Howdy, everyone! Cory here. I’m half-conscious thanks to an exhausting day at work followed by an even more exhausting evening of getting a temperamental baby to go to sleep, so instead of saying anything useful I’m just going to review Pacific Rim.
MINOR SPOILERS BELOW: DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU DON’T WANT THEM.
First, I would like to make it clear that Pacific Rim is a Summer Blockbuster Movie. You know the kind of movie I mean – it’s fun, it’s melodramatic, it’s goddamn full of explosions and white males with five o’clock shadows and tragic pasts. It is by no means a cinematic masterstroke or a life-changing magnum opus; this is a movie in which giant robots punch the unholy assballs out of giant aliens. It’s like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and Godzilla somehow got into a violent drunken brawl in a dynamite factory populated entirely by incredibly serious people with nothing to lose. In case I’m being unclear, that’s meant to cast the movie in a positive light.
The writing is weak in places, the characters are not terribly complex, the ~DRAMATIC TWISTS~ are visible from miles away, and apart from a couple of quite well-done moments, most of the scenes intended to be touching or tragic just come across as humorous because of how absurdly formulaic they are. I was honestly a little surprised that someone didn’t say he was retiring in two weeks immediately before getting murdered to hell by a giant monster. On top of that, to say that this movie plays fast and loose with its sci-fi elements is like saying deep-fried chocolate bars aren’t very good for you – Pacific Rim’s approach to its setting’s futuristic technology is to either a) completely and utterly ignore the very concept of explaining how it works, or b) babble complete nonsense and then immediately blindside the viewer with more alien punching before they have time to say, “wait, that makes exactly the opposite of sense.” It actually works pretty well considering the whole movie is an unrepentantly transparent excuse to make giant cool things beat the incredible hell out of one another for a couple of hours.
In spite of, or possibly because of, these things, it really is an enjoyable movie. If you’re the kind of person who gets hung up on silly plot elements or, well, silly anything, you might get kind of mad at Pacific Rim. However, if you are the kind of person who can stay mad at Pacific Rim while it shows you a giant bastard robot savagely bludgeoning a giant bastard sea monster with an ocean ship wielded like a baseball bat, then you are pretty much terrible and should stay away from the theatre in case you have some kind of dreadful fun-destroying disease.