Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim is basically an ideal version of “Monsters vs Robots” and is just as dumb as that sounds but is extremely self aware of its own dumbness. If you compare it to Transformers it utterly annihilates it but that’s sort of a useless comparison because the Transformers movies are by and large horrible. The film has extremely well constructed action scenes and CG and is probably the most coherent prolific amounts of CG action picture out there. Note I still don’t think that necessarily makes it the best nor does it compare to non CG action movies; but it’s certainly miles better than the shaky cam Michael Bay action type of film.

The humor in this movie is not bad but it’s sort of all cliché driven; which is fine there’s just not an original scene of humor that breaks new ground or anything. Nothing really iconic and no particularly original characters either. Idris Elba is fucking incredible as per usual but he’s also by far the best actor in the film (apologies to Ron Perlman who is also awesome in a 5 minute role). And that’s where this film sort of starts to run into trouble, the whole affair is completely predictable and while it is visually stunning with very few flaws I still want some amount of creativity in the mix.

I don’t think this movie has to be so dumb either; it’s overthinking it to say that giant robots are completely unnecessary but in the world where you make giant robots wouldn’t you use them as military assets?  Basically in the movie they send robots out 1 at a time against monsters in 1 on 1 or 2 on 2 fights; but they could easily send 4 or 5 for each and probably never would have resulted in their apocalyptic situation (also "spawn camping" would work wonders).

Additionally every mech is a melee fighter with occasional ranged weaponry; why aren’t there support mechs and ranged mechs in addition to melee ones? I get melee in order to occupy the monster in a tank role but why not use some sort of logical military tactics in your approach to fighting these monsters? The two auxiliary mechs (of 4) introduced in a really great montage sequence have less screen time in their action scene than they do while being introduced! What would make the final action scene much better is if they fought the really huge monster with all 4 mechs at once and suffered casualties there; but instead it’s just this weird series of mano-a-mano type fights.

All of that said this is a great dumb action movie, it’s not as intelligent or humorous as something like the Avengers and it’s not as funny and stupid as something like Independence Day but if you really like well put together CG action sequences or Idris Elba than this is the film for you. Personally I think unintentional comedy mixed with actual comedy is just straight up funnier so I’d basically always pick Independence Day (which is also much more original) to watch, but it is a little longer than Pacific Rim so if you only had 2 hours and 10 minutes I guess this would be the film to see. It’s probably the third best film I’ve seen this year next to Oblivion and Mud (or fourth best if you count The Last of Us) and is certainly the best giant robots movie ever made.