Pacific Rim

While the execs at Disney are licking their wounds and updating their resumes after the disastrous release of The Lone Ranger last week, the geek world has been salivating in anticipation over this week’s big one. It’s a simple concept really. We’re talking about Monsters fighting Robots in Pacific Rim.

Oscar nominated writer and director Guillermo del Toro has taken a step backward in this futuristic, lightweight tale about how aliens have been using a space portal in the Pacific Ocean to invade Earth.

Humans are on the run, and civilization as we know it is on the brink, so one last ditch, Hail Mary desperation plan has been hatched and the world has to count on Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) to save the day (that’s probably where you should start getting worried about humanity).

Becket is part of an elite force that operate huge robots, Jaegers, to battle these monsters who look like massive lizards with bad attitudes, Kaiju (I guess giving everything foreign names helps sell the movie overseas). The robots had been winning, but the monsters have adapted, leading the world’s leaders to moth ball the heavy metal combatants.

Of course, their leader, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), still thinks they are the only hope for humanity, so, in essence, he has mounted a military coup by coming up with a plan to use the remaining forces to stop the monsters once and for all.

Pacific Rim is the dumbed down summer blockbuster of all dumbed down summer blockbusters.

I feel like I have worn out the use of the word formulaic this summer, but I can’t think of another word for this schlock.

Sure, you get your fight scenes with monsters and robots pummeling each other, but that’s all you get.

Our hero, Becket, is a loner, a rebel, a rulebreaker with a haunted past. He’s a bad boy. Oooooo.

We get all sorts of big inspirational speeches from Stacker that put you to sleep. Every word coming out of this character’s mouth is supposed to be some big movie moment full of meaning and inspiration (and designed for the fans to repeat over and over again), but none of it carries the weight needed, and del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham try so many times they unintentional marginalize each moment and take away any meaning a well placed special scene or speech may have.

Then, del Toro tosses in a whole bunch of loud, rousing mood setting music to wake you up. I guess the action and the dialogue on screen is not enough to make you feel the emotion, so they need to cue the audience with the music, just to make sure. No one said subtlety was Pacific Rim’s strong suit.

Even all of the nationalities represented in the movie are stupid stereotypical portrays. The Russians might want to invade us after seeing these Russians.

All of this propels Pacific Rim beyond campy and straight into cartoonish, which will make the teenage boys happy and compel them to buy the video game, but that doesn’t make this Godzilla vs. The Transformers mess anything more than blah.

del Toro never gives us anything that makes you go WOW! No dialogue is smart or insightful. No acting is anything beyond what you can see on a 3rd rate cable re-run. The comedy, especially stuff with Charlie Day as some sort of scientist, is overdone and forced like someone felt we better have some comedy to appear cooler or hipper.

Even the special effects are nothing to make you feel you are watching the second coming of Star Wars or Terminator 2. This is more like the second coming of Battleship if it starred Nicolas Cage.

Pacific Rim is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief language.