My thoughts on Pacific Rim

Not quite right...

I'm on vacation this week and wasn't going to post at all, but I saw Pacific Rim this morning, and felt I needed to be the 9,584th person to comment on it.

Overall, I enjoyed the film.  It does what it sets out to do well - to make a movie where giant robots and monsters punch and stab and shoot each other.  Hollywood doesn't think that's enough, though, so you end up with plot and character development shoehorned in awkwardly.  Did Idris Elba need to have cancer?  Did Dudebro McGee (does anyone remember the main character's name without checking IMDB?  Bueller?  Bueller???) have to have any sort of character arc at all?

Think about all the criticism the movie has suffered since its release - 99% centered around paper thin plots and broad sweeping characterizations.  Why?  Because those sorts of things don't really belong in a film about giant robots and monsters that punch and stab and shoot each other.  You're not going to the movie to see character development.  Idris Elba's name might have been on the top of the posters, but he wasn't the star of the show, the giant robots and monsters were.  And if you don't need it, putting it in there anyway is always going to feel forced.

Movies like these should be done documentary style.  You ever watch Our World at War, Victory at Sea or any of the old WWII documentaries History Channel used to play when they used to talk about History?  It should be like that.  There's plot, but the characters are only presented in terms of how they relate to the plot.  The only time you get romance is when it's germane to something to do with the War.  Here's a sample:

Can you honestly say this movie would have been worse had Dudebro McGee and his merry band just been presented, profile style, and the rest of the movie was just giant robots and monsters punching and stabbing and shooting each other?