Pacific Rim Review

I’ve been waiting for a movie like this since I was a 12 year old obsessed with Evangelion and old Godzilla movies. It didn’t help that I over-hyped myself into a frenzy before Pacific Rim even hit the cinema.

I watched every trailer and featurette. I read the prequel comic and listened to the movie soundtrack on repeat while riding to work imagining I was avoiding Kaiju.

And for the first time in a long time the movie delivered everything I was looking forward to. I even found the myself liking the 3D.

The whole premise of Pacific Rim is about Giant Robots called JAEGERS laying a beatdown on the ugly/beautiful creatures called KAIJU. These are hands downs some on the best action scenes put to film. I sat in that cinema glued to this beautiful ballet of gigantic destruction. At one stage I wanted to physically jump up and start cheering on the JAEGER pilots to beat the KAIJU like some kind of crazed sports fan. You could say I found myself rather invested in this movie.

I know every movie has its flaws. I had to put up with another chemistry-less couple and hear my native accent sound like some kind of munted-Crocodile Dundee. Between each fight we had to sit through the story element of the movie. The story of this movie, while being alright, was nothing new and fairly predictable (although that is not always a bad thing). Still, I found myself enjoy the fight between Charlie from Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia and that guy from Torchwood. Plus Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau put in quite an amusing performance.

But at the end of the day, I was just happy to watch a movie that was actually fun and not some convoluted, boring mess which required million dollar set pieces to justify its existence. Pacific Rim used it’s set pieces to help make it’s story as opposed to using it’s set-pieces to try to inject some interest into a largely forgettable movie.

For me Pacific Rim is the kind of movie that I hope will inspire people to create something that they are interested in and excited about as opposed to making more Star Wars/Spiderman/Star Trek reboots/reimaginings/sequels.

Thanks for saving this year’s blockbuster movie releases from more disappointments,  Pacific Rim.