Pacific Rim (2013) - Review

Guillermo Del Toro is a director that can do no wrong in many an online critic's eyes.  Being the contrarian that I am,I must challenge that misplaced love!  I haven't seen many of Del Toro's films, at least his directorial films anyway.  As of this writing, I've only seen Pan's Labyrinth, this, the original Hellboy, and Mimic, in that order.  I can honestly say that, based off of that body of work, that I am NOT a Del Toro fan.

I know that Mimic isn't terribly loved, and this movie polarized some people, but the consensus is generally that Pan's Labyrinth is a stellar film... I guess I just don't get it.  Other than his admittedly magnificent eye for outlandish visuals, I didn't see too much to love about that movie that seemed to wear out its welcome soon after the (pretty damn good) scene with the pale man.  You know, the guy that puts his eyes on his hands.

But hey, the guy has a great visual style, and maybe Pan's Labyrinth was just a bit too dark and plodding for me.  Why not give him a big action blockbuster, eh?  Maybe he can excel in that tired format.  Or maybe he'll create a movie that's somehow even dumber than the movies that it's emulating.  Look, Del Toro is obviously a smart guy.  Maybe some of it is satirizing the idiocy of popcorn blockbusters like Transformers and the Godzilla movies (of which this movie takes a ton of inspiration).  But it seems like it's more of a love-letter to those films, not deconstructing the tropes in any way, but instead falling into the exact same pitfalls.

Look out, Shinji!!!

This movie is big, loud, obnoxious, and most of all, stupid.  Typically I don't fault dumb action movies for being dumb and action-y, but this movie really grates with me for some reason.  The art style is pretty cool, I admit.  The Jaegars and Kaiju (or hero robots and monsters if you prefer, or Eva and Angels, if I prefer) are well-designed, the Kaiju especially having an eerie, otherworldly feel (so much so that I really wish Del Toro would just make that Lovecraft movie that he wants to make already).

We all know that Del Toro can design the hell out of a creature.  No, the problem lies in the script that just takes itself too seriously and never develops the characters beyond the one-dimensional shapes they are.  The film seems to take a lot of material from 'giant robo' animes, Evangelion being the only one I'm familiar with), but lacks any and all depth that makes Eva so brilliant.  It's just big monsters go boom.  Like Godzilla, which this also takes stuff from (especially the music, I noticed).  Godzilla is dumb, but there's a charm to the camp and the suits.

There's no charm with Pacific Rim.  It's just this big crash of metal on monster and none of it means anything.  It's insultingly stupid, either playing to the lowest common denominator or pretending to, which might be even worse.  It would be completely creatively bankrupt if not for the art design, which is neat, but that only gets you so far.  You actually have to have interesting things happening, Pacific Rim, not just shots of testosterone and cool effects.