Pacific Rim (2013)

 

Do you like giant robots? Do you like giant monsters? Do you like aforementioned kicking the everloving snot out of each other? 

Then this is your jam.

Director Guillermo del Toro often manages to bring wonderful worlds to the screen, but here he went all ten-year-old fanboy of all things Japanese/anime and it is lots of fun.

Not a great film mind you, but an enjoyable timewaster. 

Somewhere in the near future, a fissure opens up on the ocean floor and giant monsters, quickly dubbed 'kaiju', start to appear and wreak havoc across several cities. Humanity comes together and cobbles together mech suits to fight the creatures, which does seem to do the trick. Our protagonist Raleigh does lose his brother in one of their fights, though. You see, you need two pilots to operate the giant mechs for some technobabble reason. 

But, as the number of kaiju-assaults drops, governments decide to phase out the program and focus on building massive coastal walls, because it is more cost effective.

Guess what works best when stronger kaiju start to appear again? 

Of course it's time to suit up once more, under the charismatic leadership of Stacker Pentecost, a hilariously stupid name but performed by the always sublime Idris Elba; who, coincidentally, also delivers the best "we're going to kick ass"-speech since 'Independence Day', FYI.

There's some drama, there's some hijinks, there's my favourite character actor Ron Perlman for a fun little cameo/side plot and there is a lot of knuckle-dragging, all out brawls between cool monsters and even cooler mechs. 

The film looks great, as del Toro is always on point with his visuals. Not only the cityscapes look great in the dark, but the monsters have this blue neon glow to them that works really well. The mechs are also wonderfully designed and each have their distinct character and feel, so you can once again tell there was a lot of eye for detail. 

But not everything is great, alas. The characters are pretty boring and flat and you won't really care about any of them. At all. Couple that with a fairly by-the-numbers plot and you can see why this doesn't rank very high up there with del Toro's masterpieces. But if you take it for what it is, namely an ode to classic Japanese anime and manga like Voltron, Goldorak, Gojira and Transformers, then you will definitely have a good time.