This post will contain spoilers.
There’s been a few reviews of this movie already that laud it as a brilliant genre film and it’s true. The mecha are real mecha; heavy, city-smashing and giant. They are so big they need two pilots to operate them. If you try and do it single-handedly – your brain will explode (unless you are a hero).
The movie is big and fun with broad brush characters and some great sci-fi world building. If you like robots and monsters and video games and anime you will love this movie: no questions asked.
The downside? Let’s be honest. The problem has been raised before, but it’s worth restating. One central female role, who – although definitely bad-ass – is still not quite bad-ass enough to finish the mission or carry the movie, but instead plays second fiddle to a fairly flat character. Having said that, it features POC in central roles and in authority and it has disabled people in heroic roles so that is pretty awesome.
Bits of story and character that are brought up and then go nowhere. Raleigh’s brother dies. So what? Raleigh can pilot a Jaeger by himself. So what? Mad scientist gets forced into an underground kaiju refuge and nearly gets tongued. So what? Given that the source material is a bunch of extended anime series, it seems like the film tries to cram a whole bunch of plot into a structure too small to hold it all. Each scene by itself is a masterpiece, but they don’t add up to anything overall.
However. My opinion is not all of the opinions. Some other people writing interesting things:
Visual storytelling as opposed to verbal
Pacific Rim is silly and sexist
On an aside, was anyone else completely thrown by the line “Today we cancel the apocalypse”? I mean – cancel? That makes it sound like it’s kind of easy and normal, like cancelling an amazon order or cancelling a TV show. For a rousing battle speech they could have found some words that were a bit more bombastic. (On the other hand, the acting and delivery were perfect.)
Have you seen it? What did you think?
