Pacific Rim review

Pacific Rim (12A, 131 mins)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Wildly anticipated, Guillermo del Toro’s first film since Hellboy II five years ago is a thundering slice of sci-fi action that, given its premise and budget, emerges as a typically overbearing, sporadically very entertaining blockbuster.

It’s got problems, and plenty of them, but these are papered over with enough skill, exuberance and spectacle that more forgiving audience members should find much to tickle them.

In an extensive prologue we learn that massive alien beasties, Kaiju, are coming to earth via a portal deep beneath the Pacific, kicking off a seven-year war after humanity’s response comes in the shape of enormous people-controlled robots, Jaeger, used to battle the Kaiju.

One such Jaeger pilot is Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), an orders-ignoring hotshot the likes of which we’ve seen a thousand times in movies like this. They're fighting a losing battle, with the Jaeger programme due to be retired in favour of erecting defensive walls, until it becomes clear that the few remaining robots are earth’s last hope.

With all the bombast and subtlety of a Michael Bay effort, Armageddon and Transformers being the most obviously referenced, and with the woeful banter to go along with it, this is brainlessly chaotic stuff. Elements of Avatar are in there too, and naturally plenty Godzilla, but such considerations aren’t really at the top of the agenda. This is a movie with little but carnage on its mind, and on that front it delivers.

Once the initial heavy bursts of destruction are out of the way, the movie pauses for a lengthy bout of training and character introduction. This midsection finds the film at its weakest, with the most periods of talk, and the clunkiest of interactions and relationships. During this down-time, the need for action is covered by flashbacks and memories and internal squabbling between Raleigh and his rival pilots.

But, notwithstanding the fact that it can get rather dull during that middle stretch, what saves Pacific Rim is its well-drilled structure and sense of pacing, a ruthlessly controlled build that takes us from glimpsed skirmishes to colossal scraps between Kaiju and Jaeger, as cities topple beneath them.

We’re well used to seeing this level of photo-real devastation in Transformers or The Avengers, and right up to last month’s Man of Steel, but Pacific Rim still manages to throw up moments that astonish and, given its very straightforward setup of monsters versus robots, even surprise. A thumping score propels it too, while Idris Elba generally manages to rise above the risible dialogue with a commanding turn as the soldier in charge.

As long as you don’t pay too much attention to most elements of the story, Pacific Rim does the job it set out to do. It gets better as it goes along, which is important, and in its scale and threat it’s genuinely epic. It doesn’t maintain it all the way to the end, and it’s regularly thoroughly dumb, but when it’s good it can be very good indeed.

Battleship review

Battleship (12A/PG-13, 131 mins)
Director: Peter Berg
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Believe it or not, this silly slice of sci-fi action is based on the classic board game in which players call out grid references to try to sink each other boats. From that slimmest of platforms, a two hundred million dollar blockbuster has been born, one that begins after mankind sends out signals to an earth-like planet and objects from space land in the Pacific, turning out to be aliens intent on taking over the planet. Luckily the world’s navy is gathered in Hawaii for exercises, and Taylor Kitsch’s naval loose cannon must rise to the occasion and save the day. A few diversions and a good half hour drift by before we really get down to it, but once it kicks off astonishing visual effects are piled on to wreak devastation on a massive scale, unleashing a grinding metallic orgy of destruction that’s fun for a while and yet surprisingly repetitive and lifeless in places. Kitsch shows much the same stolid charm he did as John Carter, but Liam Neeson is criminally underused as the admiral in charge, largely because much of the fleet is isolated, leaving Kitsch and his crew as the only ones carrying the fight. It’s as cheesy as Independence Day and as chaotic as Transformers but agreeably goofy, never asking to be taken too seriously, which is probably just as well.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon review

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (12A/PG-13, 154 mins)
Director: Michael Bay
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

As a piece of storytelling, the Transformers well has long since run dry, leaving us with a franchise kept on life support by the power of the dollar. Though we had some fun with the first movie in 2007, we got punished by its unendurable sequel two years later, one whose success made a further instalment inevitable.

Now we come to the third go around with the robots in disguise, the good Autobots who keep earth safe from the nasty Decepticons. Rewriting its own mythology yet again, we learn that the during the first Apollo moon landing, the astronauts discovered that the Autobots were already there, leading to a four decade cover-up to keep the news hidden.

Meanwhile at Chernobyl, a part from a long lost Autobot ship has been found, and their leader Optimus Prime wants to get to the technology before the Decepticons, who are plotting to get their hands on it to help them win the age-old war that has been raging between them.

The human face is once again provided by Sam (Shia LaBeouf) who, in one of many extraneous plotlines that drag the running time to insupportable levels, is having difficulty finding a job, even after having saved the planet twice already.

LaBeouf has an undeniable star quality, but as a character Sam is nothing but a lot of running and shouting. With Megan Fox out of the picture, his new squeeze is Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, making Fox look like Meryl Streep), while also new to the party are the likes of John Malkovich in a showy yet thankless turn as Sam’s boss, and Frances McDormand as a CIA goon.

Pare it back, amputate the ridiculous amounts of unnecessary flab, and you’re still left with absolute galloping nonsense, just as idiotic as what we were put through in the second film. But while it’s not quite the gruelling assault that was Transformers 2, it is every bit as mind-alteringly tedious.

The first hour and a half is the gift that keeps on taking, and though there are a few scenes of robots talking or shape-shifting, it’s light on action and long on explanation. There’s so much to irritate, from the quips coming from the heavily accented ‘bots, to director Michael Bay’s unquenchable penchant for soft rock and scenes set in the golden glow of sundown.

The first major rumble is a freeway chase-and-hit, and it’s undeniably impressive. But don’t even try to follow the machinations of the ropiest of plots and you might just survive to the final reckoning, wherein the streets and buildings of Chicago become a battleground for the robots’ decisive encounter.

Visually, its equal may never have been seen, but it’s entirely investment free. It’s a graceless, grinding, exploding cacophony of computer generated metal and noise, and never in the history of cinema has a film been more geared towards mere spectacle than coherent and involving storytelling.