Del Toro's peculiar sensibilities - some of the monsters here could have cousins in Pan's Labyrinth - have survived the transition to a mega-budget movie. Still, it has some of the usual faults when it comes to big CGI stuff: like who's exactly thumping who? Which mega-beast is that?
That's not helped by most of the action taking place out on the storm-lashed Pacific at night - or, in the final stages, 20,000 leagues below it.
But del Toro knows all that mega-action stuff only really engages the audience if it's bedded in character. So making the giant robots (or "jaegars") have two pilots, their interconnected minds the only way of having enough brainpower for the fights with the monsters (or "kaiju") is really a bit of masterstroke: You get to root for the iron giants and the mind-melded mates doing the virtual reality fisticuffs inside the bots at the same time.
There's another smart move: setting this years into the kaiju war in a world where those in the jaegar business are falling on desperate times as governments - which initially built the big brawlers and put them in national colours - start to look for more budget-conscious solutions to preventing the apocalypse.
That gives this an amusingly cynical world-weary and decidedly non-American sheen. Though Idris Elba as the robot squad's commander does offer his own variation on the Independence Day speech and robo-pilots Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi risk being the designated will-they-won't-they couple of the piece.
But like everything in this lateral-minded neatly-paced mega-action flick, those characters and the relationships don't play to the usual rules. All of which makes Pacific Rim utterly, stupidly terrific.
Stars: 4/5
Cast: Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Director: Guillermo del Toro
Rating: M (violence)
Running time: 131 minutes
Verdict: Not your usual monster mash but quite smashing.
- TimeOut
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