Raconteur
Since: Mar, 2013
07/19/2013 00:00:00
I was all set to write a review today but then I saw yours. To my pleasant surprise you captured everything I wanted to say! Very fluent and coherent review. There really is a certain spectacle to Pacific Rim that isn't in Transformers or Man of Steel. That kind that just makes your jaw drop and your blood pump harder. I could barely get my eyes wide enough to contain the hugeness of it all. Just wonderful boisterous energy throughout.
Leave a Comment:
A Masterpiece of Summer Fun
It's been almost a week since I checked out Pacific Rim, and I'm still on a high. A rollicking, boisterous, endlessly entertaining movie, Pacific Rim also excels in keeping the audience transfixed on what happens. There's no Michael Bay-style twitchy, half-hour single action sequences, and none of the exhausting destruction of Man of Steel - Rim focuses on taut, sprawling brawls between giant robots and massive monsters and it does it with a real, raw heart.
The trick is the concept of Drifting, the synchronizing of two pilots to operate the enormous (and extremely well-designed) Jaegers. The Drift doesn't work if the pilots don't work together, so the characters must develop, solve their problems and bash out their issues so the bowel-breaking fights can actually happen. Even if the characters themselves range from the wonderful (Mako Mori, Stacker Pentecost) to the bland (ostensible protagonist Raleigh Becket) to the amusingly caricatured (every foreign pilot, especially the towering, frost-haired husky Ruskies), they all feel worthwhile in a manner that could only be described as like a Saturday Morning Cartoon. We care because they're in cool outfits and driving giant robots.
And what robots! Each Jaeger has a wonderful sense of design behind it, moves in it's own way and fights with a style that must have taken Guillermo del Toro and company some time to mape out - if they all don't have detailed fanpages by the years end I'll eat my hat. They glimmer and groan and engage in brutal rumbles with the equally stellar Kaijus in a chain of completely astounding action sequences that left cinema-goers (in my screening, at least) slack-jawed and breathless. The film is awesome in the truest sense of the word.
The plot is a little thin, to be honest, but it doesn't hamper it. There's no flabby exposition or bloated mythology in Rim - it elects to stand on its own massive feet, and it stands like only a mecha could. Perhaps most importantly, the film is capturing new imaginations - there was a kid of nine or ten in the row in front who was absolutely energized by the film. If it can have that power and keep it going, Pacific Rim is going to be a movie worth remembering: and right now, it's one worth seeing as soon as you can.