Pacific Rim Lives Up To The Hype! - Spectacular, Heart-Warming, But A Little Cartoonish Too.

Pacific Rim (2013)

As is often the case, my main motivation for seeing this movie was the director. I absolutely love Guillermo Del Toro's work, even on a bad day. "Hellboy II" is one of my favourite superhero movies of all time, "Pan's Labyrinth" is one of my favourite movies of all time, and "Blade II" is pretty good fun too. So if there's anyone I'm going to trust to give me a good giant robots vs giant monsters movie, it's Del Toro.



Now the giant monsters side of thing I'm entirely on board with. I loved the original Japanese "Godzilla" as well as "Mothra Vs Godzilla" and I'm highly anticipating the upcoming American reimagining of Godzilla by Brit director Gareth Edwards whose debut feature was the awesome "Monsters" (which featured giant monsters, though they weren't often seen in the movie). Asides from "Monsters" other giant monster movies I've found highly enjoyable include "Troll Hunter", "The Mist" and also "The Host" from the awesome Korean director Joon-Ho Bong (though in "The Host" the monster isn't really anything like as huge as in the other films mentioned).



The bigger concern was giant robots. Naturally the most obvious recent giant robots movie was Michael Bay's live action "Transformers" movie and there's a very simple reason why I haven't seen beyond the first one: I found it boring as hell. In order to make an action film interesting you have to set up what is at stake and you have to make us feel for the characters. These aren't elements that are lacking in most Michael Bay films no matter what else might be wrong with his movies, but in Bay's "Transformers" movie I felt nothing for the characters nor did I really get a sense of what was at stake. And so it left me cold.



The other giant robots thing that comes to mind is "Power Rangers". So giant robots aren't really something that has a long history of being done well in movies. Not as a major focus of the film at least.

I had a few concerns with "Pacific Rim" from what I saw in the trailer:
1. The trailers looked rather dark making it hard to make out what was happening. - Admittedly later trailers had already shown the footage more brightly and clearly and I think they must have been gradually making the effects work look better and better. What I finally saw in the cinema was bright, clear, colourful and absolutely breathtaking.



( Read the rest of my Pacific Rim review under the cut... )

Ranking Guillermo Del Toro's movies

8. Mimic (1997)

Starts off with a lot of the Guillermo Del Toro hallmarks. The idea of an insect amongst us, acting like a human, with humans as it's new prey, is quite a cool idea. The idea is set up pretty well. However, in the second half the film is relying on jump scares and really loses any sense of plot. Del Toro refused to ever work with the Weinstein's again as result of his experience making this movie.

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