Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim is, simply put, a movie about giant robots fighting giant aliens. If you ever wondered what Gundams on roids would to inbred cousins of Godzilla, well here you go. Although directed by Guillermo del Toro (who has a very strong connections to digital animation films like Puss in Boots and Megamind, as well as a writer for The Hobbit trilogy), the story at a critical glance has very little actual storyline in it. And it almost seems that this might have been intentional. 

How do you make a movie about giant robots (a foreign aspect in western films save Transformers, but let's face it, those aren't real movies) fighting giant aliens and make it into a believable world with storyline and character progression? Well, some might argue that it would take lots of work and make the movie into an epic. 

Guillermo del Toro seems to have chosen neither. During the whole movie, only two characters seem to make any sort of character changes, and only in narrow points of the movie. For the most part, their characters are already established and they remain that way for the entire movie. There are also gaping flaws in both storyline and realism in the movie (like how a scientist somehow managed to create a working mind-linking machine from the ruble of Tokyo city, during an attack that only last about fifteen minutes) and some decisions by the characters are so out of place that those decisions seem to be forced in there to progress plot (like how the world governments cut funding from the arguably successful Jaeger program to fun the Wall of Life project). But is this necessarily a bad thing?

At the end of the day, as one internet commentator "Total Biscuit" stated, "At the end of the day, I'm watching a movie about giant stompy robots."

Another commentator, "Angry Joe," simply states, "if you go into this movie with the expectations that you're going to see robots fighting Kaijus, and that's going to be the best part of the movie, you're going to love the s*** out of it."

(Angry Joe and friends discussing Pacific Rim. NO SPOILERS ver.)

Admittedly, I could see where the movie is severely lacking, but the fact that I knew beforehand that the movie lacked in those respects, and that the movie was all about the robots vs. aliens angle, I was able to enjoy it extremely. 

Then again, I am notoriously easy to please when it comes to sci-fi movies. But it begs the question; is moving away from basic story telling elements necessarily a bad thing? As far as I see, Pacific Rim says "no" and says it right.