Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Pacific Rim Is Quite Possibly the Worst Movie Ever

We recently switched from Charter to AT&T Uverse. And, then went back to Charter.

In short, Uverse’s internet speed wasn’t as advertised. Though, I have to give them top marks for customer service.

Anyhow, when we went back to Charter, I picked up the HBO package. YOLO. (as the kids say) It’s worked out nicely because I haven’t rented a movie in about a year. So, everything I wanted to see a year ago is now popping up on HBO, Cinemax and Showtime.

When Pacific Rim was added to HBO a couple weeks ago, I was stoked. The CGI looks terrific and I figured Charlie Hunnam deserved another chance. I was wrong.

Looks pretty cool, right? Nope. It's 132 minutes of suck.

This was by far one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen – a complete loss of two hours of time.

I’m sure there are fanboys out there who will disagree. Let me go point by point. 

1. Charlie Hunnam cannot act. His only shot at hanging around is if he achieves Nicholas Cage’s level of “so bad it’s good, but it’s not actually good.” 

I'm pretty sure this gratuitous shirtless shot was Hunnam's way of saying, "See, I could have played Christian Grey."

2. The movie is chock full of ridiculous scenes that make no sense whatsoever. For instance, at one point a scientist has filled numerous chalkboards full of complicated math to calculate when the next Kaiju attack will occur. (Kaijus are these huge monsters that are pop up from a hole in the earth and subsequently terrorize urban population centers.) In short, the time between attacks is following a very predictable pattern.
What sort of scientist needs that much math to calculate a basic function such as this? Pretty sure I could of figured when the next attack would occur with Google calendar and a calculator. 

3. To battle the Kaiju, humans pilot massive mechs called Jaegers. It takes two pilots to share the “neural load” in order to drive these massive beasts. The pilots must have some sort of neural compatibility.

How do they test compatibility? By stick fighting of course. Yeah, that’s right. No need for any fancy brain technology. Put a couple potential pilots in the ring and let them stick fight. That’s it. If one wins too quickly, they aren’t compatible. Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

4. Speaking of technology, at one point the Marshall describes one of the latest mechs as having 50 diesel engines per muscle strand. He then proceeds to note another mech is nuclear powered. What?!! Why would they shove that many diesel engines in a mech if they can run on nuclear technology?

5. Here’s the final straw. Within five minutes of the movie, you realize the entire mech concept is completely unnecessary.

So, a Kaiju pops up in the Pacific Ocean. They send a mech to intercept. It slowly walks across the ocean floor, until it finds the target. Once the battle begins, we see that the ion cannon is the key technology when killing a Kaiju.

Here’s my conundrum: technology has advanced to the point of ion cannons and mechs. So, why can’t we deploy the ion cannons via satellite and just headshot these fools the moment they pop up? Boom, no need for the mechs and no need for this horrendous movie.

Now that I’ve sufficiently ranted, I will say the CGI is really cool in this movie. It’s a shame the plot was unbelievable and the acting was B-movie-esque.

If you have HBO, save yourself some time and skip Pacific Rim. Watch the True Detective series instead. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are phenomenal.