I've been looking forward to Guillermo del Toro's PACIFIC RIM all year. The maker of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth taking on the giant movie monster genre? I was all in.
What a disappointment the movie is, landing with a thud and going on forever, more like Transformers 2 Meets Godzilla than anything imaginative from the mind of del Toro.
Giant Kaiju (Japanese for monster) are rising out of a trench deep on the ocean floor and destroying cities worldwide, so the world pulls financial and intelligence resources to build huge robots called Jaeger to beat the monsters.
The scale of both the monsters and the robots is impressive and there is no shortage of massive scenes of destruction, all of which left me thinking "how is this different from Transformers again???".
All the standard stereotypes are in place, from hotshot soldier Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy), tough with a heart of gold commanding soldier Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, always great) and new pilot who has to overcome personal trauma Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, one of the best parts of the film) but it's all so damn predictable and cliche it never becomes any fun.
One bright spot, the new DOLBY ATMOS sound system in theatres is amazing and adds a whole new dimension in truly surrounding, immersing sound.
Are there amazing visual scenes of the massive robots? Yes. After about 57 of them, do you care? No.
The only thing as giant as these fighting robots is my disappointment in this highly anticipated summer flick. It's a colossal miss that I'll give a fittingly gargantuan C.
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