Pacific Rim. Member review.

So I went to see Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” last night. I’d been eagerly waiting for months on end for this, watching countless trailers and teasers on youtube to satiate my hunger for the film to finally come out.
For those of who who don’t know what this film is about, it’s basically as follows:

Giant monsters called kaiju (Japanese for “strange beast”) start appearing out of an inter-dimensional rift somewhere deep undersea in the Pacific Rim. They waste no time trying to smash up the earth and eradicate the humans (cats and guinea pigs are safe, though). So the humans get fed up and decide to build giant robots called jaegers (German for “hunters”) to start a giant UFC match in the ocean.

The film wastes no time getting into the heart of the situation by starting off with a 30 second narration that goes something along the lines of “Hey everyone. Once upon a time some giant A-holes turned up in the ocean and started wrecking things, so we built some robots to punch them. Lots of people died and a bunch of our robots got smashed up and stuff. Anyway, fast forward a bunch of years and the war is still going, bla bla bla. You get the drift”.

I was a bit disappointed by this. I wanted to see the initial moment the creatures arrived in all their glory. Instead I got a bunch of cut-scenes. Oh well.

The story follows the life of two young pilots who separately have had some very crap situations happen to them courtesy of the kaiju. They end up piloting one of the mechs by way of a “neural handshake”. Basically if one person alone tries to control a jaeger, the impact on the brain is enough to cause the pilot to flip out and explode.
There’s not much else to say as far as the story goes. It’s predictable and the dialogue is very straightforward. But you don’t go and watch these kind of films expecting Shakespeare, do you?

The CGI is amazing (worth watching in 3D), and the fight scenes are well done. None of the fast cutting rubbish we saw in the Transformers films. The only issue I have with the fight scenes, is that they always happen at night while it’s raining, or deep underwater where it’s dark anyway. That being said, the fight scenes in Hong Kong look amazing. Lots of buildings getting smashed and cars getting crushed and so forth.

Overall, it does what it says on the box. Giant robots vs giant monsters. I recommend you watch it if you love these sorts of films, as it looks beautiful and has a bunch of cool action scenes. Ron Perlman has a great role in the film, too. Just ignore the horrendous Aussie accents in the film (eg: “Strewth! That bloody mongrel monster is bigger than the Big Pineapple, mate!”), and the very, very obvious Independence Day scene. I won’t tell you what part that is as you’ll work it out for yourself.

Overall, I give it 3 and a half out of 5 stars.

Here's the trailer for those of you living under a rock: