What Keith's Watching: Pacific Rim (2013)

Pacific Rim is one of those movies where you automatically love the concept. It's not a high concept, but someone says to you: "giant monsters versus robots" and you say: "I want to see that!" But then you see it.

I really wanted to enjoy this movie a lot more than I did. And I did enjoy it, but I wanted to enjoy it more. The best parts of Pacific Rim are the fights between the kaiju and the jaegers. The parts in-between don't blow me away. The characters don't have great story arcs and the ones that do are pretty much the same stereotypes. Great acting might have saved these troupes, but that would require acting that the Pacific Rim cast lacked in spades.

Honestly, a lot of it felt like I was watching the pilot movie to a new SyFy channel TV series that was reusing Battlestar Galactica sets. Everything seemed really bright - at least it did on my TV. If the end of the world was on the horizon and the characters all seem to know that, then maybe we should have a little mood lighting. Instead every room seemed to have a dozen 100 watt bulbs.

Also, if this has been going on for so long, and cities are regularly getting attacked, it seems weird that these Pacific cities would continue to do such large scale rebuilding, or that they would remain so heavily populated. I'll buy it to a certain extent, but even looking at natural disasters, it takes YEARS to recover.

Visually, everything with the kaiju-jaeger fight scenes look great and that's the reason to watch this movie at least once. But otherwise the story and the world are too campy for me to rematch many times. Maybe if there was a more captivating performance in the main role, I might get more out of it. I have serious doubts that Charlie Hunnam can transfer from a leading TV role to being a leading film guy. He could probably get some great supporting roles in movies, but right now, I doubt he can carry a movie on his own. The real tragedy in the acting though, is that Idris Elba couldn't save it.

(Side note: I've never watched an episode of Sons of Anarchy, so about halfway through the movie, I finally realized that Charlie Hunnam was Lloyd from Undeclared. This blew my mind.)

Pacific Rim is worth a watch. It will probably become a recurring thing in "nerd culture" because of the concept alone, but not on any of the other merits we judge films by.

VERDICT: Watchable