It's Transformers Vs. Monsters. Huge mechs going toe to toe with Godzilla and all his chums. To top it off GLaDOS from Portal's voice is in it. How could this possibly go wrong...
The film I expected to sit down and watch ended within the first 5 minutes of the film starting. The prologue basically details how over the course of a few years giant monsters have risen from the sea and mankind have build these giant machines to fight them...and have won. It did seem a little odd that the actual story of the film starts about 15 years after all that shit started to happen. What is summed up in a little recap montage could be extended by a few scenes I feel. The film suffers from maybe not enough mechs vs monster fights overall so this would have been a good opportunity to get a few more in.
When the action does happen it is pretty awesome but maybe not quite as jaw dropping as I'd hoped. The fights are massive scale, explosive and loud but it all seems to go a bit slow-motion as they wade through the ocean towards each other and punch each other in the face veeeery slowly. It never really gets truly frantic like saaay in Transformers and while it all looks very nice it's not quite the thrill ride the trailer promised.
Onto the characters. The main character does his job as you'd expect, the handsome action man style character with a chip on his shoulder. By far the best performance is from Idris Elba who you might recognise from Luther. He plays the strong leader of the war against the Kaiju [the film's monsters] and portrays the role of badass warrior who genuinely cares about the fate of earth perfectly.
I was annoyed by the love interest with her annoying fake Asian accent and the other two characters are basically the film's Timon and Pumba- two scientists offering a comedy aside from the monsters that are killing all of mankind. One is a young nerd and one is an old man...who's played by the young guy from Torchwood for some bizarre reason. The character he played in the Doctor Who spin-off was a cheeky lad type and he played it well but I didn't believe him for a second here, the casting just seemed really strange.
The monsters also seem a little bit soulless and just seem to spawn every so often out the ocean with no motive to kill people, they just do. It leads to a rather lacklustre finale against another monster who looks just the same as all the others but a little bit bigger in some floaty other dimension where size is irrelevant. Not a great move when extreme size is an important aspect of the film.
Pacific Rim was possibly my most anticipated film of this summer and I feel rather let down. While the action is indeed big-scale and there's nothing offensively wrong about it it just seems to be missing something and the novelty of it all starts to grow weak quite early into it's 2 hour 10 minute run time. It's fun enough, just disappointing.
6/10
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