Review Pacific Rim film review by erics5050

Since this website is about SciFi I think it deserves a review by someone who is not just a geekboy who goes silly over any mediocre scifi product, but also by someone who enjoys a full scifi movie experience. Now to me ''full'' means good story too, but maybe thats because I was raised on quality like Aliens & Terminator 2. So if you just like polished crap go see this movie as you will truly enjoy it, but if you actually have a brain that expects to entranced & riveted prepare to be let down & frustrated. In fact either way if you have not seen this movie stop reading now because I am about to list the faults with this disappointment. The biggest problem with this movie is that it never draws the smart viewer in. Now if you had a hard time following the GI Joe cartoon as a child this review is not for you. Now dont get me wrong I liked GI Joe, but it never had the substance of say Robotech, a 22 hour long continuous storytelling feast. My mind craves scifii with soul, but instead here we are given GI Joe to choke on. And I say this because you never care about the characters or the robots. From the beginning the robots @sses are kicked and look inferior to the Kaiju. The narrator says of a time when the Jaegers were able to halt the Kaiju threat, but we never get a feel of that. The director never allows the viewer to see the dominate strength of the Jaegers, which denies the viewer of rooting and connecting with the pilot/ robot. Which brings up the 2nd worst thing about this movie. I was under the impression I was going to see a few big robots kicking some monster A$$. Well I got half that expectation. I got a few Big Robots getting destroyed. Now I am ok with good guys going down, but its how they went down that left me throwing my arms up in disgust. Half (2) of the Jaegers got maybe total 5 minutes action screen time in the whole 2 plus hour movie. AND 4 of those minutes was walking to their 1 minute "battle'' with the Kaiju. Further adding to this joke was that neither Jaeger was given chance to use a special weapon or skill to show the audience their strengths, nope they just basically walked out to their deaths. Granted I understand the Kaiju were becoming increasingly stronger which explains why the Jaegers were weaker now, but give us something here. I mean they spend all this money on development & special effects to produce these giant awesome robots only to go basically walk off an edge. Making this scene more stupid was that these weren't just 2 generic robots. Both of them are shown thru parts of the movie along with their pilots. In fact a case could be made that these 2 Jagaers could have been the most interesting and strongest of the group. Which leads me to my next valid complaint. The typical generic this is the hero character so he shall be the victor plot. I was really hoping that this movie would have some substance & international aspect when I heard there were 4 different Jaegers 2 of which from China & Russia. I was hoping to see some co-operative plot lines to shine light on what would really happen if the nations had to fight a universal threat. Nope, pretty much none of that here. Instead we are given a glimpse of these cool token characters & then they are kaput. Yo JOE! Guillermo might as well have had a parachute pop out after they explode. No time for those guys because guess who the hero is: yup the all american golden boy. I say that because I can think of not other reason why he is so much more spectacular than the rest of the Jaegers. Not only do the other Jaeger pilots have more time working together & "nueraly connecting" but their machines were newer, stronger, more advanced, & honestly to me looked a lot more awesome. But no they all die & the robot pilot that rises up does so for no other reason than he looks more like Brad Pitt. What a joke and typical way to end a story. Once again YO Joe! I get it this movie is meant to be fun & somewhat tongue in cheek. But go watch 5th Element for proof tongue in cheek can draw you a viewer in make them invest in a movie. Thats what makes this movie so frustrating. They spent so much money on it yet gave it no substance, almost as if GDT has no clue of human soul. GDT needs to go watch Aliens again to learn how good scifi not only has great special effects but also causes the viewer to accept their world, because nothing engrosses the viewer in a movies visuals more that the director telling us a compelling story. Well I'm speaking of course for the true scifi connoisseur who wants their mind to be encompassed in this fantasy world. The rest of you seem to be satisfied by anybody with an air-brushed Nerf gun. I give this movie 2 stars. 1 for the fact that it has some of the most amazing visual effects I have ever seen and 2 for the unique technical mechanical focus GDT put on the robots workings and sets. That I give him credit for, too bad he F'ed up the rest of the movie. Which is too bad because I really wanted this movie to be great & everybody to like it so there could be more. Instead all it does is further stereotype the close minded general mentality that these movies are made for obsessive geekboy dreamers