Sunday, July 14, 2013

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

There isn’t a lack of action-adventure movies these days.  Just this week I saw Red 2 and a few weeks later saw World War Z.  Action movies seem to be plentiful, but that doesn’t mean they are all equal.  In this monster movie, Guillermo del Toro does his best to make the genre feel fresh.  I saw this movie in IMAX 3D and it was worth the extra money.

Pacific Rim finds the world dozens of years in the future, where all the powers of the world must unite to create massive machines to combat what appears to be an alien invasion.  The science of the movie is paper-thin, but it doesn’t matter.  The characters are all very rich and yet somehow seem to fit into the usual Hollywood archetypes.  The movie starts off with two brothers manning this massive machine and one brother dying, leaving the other to lament the death.  The government decides to shut the project down, forcing the director to do something drastic to get his pilot back into the programme.  The failsafe that would have put the mechanical monster business out doesn’t hold and the director is able to continue working.

The story is as predictable as it can be.  There was not one point where I felt surprised or moved by the story or the acting.  While Idris Elba is a Brit, the accent was distracting and felt inconsistent throughout.  Lead man Charlie Hunnam was easy on the eyes and also uninteresting.  The special effects made this movie worth seeing, the acting, not so much.  I can’t mention the movie without giving credit to Ron Perlman and Charlie Day, both playing the same characters I feel like I’ve seen them play before, but just as entertaining.  This isn’t a must see movie, but given the lack of good action movies right now, it might be worth watching.

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