Pacific Rim - a movie review

As I said in my last post, Pacific Rim is a monster movie, so you need to expect a lot of explosions and buildings blowing up. There is a loose plot but not enough to detract from the basic monster formula.

Giant monsters attack coastlines. Mankind bands together to survive. Mankind survives. Some people are heroes. 

There you go.

In Pacific Rim the giant monsters are Kaiju (Japanese for monster) and the world bands together (at last) to build huge robotic Jaegers (German for hunter) to defeat them.

You get a little bit of Iron Man in the fantastic suits, but these suits are the size of multi-level office buildings. It’s more like people-powered Transformers, which is cool.  It isn’t a spoiler that one of the Jaegers uses an oil tanker as a ball bat. That was fun. You certainly get a little bit of Godzilla and Mothra in the Kaiju.

If you are a fan of the old Godzilla movies from the late 50s and early 60s (I grew up with those) or even a fan of the 1998 version of Godzilla with Matthew Broderick, you will like Pacific Rim. Don’t expect a plot.  The movie writers provide a paper-thin romance and a movie climax where the enemy is defeated but it is barely noticeable.

Pacific Rim is a fun movie and it was worth going to see. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a solid six stars. That’s enough to make it worthy to see at the theaters, but only once. I’m not interested in renting this one to see it again.  I might watch it once it hits prime time television just to watch the explosions again.