Pacific Rim

A quality movie, but not such a massacre as promised in the trailers. The characters receive the same care as the unbelievably tangible fights with metal and organic monsters. Beautifully followable and ingenious brawls are the icing on the cake, held together by a perfectly functioning world whose natural laws are strange, but most of the time make more or less sense. Locating most of the plot in Hong Kong was also really fine, because it provides a perfect backdrop for those monumental punch-ups. People who like monsters and robots have made a movie for people who like monsters and robots. (13/08/2013)

After watching this film, at first I said to myself that it was completely average. But then I went down another star as I thought of a lot of scenes where the logic of it was just too incomprehensible. Pacific Rim is a textbook example of a blockbuster. I don’t blame it for that, I even liked the camera and digital effects that Guillermo del Toro and his crew worked with. But let no one tell me, and now I’m going to spoil a bit, that the best warriors in those robots are brothers who, by coincidence, are on a routine mission in a sea grasped by a monster who immediately takes down one of them. I was also fascinated by how ten years later the other brother is offered to control a robot again and is considered an incredible fighter, which of course the other colleagues do not believe him at all. Plus, not a single actor fully convinced me to like him here, which is quite a fundamental issue, because Guillermo relies on the power of dialogues that do not work here at all in this regard. The only one worth it is Charlie Day as the crazy doctor. The rest is neither funny nor interesting, and the viewer simply cannot connect to them, which is probably the most fundamental stumbling block. It’s not entirely bad, but it failed because of the average actors and a very bland screenplay, which is simplifying so many things that it’s just incredibly obvious. (14/06/2014)

A case of cinematic megalomania that is not self-serving and over the top, but is the very essence of the target concept, the blood in the heart of the film. A simple storytelling template, perfect visual effects and super-cool action scenes (Hong Kong Harbor rules), redesigned visuals of mecha-robots and sea monsters. Astonishment over the epic power of the opponents (the Japanese will piss their pants). Plus Guillermo del Toro-like enthusiasm for slime, skin parasites and Ron Perlman. The characters and their interaction, however, are not too impressive and the dinosaur idea is very contrived. That’s a pity. The 3D is better than usual (but still only converted from 2D in post-production). I wonder whether it’s a coincidence that the mad scientist looks exactly like J.J. Abrams. (11/07/2013)

Guillermo del Toro was a bit of a wildcard in the top Hollywood league, because it was automatically assumed that once he made a real feature film (the underfunded Hellboy and demented Blade can't be included here), it would be quite the event. In retrospect, I'm really sorry that the R megalomania in the At the Mountains of Madness exploded and The Hobbit was overripe. Because Pacific Rim is basically everything that connects me to the term generic Bay blockbuster. A few initial great ideas and a really gigantic atmosphere were taken away by the speech of a crazy hipster scientist, in which he sucked all the clichés about the alien invasion into one sentence and things got no better thereafter. The fact that basically a third of the film is devoted only to the relationships between the characters makes Pacific Rim feel empty and undeveloped, even the miniaturist del Toro, who managed to make a sympathetic character from a walking ectoplasm, sinks to awkward creations and casting overacting (the younger and less talented brother of Heath Ledger really doesn't pull it off). Were it not for Ron Perlman, I would dare say that there is not a single really eccentric character in the film, rather only a collection of replaying clichés. I was quite surprised by the clumsy work with the storylines - in order for one to continue, the other stops and after five minutes continues from the same place it ended. Sometimes this leads to obscure awkward transitions, such as SPOILER "characters who learn valuable info have to run to the control room to shout into the microphone and warn the Jägers, who are meanwhile marching for three minutes on the seabed" / SPOILER. At the time of Star Trek's frantic intertwining of events, this is truly dense retro. You will get to know Guillermo mainly from the perfectionist visual, which gives the impression that Gaspar Noé started playing with robots and monsters. There is really very little to catch on to the neon beauty full of reflections, and some scenes are giddily iconic and it is a pleasure to look at them (even in 3D, which is not dark and is not at all bothersome). So what arose from del Toro's long transition to blockbusters? Visually and design-wise retro, which is not much better or wittier than Transformers (although from my point of view, it surpasses Transformers in terms of implementation skills). Hit me in the head with a tanker, but that is not going to be enough. (10/07/2013)

A new movie about an invasion by toerags from another dimension which, instead of NGE (the blues know what I’m talking about), is more similar to Emmerich’s version of Godzilla, eighties style. Guillermo has a lot of strong sides and one (and for the purposes of a summer popcorn movie - fundamental) weakness: he is simply no good at action. Under his directing action turns into a succession of clichés and wonderfully arranged images with no dynamism, inner tension, build up or clarity. No wonder that the most successful movies of his career are those with no action. Despite this handicap, he decided to make a movie based purely on action in massive dimensions. And... And certainly this didn’t turn out to be that proverbial exception that proves the rule, but simply solid Bayism with nice visuals, which might just break the iceberg of racist xenophobia so common in this country. After watching this, every little boy will want to have a little Gypsy Woman figurine on his bedside table. (10/07/2013)