- Location: Brette and Jason's
- When I was a child, I would arrange sprawling, epic battles in which all of my toy Transformers were spread across the basement floor fighting each other. I imagine director Guillermo del Toro must have had similar childhood experiences, given that his monsters vs. robots movie Pacific Rim displays all the feverish imagination and enthusiasm of an eight-year-old's fantasy playworld. Admittedly, the film's special effects are more detailed and convincing than anything that went through my mind as a kid. The plotting and dialogue, on the other hand, are roughly at the aforementioned eight-year-old's level. My parents would have made me clean things up in less than 130 minutes, but maybe that's just my family.
- Little is known about Pacific Rim's Kaiju monsters except that these towering, often vaguely reptilian creatures burst forth from the ocean every so often to wreck a city. Humanity's natural response? Why, the construction of giant battle robots known as Jaegers, of course. For reasons that could not possibly make sense, two compatible human pilots are arranged in each Jaeger's chest to control the robot as it battles the Kaiju. Raleigh Becker (Charlie Hunnam) used to be one of the world's greatest Jaeger pilots until his brother was killed in a traumatic Kaiju battle some years back. Now military commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) needs Becker back for one last monster-slaying mission.
- Perhaps it goes without saying that Pacific Rim also features an earnest rookie (Rinko Kikuchi), a cocky antagonist (Robert Kazinsky), and some intolerably obnoxious scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman). It is probably also a foregone conclusion that the film starts to drag for any five minutes in which monsters aren't fighting robots. The sole exception to this rule is when the always-engrossing Ron Perlman is onscreen as a smuggler named Hannibal Chau. If only Pacific Rim were as fun as its characters' names, as varied as its roster of monsters, or as good as its special effects. Instead, it's more like a gussied-up version of hundreds of similar Japanese movies that can barely be watched outside of the confines of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Sure, it's better than the movie the eight-year old version of me would have made, but then again what isn't?
- The closing credits mention Ray Harryhousen and Ishiro Honda.
