that (tagline alert) to fight monsters, we must create monsters of our own-specifically, towering mechanical men called 'Jaegers.' (The word is German for 'hunter.') Though this 'Kaiju'-the term is a genial nod to the Japanese giant-monster movies of the 1950s and '60s-is ultimately defeated by the military, another materializes six months later, and then another, and another. The story begins in the near-future, when an interstellar portal opens up deep in the Pacific Ocean and belches forth a lumbering monstrosity that lays waste to San Francisco. So now that Pacific Rim has landed ashore, which is it? A feebly written special-effects-fest explicitly engineered for the international market? Or a work of next-generation visual imagination? The answer, I fear, is both-though the balance tilts somewhat toward the former. Emily in Paris Is the Last Guilty Pleasure Spencer Kornhaber

Pacific rim movie cast