Pacific Rim: Watching it with the right expectation

The Pacific Rim

I finally watched Pacific Rim almost 1 month after it’s first released. The film has divided critics with some slamming it as a B-grade Sci-Fi plot-less movie with cheesy lines, which the movie is essentially just a dumb movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. But on the other end of the spectrum are critics applauding the movie’s extraordinary visual effects and it’s thoroughly entertaining and engaging.

And it is precisely because of the divided opinion that caused me to hesitate that long to finally gives it a try. None of the leads were A-list actors, and this looks just like another monster apocalypse movie that so saturate the movie market recently. But almost 80% of my friends, who had watched it gave it the thumbs up. And so I thought, it couldn’t be that bad after all.

This is the movie synopsis in a nutshell.

Monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju rose from the sea and caused destruction of apocalyptic proportions. And fighting the Kaiju are massive robots called Jaegers which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots locked in neural bridge. And so a retired pilot and a rookie trainee teamed up and guessed what, defeated the biggest Kaiju and saved the world from apocalypse.

It’s basically about managing expectations. You can’t walk into the theatre expecting a Notebook-ish kind of romance movie or hoping to be mind blown by plots and sub plots of Inception proportions. What we can expect is definitely a special-effects-fest.

There’s not much to say about the plot, because we are talking about a robots vs monster apocalyptic type of movie, how predictable can the plot be. Very predictable indeed! With the world facing apocalypse, a group of men and women defied the odds and save mankind from total destruction. There you go, the movie plot in one simple sentence.

But I do appreciate that it is not trying to story tell the movie like some kind of drama movie but get straight to the point with a concise background introduction of why the world is in its apocalyptic state. In the first 5 minutes of the movie, we are already treated to a visually stunning battle scene between the Jaeger and the Kaiju. That was like a preface of what is to come.

Being a robots vs monster movie, with the CGI battle scenes being the main draw of the movie, not much time is spent on character development and plot twists. But not to say it is non-existent, the movie plot and characters still make sense, although it lacks a little soul and depth. However, it doesn’t matter as the full throttle, power packed action scenes more than makes up for it. I found myself gripping the arm of the chair as the Jaeger battled the monsters, and willing them to kick their asses out secretly inside.

It is not endless and long battle royale stuff but good thing it isn’t, because it is pretty difficult to sustain the kind of adrenaline pumping high energy action scene from start to finish, might be too much of an overkill. So the battle scenes are punctuated with “heart-warming” and “humanistic” scenes that sort of build up the movie to its final climax when the Jaeger fought the biggest and baddest badass category 5 monster and destroy the link bridge that the monsters used to “commute” from their world to our world. Not just that, I thought the 2 scientists characters, Dr. Newton and Dr. Hermann were pretty entertaining as they provided the comic relief in this high octane movie.

Not as bad as I thought, it was a fully entertaining movie worth every cent of the movie ticket. But again I must warn, come watch it with the right expectation, and I am sure you’ll be thoroughly entertained by Pacific Rim.