Pacific Rim

A new movie about an invasion by toerags from another dimension which, instead of NGE (the blues know what I’m talking about), is more similar to Emmerich’s version of Godzilla, eighties style. Guillermo has a lot of strong sides and one (and for the purposes of a summer popcorn movie - fundamental) weakness: he is simply no good at action. Under his directing action turns into a succession of clichés and wonderfully arranged images with no dynamism, inner tension, build up or clarity. No wonder that the most successful movies of his career are those with no action. Despite this handicap, he decided to make a movie based purely on action in massive dimensions. And... And certainly this didn’t turn out to be that proverbial exception that proves the rule, but simply solid Bayism with nice visuals, which might just break the iceberg of racist xenophobia so common in this country. After watching this, every little boy will want to have a little Gypsy Woman figurine on his bedside table. (11/07/2013)

Del Toro brings us something that has been done before. After all, big cities have already been devastated by The Avengers, Transformers, or Superman to the point that falling skyscrapers are becoming a bit of a stereotype. The director tries to add personality to it by providing some pretty clear action scenes, and by not going too far over the edge in terms of visual sweeps. On the other hand, into two hours he didn't cram in a single major character, a real character who could pull carry better than a jaeger pulling a tin can down the street. Idris Elba has charisma but drowns in pathetic speeches, and the rest of the ensemble is severely uninteresting - Ron Perlman is more of an iconic trademark than a functional character. It goes by quickly, but the most important and impressive scene is still the escape of little Mako from the kaiju through the empty street. (18/07/2013)

After watching this film, at first I said to myself that it was completely average. But then I went down another star as I thought of a lot of scenes where the logic of it was just too incomprehensible. Pacific Rim is a textbook example of a blockbuster. I don’t blame it for that, I even liked the camera and digital effects that Guillermo del Toro and his crew worked with. But let no one tell me, and now I’m going to spoil a bit, that the best warriors in those robots are brothers who, by coincidence, are on a routine mission in a sea grasped by a monster who immediately takes down one of them. I was also fascinated by how ten years later the other brother is offered to control a robot again and is considered an incredible fighter, which of course the other colleagues do not believe him at all. Plus, not a single actor fully convinced me to like him here, which is quite a fundamental issue, because Guillermo relies on the power of dialogues that do not work here at all in this regard. The only one worth it is Charlie Day as the crazy doctor. The rest is neither funny nor interesting, and the viewer simply cannot connect to them, which is probably the most fundamental stumbling block. It’s not entirely bad, but it failed because of the average actors and a very bland screenplay, which is simplifying so many things that it’s just incredibly obvious. (14/06/2014)

Guillermo del Toro was a bit of a wildcard in the top Hollywood league, because it was automatically assumed that once he made a real feature film (the underfunded Hellboy and demented Blade can't be included here), it would be quite the event. In retrospect, I'm really sorry that the R megalomania in the At the Mountains of Madness exploded and The Hobbit was overripe. Because Pacific Rim is basically everything that connects me to the term generic Bay blockbuster. A few initial great ideas and a really gigantic atmosphere were taken away by the speech of a crazy hipster scientist, in which he sucked all the clichés about the alien invasion into one sentence and things got no better thereafter. The fact that basically a third of the film is devoted only to the relationships between the characters makes Pacific Rim feel empty and undeveloped, even the miniaturist del Toro, who managed to make a sympathetic character from a walking ectoplasm, sinks to awkward creations and casting overacting (the younger and less talented brother of Heath Ledger really doesn't pull it off). Were it not for Ron Perlman, I would dare say that there is not a single really eccentric character in the film, rather only a collection of replaying clichés. I was quite surprised by the clumsy work with the storylines - in order for one to continue, the other stops and after five minutes continues from the same place it ended. Sometimes this leads to obscure awkward transitions, such as SPOILER "characters who learn valuable info have to run to the control room to shout into the microphone and warn the Jägers, who are meanwhile marching for three minutes on the seabed" / SPOILER. At the time of Star Trek's frantic intertwining of events, this is truly dense retro. You will get to know Guillermo mainly from the perfectionist visual, which gives the impression that Gaspar Noé started playing with robots and monsters. There is really very little to catch on to the neon beauty full of reflections, and some scenes are giddily iconic and it is a pleasure to look at them (even in 3D, which is not dark and is not at all bothersome). So what arose from del Toro's long transition to blockbusters? Visually and design-wise retro, which is not much better or wittier than Transformers (although from my point of view, it surpasses Transformers in terms of implementation skills). Hit me in the head with a tanker, but that is not going to be enough. (10/07/2013)

Del Toro serves up pure-blooded mecha anime in live-action form with a properly intensified wow effect. Nevertheless, it is necessary to realise that Pacific Rim is primarily intended to work as a presentation of the mecha genre for the mainstream western audience. Therefore, if we look for adequate equivalents to the film in anime, then we definitely cannot go to the extremes of the genre such as the psychological-existential-theological curiosity Neon Genesis Evangelion or the spectacular self-reflexive and genre-caricature madness of Gurren Lagann. Pacific Rim is rather an equivalent of the genre’s pioneering titles that gets by with an honestly straightforward story and is built primarily on the novelty (in the context of Hollywood blockbusters) of its basic concept of spectacular battles between giant robots and giant monsters. People who have had a brush with anime, or rather Japanese pop culture in general, and have seen a handful of the most highly acclaimed and thus also completely exceptional titles can lament the fact that, in terms of characters and their dramatic arcs as well as the complexity of the given world, there are better mecha films than the first American blockbuster venturing into the vast expanses of the genre. But let’s bear in mind that the purpose was not to make an equivalent of Evangelion, but simply to make the first-ever live-action mecha film that wouldn’t have the form of papier-mâché tokusatsu movies and series, but would be an epic hyper-realistic spectacle in which the main attractions are the dimensions and proportions of the mechs. Similarly as in the case of Hellboy, del Toro doesn’t offer a distinctive interpretation of the existing tradition, but he gets by with fannish enthusiasm over the fact that he got to play with his dream action figures. _____ Regarding the film’s revenues and reception: Based on opening weekend box-office receipts in the US, some predicted a sad fate for the film, but several weeks after its release, Pacific Rim has proven to be a project that isn’t oriented primarily toward the American audience, as it has strong international potential, especially in Asia. During its opening weekend in South Korea, it captured 44.3% of the audience (i.e. 1,160, 636 viewers), and it became a truly massive hit in China, where it held the number-one spot for three weeks, repelling attacks from expected domestic hits, and was on the way to exceeding the revenues of Iron Man 3. Whereas domestic box-office receipts account for half of total global revenues with other Hollywood seasonal blockbusters such as Iron Man 3 and Fast & Furious 6, foreign receipts comprise two-thirds of the total in the case of Pacific Rim. (13/07/2013)