When Kaiju attack, We must build giant robots, To bust monster chops.
We say, “It’s everything a summer movie should be.”
HOWE: If you want a movie that’s BIG, loud and action-packed, they won’t come much bigger than Pacific Rim. It’s a cross breed of Transformers meets Cloverfield meets Enter the Dragon.
TAYLOR: The Kaiju, giant monsters from another dimension rendered at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, are probably the most impressive movie creatures since the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. I say this because the Transformers were machines and other recent monster movies, like Cloverfield or Monsters (inexpensive films), only gave us fleeting glimpses of the creatures.
The Kaiju in Pacific Rim are the stars. They’re large, loud and in your face.
HOWE: Pacific Rim did a couple of things right.
The fight scenes are pretty amazing, nothing super close-up or so blurred that you can’t see what is going on, like they did in Transformers.
The story doesn’t take half an hour for the build up, it just throws you right in at the deep end. That’s a good thing, or it would add at least another half hour to an already long movie, a little over two hours, 10 minutes.
TAYLOR: It was a bit long, but I didn’t mind the length, it felt necessary. I found the lead a bit wooden (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy). Everything seemed a little forced, perhaps rushed. The relationships of the characters in Pacific Rim are complex and deep; even the pilots of the giant rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots share each others memories while “in the drift.”
I think a three-hour super epic would have been required to cover the territory suggested by their attempts, which may have stepped outside their abilities. This is, mind you, while keeping the plot predictability and machismo cliche aside.
HOWE: I found this way too loud and I’m not talking about the explosions, it’s the dialogue. Everyone shouts in this. Why, what is the point? The acting is already terrible, do they think shouting makes it more believable?
The two that really annoyed me were the “scientist” characters of Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), he was like Emmett Brown who had too much sugar, and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) was like a cheap Lee Evans wannabe. Terrible casting.
TAYLOR: Well, I agree that there was a great deal of shouting and that Day is fantastically annoying, but in the end, let’s face what we have here: an FX blockbuster full of TV actors.
If you take it for what it is, a monster movie where the monsters are the stars, it’s actually pretty awesome, especially when you consider its competition. To put a giant monster movie in the same class as Jurassic Park says it all. Turn your brain off, take your kids and enjoy the spectacle.
— Howe gives Pacific Rim 3 ear plugs needed out of 5.
— Taylor gives it 4 bad actors out of 5.
The film is currently showing at the Galaxy Cinemas in Vernon.
— Brian Taylor and Peter Howe are The Morning Star’s movie columnists.
