The Pacific Rim franchise is all about titanic battles between twisted, giant monsters from the deep and the armed robots, known as Jaegers, built to resist them. But there’s another conflict inside the films themselves: a vision of global community clashing with the default American-centered storytelling of Hollywood.
The movies that inaugurated the franchise—Pacific Rim (2013) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)— never quite managed to meld those competing visions into a single unstoppable bio-mech of meaning. The films are big, loud, and, despite flashes of adequacy, deeply underwhelming. The new Netflix series Pacific Rim: The Black, though, finally puts the Brobdingnagian combatants into a mechanism worthy of their size and power. The show strides right past the same old tropes and onto a larger, bleaker, and much more satisfying landscape. At a moment when it is depressingly clear that apocalypse isn’t something you can just punch in the face, Pacific Rim: The Black rescues the hoary, clanking franchise from irrelevance.
