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| 'Pacific Rim:' Watch out for falling giant robots |
By Dan Hagen
“Pacific Rim” is a B-movie science
fiction homage that takes the Godzilla stuff to a new level of spectacle, and
silliness to a new level of unintentional self-parody.
Giant monsters, giant robots, the
end of the world — all the fault of global climate change, so gee thanks, Fox
News climate deniers. The film has some interesting touches, including a
rationale for monsters attacking the city, a point customarily overlooked, and
giant robots that require two telepathically linked pilots to operate them. The
latter innovation creates various dramatic possibilities, as you can probably
envision.
Unfortunately, you can also see
certain dramatic scenes lifted almost intact from other movies — the Spock
sacrifices his life scene, the Iron Man falls from the wormhole climax, the
typical Bond ending.
Where the movie falls to earth
with the thud of a 10-story robot is in the emotionally portentous dialogue,
which is about six kinds of embarrassing. You can’t possibly make us care about
these characters or take them seriously, so a lighter touch is called for.
The film does offer a certain
amount of fun, however. Ideally, one would wait to rent it, turn off the sound
and make up much more entertaining dialogue with your friends — a process Matt
Mattingly and I began with whispers in the theatre.
I swear, by the time this summer’s
over, Hollywood will not have left a single city standing on the planet Earth.
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