Guillermo del Toro is best known for three things: directing the “Hellboy” movies, helming the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth”, and passing on the opportunity to make “The Hobbit” trilogy. His first film in five years is “Pacific Rim”. As actor Idris Elba says in one of the cornball climatic scenes: “Today we are CANCELLING the Apocalypse!” If only someone had yelled “Today we are CANCELLING this movie” to del Toro at some point during production Warner Bros. could have saved a lot of money, and I would have had to sit through one less mind-numbing, end of the world, sci-fi, monsters, aliens movie.
Starting in 2013 (which means we all better start worrying) enormous monsters called Kaijus began rising out of the Pacific Ocean, attacking and destroying major cities. Countries throughout the world unite and build giant robots called Jaegers to fight the monsters, and seven years into the war, the human race is winning. The Jaegers are operated by two people from inside the machines whose brains are mushed together so they can fight as one. However, the Kaijus are getting smarter and more dangerous.
We flash ahead five years to 2025 (though no one looks a day older) and the Jaegers are beginning to fail. There are only a few remaining to fight off these monsters, who are attacking more often and with more force. It’s up to a handful of heroes (including the hot shot soldier, the mad scientists, the sad soldier, the rookie and the girl – who happen to be the same character this time) to figure out how these creatures are evolving and how they can stop them before it’s too late.
At just over two hours (which has become a pretty common length for films these days), “Pacific Rim” is as dull a big-budget sci-fi action film can be. It begins with some battle scenes, then there’s a long stretch of planning and training, and after an hour or so comes more fighting. And in between lots of nosebleeds. All the metal-on-metal clashes brought back some bad memories of the “Transformers” films. But they were actually more engaging!
One of the major problems with “Pacific Rim” is that most of the scenes happen at night so it’s very difficult to determine who’s a robots, who’s a monster and who’s winning and losing the fights. And these scenes go on much longer than they should, but at least they take us away from the predictable and goofy storylines involving the human characters. I’m still not sure why Ron Perlman is in the film, except that he worked with del Toro on “Hellboy”.
Yes, the visuals (when we can see them) are impressive. But with a very basic, very staged story, “Pacific Rim” is a challenge to take seriously. The action scenes provide no fun factor, but the script does include some unintentionally funny moments. And how come the person doing the casting didn’t realize that all three of the young male leads look alike?
“Pacific Rim” is rated PG-13 for the action/violence, some language and peril. It’s appropriate for kids 12 and up. Guillermo, lesson learned: you should have stuck with dwarves instead of trying your hand at robots.
On The Official LCJ Report Card, “Pacific Rim” gets a D.