Critics reviews

Pacific Rim is anything but particularly grim in tone, luxuriating in each of its thrilling, exquisitely paced action sequences and laced with notes of potent humor and sincere kinship. (That being said, Ron Perlman's welcome appearance as Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer of kaiju entrails, would be worth the ticket price on its own.)

Easily the best big-budget film of the year so far, Pacific Rim is gloriously corny and entirely unashamed of it, and no small work of formal artistry. It suggests a joie de vivre in its own absurdity and cinematic nature as well as confidence in its cornball dramatics and audio-visual force that's been frustratingly lacking from the endless series of reboots and franchise instalments of the past couple of years.

[...The] return to a resemblance-based world speaks to a powerful nostalgia in all of us, a yearning for a time when our eyes were all we needed, when all the information to be processed was visually accessible and demonstrable, the same as the evidence of our senses. There's nothing especially new about Pacific Rim on that front. Still, there's something distinctive about this movie, about its desire to meld everything, to wrest togetherness out of the deadly breaches in the world.

Above all, the action scenes are pretty to look at. Not since the Shanghai fight in Skyfall has there been such visually-pleasing action – and for much the same reason, because director Guillermo del Toro (of Pan's Labyrinth fame) shoots at night with shards of neon light adorning the image, fluorescent pinks and blues and reds bouncing off the great hunks of metal (the climax takes place underwater, which is even more dreamlike).

What separates del Toro from those other directors is the joy he imparts to you. It's the joy of a filmmaker who's never forgotten that movies can do everything. It can make a Stacker Pentecost pre-battle pep talk seem vaguely like Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech. It can keep you checking the skyline for imaginary dragons.

Yes, it's true: "Pacific Rim" is every bit as big and loud and bombastic as movie observers predicted and early reviewers are reporting. But it's also a few other things, among them fun. And it's also among the few genuinely joyous sci-fi blockbusters I've seen in quite some time.

In action, the film is breathtaking, but as a whole it suffers from a relative lack of ambition. The invaders' motivation – and much else, including an inspirational speech delivered by a rasping Idris Elba ("Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!") – is tipped in fromIndependence Day (1996), and the human characters are either cardboard jocks or irritating science nerds.

At its best moments, Pacific Rim summons up a kind of pummeling, headache-inducing rapture: metal fists tearing through steel like cotton candy; tiny humans staring down their own skyscraper-sized mechanical creations... [The film] wears its more formulaic elements with gusto, reverence and pride, and if its scenes of human interaction are necessarily clumsier than its scenes of mano-a-tentacle combat, well, yeah.

Call it an MMA (monster martial arts) film: in the big robots-vs.-monsters setpiece... the fighting is both clearly legible and prone to treating the entire city as a kind of construction site full of props to be picked up and used as weapons, only the tools of choice are super-sized... Martial arts cinema is often a quicker-than-the-eye kind of thing requiring total attention: having such big bodies in motion slows the pace... allowing you to follow the line of each super-sized move.

Nitpicks aside, the fights are astonishing. They split the difference between classical filmmaking and the blurrier, more chaotic modern style in a way that made me appreciate the virtues of both. Some of the whirling action has a geometric beauty that's faintly Cubist, and each fight contains surprises: a tactic you haven't seen yet, a power you didn't know about, a complication you didn't see coming.

...Pacific Rim falters badly whenever it isn't clobberin' time. But oh, that clobberin'. The first such sequence expends too much energy making sure viewers comprehend how the Jaegers are operated, constantly cutting back and forth between the pilots performing movements in their goofy spacesuit-style getups, and the robot's corresponding actions. Too much Wii, not enough "Whee!" Once that symbiosis can mostly be taken for granted, however, del Toro and the ILM crew go to town, so to speak.

In theory, the ideal movie for del Toro is one where giant battle bots battle giant aliens. This is "Pacific Rim," a noisy monstrosity that embraces the notion that its director can't tell a story, can't see through intriguing ideas but has a knack for filmmaking that's by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) visceral and elegant.