Thoughts on: Pacific Rim


Pacific Rim is made up of two entirely separate movies. There’s the “robots punching monsters” movie, which is what everyone is there to see, and then there’s the “humans talking about stuff” movie, which nobody is there to see. The disjoint is so extreme that I'm going to review each part separately:

Movie 1 – "Robots Punching Monsters"

It’s as awesome as it sounds. The recipe is pretty simple - you take martial arts, add missiles and swords and acid, make the opponents taller than skyscrapers, and then bask in the piles of money you make. There’s not really much else to say about it, except for one complaint: there was a lot more potential. Cool, unique robots are just instantly killed off, without them doing a single thing that sets them apart from the other robots. That’s just plain wasteful. The only excuse I can think of is they couldn't fit it in, which brings me to Movie 2...

Movie 2 – "Humans Talking About Stuff"

I can’t think of a single redeeming quality for Movie 2. It’s an hour of shallow drama, zero humour, and characters that are little more than caricatures. People’s weaknesses will get randomly mentioned, and then happen less than a minute later. Characters interact on the most superficial level, and none of it adds a single thing of importance to the plot. What makes it worse is that there was actually potential here – two people are required to pilot a robot, and they have to connect through memories and synchronise their thoughts. A pretty interesting concept, right? Not explored in the slightest. Meanwhile, we’re given a wanker who doesn’t respect his dad, and a woman who really wants to be a pilot. Yawn. It might have been okay if it was full of laughs, but we don’t even get that.

Movie 1 gets a 9/10 (-1 for throwing away interesting robots). Movie 2 gets a 1/10 (+1 for a passable relationship between the two nerds). The average seems appropriate:


5/10

PS. Pacific Rim has plot holes pouring out of every orifice, but nobody is there for the plot so I'm willing to let it slide.


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