Review: Pacific Rim (2013)

Once again I am playing catch-up and watching movies when they hit the DVD instead of paying to seeing them in the movie theater.  This time around, it’s Pacific Rim that I sat down and viewed.  Within five minutes I had realized that this movie was made to be seen on the big screen and that I’d made a horrible mistake in waiting.  For while the amazing special effects and monster-crushing action still carried some of the impact it might have in a movie theater, the rest of the film played sharper and detracted from that enjoyment.  In the end, Pacific Rim was both beautiful to behold and painful to watch at times.

The story is pretty simple - giant monsters have come from the deep to destroy humanity.  Humanity then develops giant robots (called Jaegers) to fight them.  Unrealistic?  Of course.  But the whole point of the film is to have giant robots fight giant monsters, so it’s easily forgiven for the sake of seeing the end result.  We follow one hot-shot robot jockey who lost his brother while fighting the good fight.  The giant robots need two people to pilot them, so he’s out of a job.  Sure, he could have picked up a new partner, but losing your brother is a pretty traumatic experience, especially when you happen to be plugged into his head at the time.

But when the Jaeger project loses its funding at the same time that the monster invaders are getting bigger and meaner, the old pilot is called in to help out.  Being the good guy that he is (and wanting a little revenge), he says yes.  It’s then up to him and three other teams to execute the ultimate plan and seal off the passage that the monsters are using to get from their world to ours.

Giant robots fight giant monsters.  Wacky scientists run around making discoveries to help save the world.  Cliché dialogue flies left and right.  And in the end the world is saved.

This movie has what are probably some of the most impressive visuals of any movie ever made.  The battles are done to such perfection that they will put you on the edge of your seat (and I don’t use that cliché lightly).  The impact of fist on face can be felt, cities get leveled as over-sized combatants pound the crap out of each other and great care has been taken to make every little detail perfect.

Unfortunately, while Pacific Rim excels at creating a visual presence, it completely lacks in the script department.  My biggest complaint is that the movie never quite settles in on a single tone.  We have the main character and a few others portraying very serious, war-torn individuals that are trying to save the world.  We have bizarre, cartoony side-characters lurking in the background and making the movie seem more like a comic book.  And then there are a few (including a bizarre portrayal by Ron Perlman) that act as if they’ve come straight from a B-movie that you’d see on MST3K.  Together, they rip the movie back and forth and just when you’ve accustomed yourself to viewing it in one way, it changes again.

If Guillermo del Toro would have chosen one way to shoot this film, it would have been twice as good.  Make it serious, make it campy, make it whatever.  But as it stands now, it’s like three different directors had a go at it without consulting each other.  And the dialogue… good lord.  It’s as if the writers read the “Big Book of Every Movie Dialogue Cliché Ever” and took is as their God-send instruction manual.  I found myself able to predict dozens of lines before they were spoken.  Not a good sign.

Did I enjoy Pacific Rim?  Yes.  Would I watch it again?  Only if it were on a screen bigger than 17 inches.  Do I think it was a good movie?  For the most part, no.  Enjoyable, for sure, but not a masterpiece of cinema in any way aside from the visuals, and that doesn’t count in my book.  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a decent score of 72/79%, which falls pretty much in line with what I think of the film.  I only wish that del Toro could recapture some of his glory years.  If he keeps making movies like this, I fear he’ll rapidly become the next MichaelBay or undergo the strange process that turned James Cameron into the Avatar King.  Please, del Toro - you’re better than that.

Photo Credits -           

Pacific Rim courtesy of collider.com