Let’s not say I don’t do anything for this month of extreme
ecstasy in anger. Two days have passed by where I barely swore, cursed the life
of certain people or screamed in rage. That is now over as I swallowed all my
natural instincts to watch a movie just for this web log. Just for today. Just
for a good, fired up discussion of what makes a good movie and what makes a bad
one. Today I compare to the illustrious king of the shitheap SPEED 2, Guillermo
Del Toro’s 2013 bank-breaker, PACIFIC RIM.
I’ll get two things out of the way first. I watched this
movie for the first time at some point after it was released on Blu-ray disc
and gradually began to grow an intense dislike of it as it progressed. I may
have had too-high hopes for it, as many of my friends and contemporaries that
watched it in the theatre either loved it or were very fond of it in certain
ways, imploring people to see it, since it was not sparking much heat at the
box office. Also, John “Speed 2” Amenta likes PACIFIC RIM, making this a doubly
fun mudsling for me today.
I will admit that PACIFIC RIM fits a strange bill when it
comes to comparing it to SPEED 2. It’s not completely vilified in film circles
(regardless of The Amenta View, SPEED 2 is that 99 and 44/100ths percent out of
100 shit, statistically) and it’s its own story. Even so, it had an inflated
budget and slid out of interest quickly, just like SPEED 2. Similar to A.I. and
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, this overpriced clunker
pushed a lot of my anger buttons. I had never intended to waste the time watching
it again. I guess breaking an ankle does a lot of good when it comes to
watching shit films for review – and for SPEED 2 Month. Yes, to watch this
movie and feel like I wasn’t wasting precious time elsewhere, I had to break an
ankle. Fuck you, del Toro, for that.
PACIFIC RIM is a giant comic book, for those of you that are
unaware. Del Toro had a good idea of doing a massive action movie in a similar
vein to the Godzilla flicks of ages gone by, while not having anything to do
with the big, green lizard itself. It was ostentatious, it was bold, it was a
big risk for the Warner Brothers Studio and it fell as flat as a cow pie in a
pasture. The plot, in short, follows a military program of giant robots created
to fight off just as giant monsters that have been appearing through a rift at
the bottom of the Pacific Sea floor, attacking various coastlines with progressively
ardent aggression. The robots are piloted by tandem soldiers, sharing the
powerful system load of these massive machines. Within a few years, the
monsters destroy most of the robots; the governments get scared and try to wall
off every coastline, while the last of the robots try to destroy the rift at
the bottom of the ocean. It’s a fairly cut-and-dry plot for a cheesy action
movie, or at least a cartoon. Except, it fucking sucks flattened pasture cow
pie.
When I was a teen, I watched a cartoon (or anime) called
TRANZOR Z. While the story followed giant robots bashing other giant robots,
there are so many similar features of the show that are in PACIFIC RIM, it was
all I could do to wonder where the Aphrodite X robot with her tit missiles was.
When a movie reminds me so much of a cartoon (AVATAR) that I’d rather watch the
cartoon, you aren’t helping yourself.
PACIFIC RIM is filled with more fucking cliché’s than a bad satire.
If this movie was supposed to be satire, it missed the mark by a wide margin.
It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t even topical. It’s just boring,
unless you’ve never watched a movie before, just woke up out of a coma or were
kidnapped by aliens for a few generations. It’s got the daddy issue characters.
It’s got daddy not wanting the heroine to serve because it’s a risk. It’s got
the cocky “other guy” and the requisite fight between the hero and him. It’s
got the old hero that comes out of retirement to sacrifice himself. It’s got
the “big speech” moment. It’s got too fucking many to count! I gave up after
the rousing speech, really. I’m sure I missed a few on purpose.
Idris Elba, a fine actor, plays a major part in the film. He
was so bad he felt he had to shout almost all of his lines. Scenes where he’s
face to face with the hero? Shouting. Even his whispers sounded like shouts. In
truth, many of the lines are shouted by the rest of the cast, too. Is that the
making of a Guillermo del Toro film? Everyone needs to shout most of their
lines? I’ll have to watch the Hellboy movies again to see if that’s so.
The dialogue in this movie is so rancid it makes you cringe
every time a line is shouted at you. There has to be thousands of feet of
outtakes of these actors saying their lines and stopping mid-sentence because
they can’t make themselves say them. The patter between characters is even
worse, seeming as if it were trying to channel much better films, like ALIENS.
Sorry Guillermo, watching BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON on the Rerun Network isn’t dialogue
research. Get away from the desk, stop listening to your Rosetta Stone discs
and turn the fucking lights on.
I understand that the movie had a budget of 190 million
dollars. It makes sense, considering the sheer amount of CGI and SFX work that
was needed to make this stinker. What I don’t understand is what happened
between making it and releasing it. The film is so lighted so poorly you can
barely make out who is saying what and when, or what’s happening during the
incredibly slow and boring action sequences. Top that with most of the battles
happening in water and you’ve got a great way to make it look like the director
and producers spent the 190 million but likely pocketed the majority for their
increasing coke habit. If it was done in slow motion it might have seemed like
something was happening rather than the piss-poor scenes of the tandem pilots
walking their giant machines out into the ocean to battle wacky invaders from
another dimension.
I get that this movie is trying to be something that it’s
not. It wants so bad to be a live action anime tale that it forgets to stop
trying. It stumbles and fumbles through from disconnected scene to scene hoping
that the big flashing light in the corner captures and entrances you enough for
you to not notice there isn’t enough lit up to see what’s going on. I can’t say
it’s plagiarized, but I can say that it took so many cues from other stories
and movies that you can’t help but notice, unless you’re incredibly drunk.
Well, even that won’t help you; you’d have to be passed out to not notice.
I really, really wanted to like this flick. One of my
favorite comic artists of all time, Guy Davis, designed a large number of the
giant monsters for del Toro to use. As I watched it for the second time, it’s
hard for me to say that he didn’t create them all, his fingerprints are so
noticeable. If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re more than
welcome to go read any of the B.P.R.D. comics from Dark Horse he worked on to
see what I mean. You’ll get more bang for your buck out of those anyway; they’re
extremely good and worth every single penny that isn’t part of a 190 million
dollar budget. Speaking of the B.P.R.D, which is part of the Hellboy tales, Ron
Perlman, who plays Hellboy in both features, appears in PACIFIC RIM as well.
Because of this and the Guy Davis work, the movie can’t come close to beating
SPEED 2 as the worst piece of shit on screen. It’s still an unwatchable,
eye-gouging, hair pulling film, but it isn’t nearly as bad as all that. I don’t
know what happy juice was in Amenta’s water when he saw either of these movies,
but he’s got something to answer for now that I had to watch the fucking thing
a second time.
I wonder if they made the giant robots to be a 2 pilot
system so they could show they were spending some of that 190 million on
actors? That might explain the dumb reason for all the technobabble that drags
the movie down for the first thirty minutes.
While typing this up, I listened to the latest From the Hip
release, where PACIFIC RIM was discussed in detail. You may find it an
additional bit of fun to accent Day 5 of SPEED 2 Month. You may also find it
irritating, which I would enjoy greatly. You lovers of PACIFIC RIM can suck it,
for all I care. The movie is more leaden than any tall ship anchor. Go watch
giant robot or kaiju anime if you want a better story with better action and
better lighting. Also, you should probably watch this video from Screen
Junkies. It’s their Honest Trailer for PACIFIC RIM, and it’s a laugh fest.
I also want it known I spelled Guillermo six different ways
before spellcheck, and I didn’t care at any point.
Other subheadings for Day 5 were: The Rim Job, Rimmed, I’ve
Been Rimmed Again, Dirty Sanchez.
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