Pacific Rim

Released in 2013 under the direction of Guillermo del Toro ("Hellboy," "Pan's Labyrinth") on a budget of $180 million with distribution from Warner Bros.; "Pacific Rim" is del Toro's love letter to Japanese pop culture obsessed with giant mecha fighting giant enemies while leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. The list of mecha anime itself is a long list that stretches back to the 1960's; Evangelion, Code Geass, Full Metal Panic, Gurren Lagann, and 50 billion versions of Gundam. Guillermo del Toro stated that he made this movie mostly to appeal to the nostalgic adults who watched mecha anime growing up but also have it appeal to kids to get them interested in the genre as well. Did it work though?

At least a decade into the future, giant aliens known as Kaiju erupt from a portal in the pacific ocean and, naturally, begin to attack cities mostly bordering around the Pacific ocean. The world bands together to pool their resources into creating giant fighting robots, referred to as Jaeger, that have to be controlled by two people, cause, ya know, if Evangelion or Gundam taught us anything, it's that it's impossible for one person to control a giant robot. At first, everything seems to go well until the Kaiju begin to adapt to these attacks and develop their ways of defeating the Jaeger. In a last ditch effort to stop the Kaiju, Jaeger program marshall Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) plans to drop a nuke into the Kaiju portal. To help make this possible, he brings together former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) teamed up with Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to suit up and defend Hong Kong and end the war.

The story is so predictable that, again, you might as well should bring a checklist of all movie cliches and check them off. Main character traumatized by death of loved one, badass minor characters killed off in one battle, motivation speech, self-sacrifice; been there, done that. The characters are so dull, I thought they were played by robots

Really, the only reason this movie should be seen is for the fighting giant robots and let's be honest here, the fights are amazing to watch. They're big, loud, and bombastic; too bad there are only three fights in the entire movie and the last one isn't even as good as the second one, watching Hong Kong get torn to bits made me laugh happily.

I've been getting requests to go see this from my fellow critics, hailing it as "this summer's best." While I definitely enjoyed it more than my family did, I can't really say that I would want to pay IMAX 3D price to see this again. I'd rather sneak in to watch the second Kaiju/Jaeger fight than sit through the entire movie again, or better still, wait till it's available on XFinity. I really liked the fight scenes, but the movie's plot could have been stronger to warrant rewatch.

Final Rating: 2/5