Movie Note: Pacific Rim

Well, I went to see Pacific Rim tonight. It's a movie you want to like, but it falls kind of short of the promise: Voltron vs. Godzilla. It was as if they had a list titled "Summer Blockbuster" and checked off very box on the way down:

• Multiracial, ethnically diverse cast: check.
• Giant robots: check
• Godzilla monsters: check
• Ridiculously hot Asian Chick: check
• Cocky lead needed to save the world: check
• Underworld bad guy with a heart of gold: check.

Really, it was visually pretty cool, not too gory, unless you count huge amounts of glowing blue monster blood to be gory. Not too much language. Also not a whole lot of plot.

If you actually see it, there's a montage at the end that looks like the beginning of a Voltron cartoon, and I would leave before it's over: There's a coda immediately following that ruins one of the better death scenes in the movie.

It's a lot like a transformer movie with monsters and it looks it. It's better than the 1998 Godzilla remake, but nowhere near J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield, which has to be one of the greatest monster movies ever.

On a scale of yuck to wow, I give it an eh.

P.S. There's almost no politics in the thing, though it makes the U.N look like incompetent buffoons, so kind of realistic, and a global warming throwaway.