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Movie Review: Pacific Rim

rottentomatoes.com

Pacific Rim qualifies as almost the ultimate special-effects sci-fi movie in that it involves almost no plot and includes almost nothing but robots and monsters the size of 25-story buildings. And it proves that you don’t need a plot to be illogical and inconsistent.

Our hero is selected to copilot a war machine that requires perfect coordination and near mind-reading between the two pilots. There’s no real characterization, but he’s chosen because he is a rugged individualist who tends to ignore orders, and his partner in the machine is picked largely because she’s good at hand-to-hand battle with swords and sticks.

The equipment was apparently created from scratch shortly after the Obama administration, but even though the movie takes place in the 2020s, the metal shows that particular kind of wear that comes only after decades of use, with paint wearing away and being replaced by rust.

A generation that can construct huge battle robots still uses them in slugfests like prizefights against dragons burping up from beneath the tectonic plates.

The special effects are fine except that everything is so dark that you can’t detect the shapes of the dragons, some of which are apparently fish. But they seem as clichéd as the martinet military officer and the two stereotyped scientists, and, to make short work of it, Pacific Rim as a whole.