Rating of
3/4
A Thrill Ride of a Movie
Looneymanthegreat - wrote on 07/13/13
In the middle of a summer of disappointment Pacific Rim is the movie that could revive things. And I don’t mean that things need to be revived financially; this summer has been very lucrative, record setting even. It’s just that most of the other “summer flicks” I’ve seen have been either underwhelming (Iron Man 3, Now You See Me,) or just lame (Star Trek into Darkness, Man of Steel.) With the exception of Fast 6, Pacific Rim was the first “popcorn” flick to deliver in any major way.
Popcorn blockbusters seem like they would be so easy to make. All you need is some compelling characters, a mildly interesting concept and explosions; yet so many movies fail in this respect. Hollywood is trying so hard to remake The Dark Knight that they forget to make their movies fun. Director Guillermo Del Toro has a lot of fun with his concept, and so does his audience.
Pacific Rim takes a lot from Independence Day in structure, but arguably owes more to Asian cinema. The whole thing is just trying to explain where all the monsters in japans Kaiju films (not to mention the American counterparts) come from, and the powerranger/gungdam style robots that we would (insert sarcasm here) inevitably build to fight them. In a way this did for the monster movie genre what The Cabin in the Woods did for horror; if you assume that the Cloverfield monster or Godzilla is just one of the Kaiju from Pacific Rim it makes their respective movies more entertaining.
I hate the transformers movies, but Pacific Rim succeeds in every way that Transformers fails. When the action hits, the movie has taken the time to make us care about its characters, so its action is not only bearable, but incredibly entertaining. Do not let the comparisons to Michael Bay throw you, if you want to ride a non-stop thrill ride of awesome summer entertaining this is the movie to see.
