It should be impossible to botch a summer popcorn movie about inter-dimensional leviathans battling colossal human-piloted robots. Pacific Rim’s deliriously geeky high concept—Godzilla vs. Gundam!—seems designed to appeal to the blockbuster filmgoer’s inner 8-year-old kid. (Who didn’t stage inter-brand crossover conflicts with their action figures at some point?) Although not known for gritty science-fiction action, director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) knows a thing or two about warped childhood fantasies. Unfortunately, Pacific Rim amounts to little more than bland heap of clichés, one that provides all the requisite smash-bang mayhem and not much else.
Unlike many contemporary sci-fi flicks, the film at least dispenses with its background mythology in the first five minutes. In the near future, enormous sea monsters (Kaiju) begin emerging from a wormhole beneath the Pacific Ocean, prompting humankind to develop military robots (Jaegers) helmed by neurally linked co-pilots. The details don’t really matter much, given that the film’s raison d’être is to pit alien behemoths against nuclear warbots with the best digital effects that 2013 can muster. And, admittedly, the city-leveling brawls between the factions are suitably ferocious, and at times even gorgeous.
However, the story that surrounds the monster-on-metal action is so trite and insipid that it torpedoes even the elemental pleasures of the film’s Saturday matinee spectacle. Dispiritingly, del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham pack Pacific Rim with dull, indistinguishable white guys, and then slather on stock genre situations that utterly lack the vigor or drollness that might otherwise excuse their creakiness. The plot turns are predictable, the dialogue is dreadful, and the manic attempts at humor are positively wince-inducing. It’s exceedingly disappointing to witness a del Toro feature so colorless and hackneyed that it makes Avatar seem like a work of dazzling originality.
