I will sit sucking down empty calories while dinosaurs fight aliens with the best mouth-breathers in the game, so this critique is not about pitching any lofty elitist trajectory. It's just that Pacific Rim sucks arse, so much so and on so many levels that it's difficult to know where to begin, but let me do so by aiming a roundhouse squarely at del Toro's puffy chops. Anyone who still thinks Guillermo's some kind of wünderkind needs to account pretty robustly for the misfired, piss-weak tripe he's squirted out since Pan's Labyrinth (which was overrated anyway). He shares his searing lack of taste with Jackson et al, that other bastion of seemingly unimpeachable nerdmanship and together they fap all over contemporary speculative cinema in a godawful binary orbit.
Having told you how I really feel, why wear precious epidermal matter from the ends of my fingers slagging something like Pacific Rim? Because furry dweebs like del Toro piss me off when they shit all over my Saturday night. Yes, we were adults sitting down to a robot battle scenario but to be fair, we weren't asking for much. Gigantic automatons fighting complicated monsters. At great length. Brooding, scantily-clad hotness, colourful pseudo-science and the real promise of humanity's imminent demise. Sexy times would have been a bonus. What we got felt like ten broken minutes of budget Transformers groping pre-op Godzillas who were rumoured to have sort of upset a few people internationally while my precious pseudoscience was assaulted as never before by the kind of supporting characterisation that makes you howl on your knees for mercy or at least Ja Ja Binks. Idris Elba bleeding manfully from the nose. Pointless bulldog. Ron Perlman as Ron Perlman Futuristic Arsehole Diminishing Returns/Hey It's a Cheque Guy. A confused-looking and annoyingly chaste Charlie Hunnam. Rinko Kikuchi, who, judging by her behaviour and delivery, seemed to be suffering some kind of heavy-metal poisoning, but that could have just as easily been the script. Their gelid lack of chemistry. Fake Australian Accent Douche, most probably chosen from a talent pool heaving with actual Antipodeans. In-jokes, subtext, irony, sexy times? Hell no. By the time the Glimpsed Phlegmatic Russians saddled up I was hoping maybe they would get it on but no. It wasn't that sort of movie. We smoked a bowl. It still wasn't that sort of movie.
Having told you how I really feel, why wear precious epidermal matter from the ends of my fingers slagging something like Pacific Rim? Because furry dweebs like del Toro piss me off when they shit all over my Saturday night. Yes, we were adults sitting down to a robot battle scenario but to be fair, we weren't asking for much. Gigantic automatons fighting complicated monsters. At great length. Brooding, scantily-clad hotness, colourful pseudo-science and the real promise of humanity's imminent demise. Sexy times would have been a bonus. What we got felt like ten broken minutes of budget Transformers groping pre-op Godzillas who were rumoured to have sort of upset a few people internationally while my precious pseudoscience was assaulted as never before by the kind of supporting characterisation that makes you howl on your knees for mercy or at least Ja Ja Binks. Idris Elba bleeding manfully from the nose. Pointless bulldog. Ron Perlman as Ron Perlman Futuristic Arsehole Diminishing Returns/Hey It's a Cheque Guy. A confused-looking and annoyingly chaste Charlie Hunnam. Rinko Kikuchi, who, judging by her behaviour and delivery, seemed to be suffering some kind of heavy-metal poisoning, but that could have just as easily been the script. Their gelid lack of chemistry. Fake Australian Accent Douche, most probably chosen from a talent pool heaving with actual Antipodeans. In-jokes, subtext, irony, sexy times? Hell no. By the time the Glimpsed Phlegmatic Russians saddled up I was hoping maybe they would get it on but no. It wasn't that sort of movie. We smoked a bowl. It still wasn't that sort of movie.
Kaiju rampage: harder, damn you! And by that sort of movie, I mean a good one, on any level. I'm not sure who does enjoy Pacific Rim. Maybe... 8-14 year old males? Do they look up from their consoles long enough? My gamer/comic devotee nephew would have gone back to his laptop after 20 minutes muttering something about it being crap and PR was aimed squarely at him. If we allow for the essentially sub-adult market, we're still left with the fact that it's poorly-conceived, shamelessly plagiaristic and execrably written effluent that, like Pitt's World War Z, does more to damn than to proselytise on behalf of its genre. An ageless and deeply inconvenient truth is once more revealed- the simplest premise can demand the most from those charged with its delivery. Subtlety and subtext are essential, not kryptonite. Say it with me, mecha fans- it really didn't have to be this way.
In groping for something positive to tell you, I can only say that the money shot-CGI passes were pretty well executed. They entertained us, briefly, although they bitchslapped me again with the infantile candied neon riffing that so irritated in the midst of Mendes' Asian Skyfall scenes. It's visual corn syrup, but isn't everything that rattles past the arsecheeks of the del Toro/Jackson complex? That's my problem with their output in a nutshell. Pacific Rim was a movie about robots and monsters that was neither monstrous nor even very mechanical, for the love of god; it was flaccid. And no, that doesn't happen to every director from time to time, Guillermo.
In groping for something positive to tell you, I can only say that the money shot-CGI passes were pretty well executed. They entertained us, briefly, although they bitchslapped me again with the infantile candied neon riffing that so irritated in the midst of Mendes' Asian Skyfall scenes. It's visual corn syrup, but isn't everything that rattles past the arsecheeks of the del Toro/Jackson complex? That's my problem with their output in a nutshell. Pacific Rim was a movie about robots and monsters that was neither monstrous nor even very mechanical, for the love of god; it was flaccid. And no, that doesn't happen to every director from time to time, Guillermo.
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