Pacific Rim

Del Toro brings us something that has been done before. After all, big cities have already been devastated by The Avengers, Transformers, or Superman to the point that falling skyscrapers are becoming a bit of a stereotype. The director tries to add personality to it by providing some pretty clear action scenes, and by not going too far over the edge in terms of visual sweeps. On the other hand, into two hours he didn't cram in a single major character, a real character who could pull carry better than a jaeger pulling a tin can down the street. Idris Elba has charisma but drowns in pathetic speeches, and the rest of the ensemble is severely uninteresting - Ron Perlman is more of an iconic trademark than a functional character. It goes by quickly, but the most important and impressive scene is still the escape of little Mako from the kaiju through the empty street. (18/07/2013)

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)

One of my most anticipated films of the year turned out to be pretty weak! I’d been looking forward to Pacific Rim basically ever since the first reports. A war between giant human-controlled robots and giant sea monsters could be conceived in many ways, but I was hoping for a gritty and dark sci-fi bash with relentless apocalyptic atmosphere and massive and originally conceived battles (the first reports spoke of at least five giant battles, with each being shot in a different way). In short, I was hoping for something like the antithesis to the childish Transformers. If only. Pacific Rim is nothing but a generic popcorn movie for kids with jokes, shallow characters, clichés, and pathos. Even the action scenes don’t have much juice – and there aren’t enough of them (in the first half, the characters are just talking in hangars and it’s insufferable). Del Toro really only aimed for “the bar” – even the design of the monsters and the robots is not amazing. Squandered opportunity. (18/07/2013)

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)

Godzilla meets Transformers. Pacific Rim is the most honest of this summer’s blockbusters, as it doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t and avoids narrative feints and overlapping meanings in straightforwardly bringing very clear content to the term “high concept” (Monsters! Robots! And they’re really big!). (With respect to the anticipated hurricane of merchandising, the fetishisation of technology present in the film deserves special analysis – the characters repeatedly marvel at the power and size of the robots as the camera revels in their design in long shots, which are in some ways reminiscent of the presentation of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park). The plot puts us in familiar positions as viewers, as it is composed of popular sci-fi and military motifs (Earth in peril, neural linking, clones, male rivalry, the best defence is offence). All it requires from us is that we somewhat unthinkingly and completely contentedly watch modified versions of Top Gun, Cloverfield, Independence Day and Hellboy (for connoisseurs, there is a bonus in the form of the Blade Runner-esque neo-noir visual aspect of Hong Kong and a rather inappropriate reference to the famous “nose” scene from Chinatown). Given that its marketing campaign made it very clear what it was going to be about (and that it wouldn’t be about much more than that), Pacific Rim’s lack of originality did pose an obstacle to my enjoyment of the pure entertainment that it provided. The predictability of the plot twists and the restricting of the human element (manifested in the hunky actors who, with the exception of Elba, are interchangeable and uncharismatic) to the necessary minimum – after all, the concept of the Jaeger is based on the “transformation” of humans into a multi-ton steel monster (or an analogy for the cooperative playing of action-oriented games) – make room for a visual and visceral action experience. The heavyweight matches are clear and varied to the extent possible, but they are mainly huge. It’s a dream come true for gamers and comic-book fans. Guillermo del Toro plays like a little boy on a grand scale. I enjoyed the film – not intellectually, but intensely – especially because of its imaginativeness and the sensory experience provided by the combination of the film’s incredible visual aspect and its rock soundtrack. 75% (12/07/2013)