Movie Review: Pacific Rim

First, I’d like to apologize to all my followers and readers for not posting anything recently. I have been on vacation for the past week and I do my best to avoid my phone and computer. Happy to be back writing again though. Let’s get this show on the road.

Godzilla meets Transformers in the newest summer blockbuster, Pacific Rim. The trailers for this looked epic and my brother and I were very excited to go and see this.

I’m not starting this review with the headline “Godzilla meets Transformers” just because that’s basically what this movie is. It’s also because there was a tiny shard of worry in me as well. I knew this movie could be two things: either an action bonanza with little of anything else (stereotypical Godzilla movies) or one with everything, causing it to be so epic that I nearly put a perfection label on the cover when I bought it (Transformers). These are two very different descriptions and I’d prefer to watch one over the other. I’ll let you figure it out.

The action scenes in this movie were pretty good and definitely worthy of a serious fist pound. However, something I loved about Transformers was the amazing special effects they were able to do with the transformers while still keeping the fight scenes relatively fast-paced. In this, both the monsters and the robots move like 300 ton creatures, making everything a lot more detailed, but slower paced. While I truly appreciated all the work that went into these fight scenes, at some points it was like I was watching a sumo wrestling match or two 500-pound men in a boxing ring. Personally, I’ll take speed over extreme detail any day. Godzilla-1 Transformers-0

There were no star actors in this film, which bugged me a little bit, but I figured it shouldn’t interfere with the action scenes. It didn’t but it also meant between every fight scene I was stuck watching characters I felt like I had seen a billion times. Very stereotypical and unoriginal. Think of stereotypical roles in movies and probably half of them can be pointed out in this film. That isn’t a big deal if you have actors that can bring some originality to them. There were no such actors present for filming. If you recall when you watched Godzilla movies as a kid, the characters were probably not important to you and you really could care less if they fell into a black hole or blew their brains out. You watched it because you wanted to see the fight scenes. That’s what this movie is like. I can almost picture the obnoxious audience member in the back of the theater: “Let’s go, nobody cares, start round two.” One of the scientists in the movie, played by Charlie Day, is one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen. I was waiting for someone to bust his face in, but sadly it never happened. Every time an action scene was interrupted by this guy, I was thinking, “What is the purpose of having this guy in the movie?” The same with Ron Perlman’s character. Why is he in it? He does nothing for the plot! The actors did the best they could with this, but the script writing was lacking. I cared about the characters in this film, but not as much as I want to care or should care. Godzilla-2 Transformers-0

While I appreciated that del Toro made the backstory as simple as possible, he seemed to neglect one important point, at least for me. The pilots for these machines go through a neural handshake, a process through which their memories and brains are fused, or something to that effect, oh, I don’t even know what I’m talking about! What is going on?! How does that work? It’s a confusing concept. It seems like it would have been a lot easier to just make the robot be piloted by one person.

On the other hand, then it would be Godzilla meets Transformers meets Gundam. In fact, now that I think about it, aren’t the robots kind of like Gundam warriors?

Seriously, my brother just came in with this picture south-west from where I’m writing right now. That’s weird, man. Now if they had done this same picture for Transformers I would just ignore it, but it’s not because I’m biased toward the movie. It’s because the movie is original, different in a way. The robots have minds of their own and you actually can consider Optimus Prime and the rest of the transformers characters because you can relate to them. They have a piece of individuality and creativity in them that makes me interested and intrigued, not bored like “I’ve seen this before minus these awesome fight scenes”.

Godzilla-3 Transformers-0

Once again, if you’re new to my blog,  I’ve always ranked movies on a scale of 0-100 (I don’t know why, I just always have). Here’s the grading scale.

 90-100  It’s a great movie and definitely one worth buying. (Iron Man 3, World War Z)

80-89   It was a pretty good movie and definitely one worth seeing, but it doesn’t quite scratch my top ten percentile. (Star Trek Into Darkness, Now You See Me, Man of Steel, Monster-In-Law, White House Down)

70-79   It’s okay but I’ve seen better. It has its moments, but it has its flaws, too.

60-69   It’s got plenty wrong with it but I still got enjoyment out of this one. (Oblivion)

50-59   This movie isn’t intolerable but it’s not blowing my mind either. I’m trying really hard to get some sort of enjoyment out of this. (The Hobbit, After Earth, Road to Perdition)

40-49   This movie is just mediocre. It’s not doing anything other than the bare minimal, so morbidly boring that sometimes I’m actually angry I watched this. (Patriot Games)

30-39   Definitely worse than mediocre, the 30’s ironically define the 1930’s, full of depression, lack of accomplishments, poverty and just so dumb. (The Contract, Pride and Prejudice)

20-29   What did I just watch? Cliches, stupidity, nothingness, did I mention stupidity? Just…wow.

0-19      Watching this movie resulted in one or more of the following: seizure, loss of brain cells, falling asleep/unconsciousness, feel you wasted your time/day, accomplished nothing for you, left the movie knowing less about it then you did going into it, constantly asking yourself why you came to see this movie, or near-death experience. In short, staring at a wall was just as entertaining as watching this movie. This movie deserved a sticker or a label that said, “WARNING: EXTREME AMOUNT OF SUCKAGE.”

My score for Pacific Rim: 68.

The only other del Toro movies that I have seen are the two Hellboy movies, movies that relied on a weak plot line and character chemistry. The chemistry worked, the plot, not so much. At the end of the day, del Toro’s plot struggles with holes intertwined with audience members scratching their heads. The action scenes seemed to be his main priority and nothing but. While they were well done, even if they’re perfectly done action scenes, a movie still needs more than that to be great. Perhaps del Toro and Zach Snyder should join hands in making 300 part 2. The first one was action scenes and not much else. Sounds like they have the same priorities to me.

*SPOILER ALERT* IF YOU DON’T WANT THE MOVIE SPOILED, STOP READING!!!

*SPOILER’S EDITION*

The monsters in this movie all ended up looking like hammerhead sharks with extremities and sometimes tentacles. I was disappointed I couldn’t get any more creativity than that.

Finally, the ending: the two main characters jump through the portal and Raleigh sends Mako out in an escape pod as they are both running out of oxygen. Raleigh then runs around the ship for what felt like forever pushing the manual override button for the detonation sequence. Apparently oxygen is not a necessity for people these days. I didn’t know that. I guess I’ll have to try swimming to the bottom of the ocean next week without any scuba diving equipment. Raleigh then jumps into an escape pod with under 7 seconds left before detonation and escapes the nuclear blast in Batman style. I suppose I’ll have to enlist in the air force for the next time they drop a nuclear warhead, because if they can escape nukes with seconds to spare, why can’t I? SHAKING MY HEAD!!!