Dude Rates Movies

Pacific Rim

E
Poster of the movie
Guillermo del Toro | 2013 | USA
Monday 22 December 2014 (watched)

At the beginning of the movie, you have a montage that explains why the big robots were built, and why it must be piloted by a team of two. The explanation for the latter is that the machine's power puts too big of a physical toll on a single pilot. The related exhibit is a piece of black-and-white, archive-like video, where a pilot bleeds from his nose after trying to pilot alone. This made me very mad. This is supposed to happen in the future. Why would the archives of the future be in black and white? The film deliberately decided to make it in black-and-white to gives a “archive-like” feeling to the spectator, without it making any sense since it's supposed to be an archive in the future. This is the biggest bullshit ever.

Now, see, most of the time in the movie, the big robots defeat the bad creatures by launching missiles at them (with some sort of missile launchers above their shoulder). So why would you build giant robots when all you need are missiles that can be launched from planes or ground vehicles or boats? Well, because fuck you. This movie is the high-point of non-functional, nonsensical, stylish art. Everything about it is about resorting to clichés actions and visuals. Here is a black-and-white archive for no reason. Here are robots for no reason. It's like children playing with toys and imitating whatever pieces of nebulous stylish thing they see on the TV without it making any sense at all. The robots are transported out of their hangar on crawlers like the crawler for the Saturn V rocket, that the director probably though was cool in Apollo 13. The point of exoskeletons is that they can fucking walk, why would you crawl them. God dammit.