Rhapsodies

I have five words to say about Pacific Rim.

Get To A Theater Soonest.

Anyway I was certainly expecting to enjoy Pacific Rim after all I like Kaiju movies, I like mecha and most important I really like Guillermo del Toro. But having said that I was only expecting to enjoy it I was primarily there to give support to del Toro’s work because if his “paying dues” films don’t get enough love then the films he really wants to do might not get funded.

So I’m going in more for the art and special effects and while going out of my way to ignore the rule of cubes am looking forward to nitpick it to death. And for the first half an hour or so that was exactly what I got and I was having fun nit picking asking all of the usual questions like “if they have Jaeger technology why do they have humans working on that huge project” and “why is the cockpit in the robot’s extremely vulnerable head?” … and then it got better… and BETTER and I stopped asking questions and spent the rest of the movie gripping my chair in excitement and occasionally applauding.

In a way despite being very much a del Toro film I found myself thinking of it as a Tarantino film in that it was a love letter to a specific genre with all of the in jokes and cliches going down a long checklist… but in a good way. We had the damaged ace with a dead brother, we had the dying commander, the asshole rival, comrades sacrificing themselves for the greater good and Bushido all the way I don’t think a single thing was missed and I loved every minute of it.

So what did I like about this best ? This was a movie that ran on rule of cool all the way and I loved it for it everything from a future Hong Kong that made the set from Blade Runner look like a resort spot to robots using freighters as clubs it was glorious. It’s one thing for a movie to have spectacular effects it is another thing for an artist to know what to do with them. Also it was great seeing actors having fun for a while it was hard to see who stole more scenes Ron Perlman or Idris Elba.

An on a final not the Ramin Djawadi soundtrack is now on my list for jingoistic Fourth of July firework music.