In Pacific Rim, colossal godzillas are being pushed through wormholes by terraforming bad guys, where they take out coastal cities around the Pacific. Humanity, after a few hiccups, creates gigantic robots to fight them, powered by the brains of two interconnected humans.
Pacific Rim is bombastically loud. It’s like someone took Michael Bay’s Transformers and upped the volume and the intensity and the smashing stuff about, and set it loose on the citizens of Hong Kong (actually, Raleigh Studios in Toronto, of all non-Pacific places.) Perhaps inevitably, some of it – especially some of the characters – are so completely cartoonish, you occasionally have to remind yourself that this is a live action pic. It also plays out largely in the dark, which is especially irritating when watching on the blur of 3-D.
So, mostly I’d say Pacific Rim is a creature feature with more style that substance. But the one thing that raises Pacific Rim above the usual fayre of this kind is Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi who seem to have a very sweet, altogether human chemistry together. It just reminds me that the best movies are the ones that offer us human relationships we can relate to. (Even if they’re played out against 120-story robot suits.)