I had a rather stressful weekend, so I played hooky this morning and caught the IMAX 3D presentation of PACIFIC RIM at the AMC16 in Burbank.
The very best part of the story comes in the middle of the film and involves Mako Mori as a child in Japan, with the film’s best performance delivered by young actress Mana Ashida.
I thought the film would excel from that point on, as the story had just been raised to a higher level — but, alas, it went back to “Robojox bashing Kaiju” with a muddled “mind-meld-with-the-monsters” subplot that gets confusing & lost in the din.
Visual effects are beautifully executed, but too much quick cutting in the fight action makes it hard to follow the action. So the reviewer who said it looked more coherent than a Michael Bay film was exaggerating.
For an action film, it did well on the characterization levels. After all, there’s only so much screen time one can devote to that in an action film and one has to resort to archetypes for minor characters — so criticisms of that are not really justified.
Biggest casting problem was in the visual similarity between Hunnam and Klattenhoff. They just look too much alike (someone needed a black hair dye job before shooting began).
Unfortunately, the running time felt about 20 minutes too long. By the end you’re saying, “Just get it over with, please — I don’t care anymore!”
3D conversion by Stereo-D was astonishingly superb considering what they were given to work with, since most of the film was clearly not stacked for 3D.
Film is sure to perform well in Asian-Pacific countries. North American B.O. was actually a bit better than predicted.
On a scale of 1 to 5, I give it 3 1/2.
10am bargain showing at AMC-16 was $13. Evenings are $18.50 and higher.
3D trailer below courtesy of 3D Entertainment News by 3DGuy and 3doo.