Nothing Pacific About 'Pacific Rim"

'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.