Pacific Rim Movie Review

So I saw Pacific Rim at the cinema and thought I’d check in to leave my thoughts on the film.

So let’s get to it. If you haven’t seen the movie or watched the trailers you should still be able to guess what it’s about just by looking at the poster outside the cinema. Unless you’re blind. Huge robots’ fighting giant monsters is pretty self-explanatory.

In the near future a dimensional tear appears in Pacific Ocean. Giant monsters start to pour through and, being angry at mankind for no apparent reason like all monsters are, they start to destroy cities. The world’s answer to this is to build giant robots to kill them. Yes, that old chestnut.

The premise is quite silly but once you get over that this is quite a fun movie. The graphics are very impressive and the fight scenes are nothing short of epic.

One of the only problems with Pacific Rim is that at times it tries to take itself too seriously. Which, considering what it’s about, is impossible to do. I ended up not caring about any of the characters, nor did I learn any of their names. The filmmakers try to ram a lot of sad back stories down your throat in the first hour and it just doesn’t work, simply because you’re counting down the minutes to the next robot-monster smack-down. Which let’s be honest, that’s the only reason why anyone would want to watch this film. Also, the characters are either clique stereotypes or have no personality whatsoever. 

Names? You want names. Erm…you’ll find none here. 

Also the film has some strange bits that not everyone will notice when watching it the first time round. For example, at the start of the film, the leader of the robot defence program is told that the plug is being pulled. He gets told that the governments of the globe will only continue to fund the robots for another eight months.

Why eight months? Are they already four months into the new financial year or something? This isn’t explained. It just seems like such a random number. 

Also, the reason the robot program is wound-up is because the governments are building giant coastal walls to keep the monsters out. But these aren’t finished yet. Why would they retire their only line of defence before the new one was finished? And there are a few others which I won’t go into here or else I’d spoil it. 

If you like Godzilla movies (except that awful 1998 Hollywood version) and rock-em-sock-em-robots, you’ll enjoy this.