This is carried through in really fucking interesting ways throughout the movie, actually. You remember the scene where we get introduced to Stacker? The Becket boys are joking with Tendo about his disaster of a love life, and it’s cute and fun and casual and dude shenanigans — and then it gets announced that the Marshal is on deck. The camera happens to be on Tendo, and you see him — you see on-fucking-screen how his shoulders straighten and he sits up and his tone of voice changes and goes professional. And you see it again, too, in the post-double event scene where people are in a joyous, packed crowd around Mako and Raleigh — and then Stacks shows up at the door, and a path fucking parts for him like he is smoking-hot Moses in a double-breasted suit.
That’s presence, folks. That’s charisma, and even more than that, it’s people respecting a natural fucking leader who has earned respect.
It’s been pointed out that people disobey Stacker in PacRim all the fucking time. You’ll note that it’s not something undertaken for shits and giggles, though. Instead, it’s because they’ve made an evaluation in the field and disagree because they think it’ll cost lives — each time, it’s presented in a sympathetic light, and each time, the movie shows that their disobedience Does Not Get What The Disobedient Ones Want. Remember that Yancy and Raleigh disobey Stacker’s order to stay back, and Yancy gets dead (and it’s not clear that they actually manage to save the dudes on the ship). Chuck and Herc disobey the order to stay back because they’re trying to save the other Jaeger pilots, which they not only fail to do, but they get hit with an EMP pulse from the kaiju. If Mako and Raleigh don’t arrive when they do, both it would’ve been a long, long fall into water for two Aussie pilots, and the world would have been well and truly fucked.
The movie underscores this with what I consider to be the goddamn climax of the whole thing. I mean, what’s the biggest command that Stacker gives? Like, the single biggest one?
To me, it’s gotta be when he tells Mako (Mako! Specifically!) during Pitfall that she can do this. She can finish it. And Mako does it, even though it clearly fucking costs her not to try and go to Striker’s aid, even though it isn’t phrased as an order. Stacker knows he doesn’t have to phrase it that way, because he knows that he has been Mako’s fixed point since she was ten years old. He knows that she knows what should happen. And he knows that he is right. And that Mako agrees, too, because again: fixed point for how many years now? The command doesn’t need to be verbalized as such. It doesn’t even need to be entirely articulated, because the Drift that Mako and Stacker share isn’t a physical one inside a Jaeger with a Pons mechanism. Instead, it exists because Stacker and Mako found each other in the wreckage of Tokyo. Stacker raised Mako, and they share the same value system and the same way of looking at the world and the same fierce pride and devotion and willingness to lay down personal attachments to other lives if it means saving the motherfucking world.
So Stacker tells Mako that she can make this sacrifice — his life, for the world. It’s a parallel to the situation that Yancy and Raleigh have to make in Alaska, with the fishermen versus the city of two million, and the one that Herc and Chuck have in Hong Kong, with the lives of their fellow Rangers versus one of the few great coastal cities left. Yancy and Raleigh and Herc and Chuck choose to disobey, and each time, not only does it not get them what they want, but it’s got shitty consequences.
This time, instead of laying it down as an order, Stacker tells Mako that she can finish it. She’ll always be able to find in him in their particular version of the Drift.
And Mako obeys because she agrees with him.
Let me emphasize that: the world gets saved without further loss of life because Mako and Raleigh follow Stacker’s directive to Mako.
Stacker fucking Pentecost, everyone. This fucking movie, everyone.
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