Pacific Rim (2013) Review

By: Aidan McBride

Kameron's wrong. This is a great movie.

Okay, maybe not a great cinematic experience on the level of Citizen Kane, but what did you expect? It's a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. If that isn't the best premise of any movie of all time, then I don't know what is.

I was really excited about this movie for months before it came out. It was easily the movie that I was most excited about since last year's The Dark Knight Rises. The idea of Guillermo Del Toro directing a movie about giant robots is already enough to make me crap my pants with excitement, but I'm also a big Godzilla fan, so when Kaiju are thrown into the mix, it's just cinematic perfection.

When I finally saw that movie, I thought it was by far the most fun I've had in a movie theater in a long time. It had amazing animations, spectacular sequences of robotic-reptilian rumbles, and other alliterations I'm not clever enough to think of. But seriously, the fight scenes in this movie are extremely well done. Unlike some other similar movies, where it's impossible to tell what's going on in the fights, there was never a point where I didn't know what was happening, and what was happening was awesomeness.

Was is a perfect movie? No, but it wasn't trying to be. It won't make you cry at the end. It might not rewrite film history, or change the face of the industry forever, but it was a good, fun action movie, with a passable plot, a lot of action scenes with fantastic animation, and plenty of heart thrown into it. It's not perfect, but if every summer blockbuster were to follow the formula used here, I think the industry would gain a lot from it.

Four out of five stars.