Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Pacific Rim

While I was only partially interested in this story, I was definitely interested in the visualization provided by del Toro. And afterward, I was correct. The story is OK. Good enough, but not great. The action battles between the robots and aliens were too big and too fast to notice details. But the visualization came through in the slow pans across the hangers and the big wall. Just watching the wall construction scenes was enough to give a visceral understanding of the fear and scale of the problem of giant aliens bubbling out of the ocean. But overall, there were just too many holes to make this a good film. For example, why do we need a wall from Alaska to Mexico, but nothing in Hong Kong? Why do massive battles between 1000 ton objects in water not create any waves on shore? Why to the "scientists" have to be such a caricature that I felt like I was watching Ghostbusters? Everything else was played straight, why not the scientists? Am I overly sensitive here? Unfortunately, this film is of a quality that recommends seeing it at home, but really needs to be seen on the big screen. What to do?
2 stars (out of 5)

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