Pacific Rim Movie Review
Pacific Rim movie review
If I were nine years old, I would see the monsters-versus-robots adventure "Pacific Rim" 50 times. Because I'm in my forties and have two kids and two jobs, I'll have to be content with seeing it a couple more times in theaters and re-watching it on video.
Like George Lucas' original 1977 "Star Wars", Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi actioner uses high technology to pump up disreputable subject matter to Hollywood blockbuster levels. The film's main selling point is its overscaled action sequences. In a terrified futureworld, spindly-limbed, whale-sized beasts emerge from a Hellmouth on the ocean floor and duke it out with immense robots. The robots are run by two-pilot teams whose movements suggest tai chi exercises taking place on the world's largest, weirdest elliptical machines. They work in pairs because they use their minds and bodies to guide the machines in the way that puppeteers guide puppets, and the technology is too complex for a single brain to handle.
The creatures began attacking years before the start of the story proper (we get the history in a prologue). The humans can't fight the monsters by conventional military means because it causes too much collateral damage. They created the robots — called Jaegers — to engage them directly, before the creatures, called Kaiju, could make landfall. Over time the beasts have become bigger, nastier, more resourceful, as if they're evolving. And now they seem to be winning. Humankind is in retreat.
The fight scenes are often shot too close-in for my taste, and they go on too long, particularly during the final stretch — a problem that also afflicted"Iron Man 3," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Man of Steel" and other recent summer films — and there are times when one of the combatants will use a weapon so devastating that you wonder why they didn't just haul it out at the start of the fight and make the punching, kicking and flipping unnecessary.
Nitpicks aside, though, the fights are
If I were nine years old, I would see the monsters-versus-robots adventure "Pacific Rim" 50 times. Because I'm in my forties and have two kids and two jobs, I'll have to be content with seeing it a couple more times in theaters and re-watching it on video.
Like George Lucas' original 1977 "Star Wars", Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi actioner uses high technology to pump up disreputable subject matter to Hollywood blockbuster levels. The film's main selling point is its overscaled action sequences. In a terrified futureworld, spindly-limbed, whale-sized beasts emerge from a Hellmouth on the ocean floor and duke it out with immense robots. The robots are run by two-pilot teams whose movements suggest tai chi exercises taking place on the world's largest, weirdest elliptical machines. They work in pairs because they use their minds and bodies to guide the machines in the way that puppeteers guide puppets, and the technology is too complex for a single brain to handle.
The creatures began attacking years before the start of the story proper (we get the history in a prologue). The humans can't fight the monsters by conventional military means because it causes too much collateral damage. They created the robots — called Jaegers — to engage them directly, before the creatures, called Kaiju, could make landfall. Over time the beasts have become bigger, nastier, more resourceful, as if they're evolving. And now they seem to be winning. Humankind is in retreat.
The fight scenes are often shot too close-in for my taste, and they go on too long, particularly during the final stretch — a problem that also afflicted"Iron Man 3," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Man of Steel" and other recent summer films — and there are times when one of the combatants will use a weapon so devastating that you wonder why they didn't just haul it out at the start of the fight and make the punching, kicking and flipping unnecessary.
Nitpicks aside, though, the fights are