What was wrong with Pacific Rim?

Count this as another example of me being really late to a party.

So, Pacific Rim. Giant robots vs. giant monsters. I'm with you so far. I mean, obviously, it's just going to be a big dumb sci-fi popcorn flick where half the cast gets gorily chomped, a la Starship Troopers, right?

Well, no. But it probably should have been.

Okay, so to set some important ground rules here: When I mention Starship Troopers in this post, I'm talking about the dumb popcorn adventure, not the extremely unsubtle political allegory. Yes, they're one and the same, but for whatever reason Troopers is either thought of as one or the other and I don't really wanna get into that here.

In fact, Star Trek Into Darkness might be a better example of a dumb popcorn flick than Starship Troopers, but STiD has the benefit of working in an established universe. Hey with that in mind, let me start talking about the reasons why I didn't think Pacific Rim worked.

The film fast-forwards through its most interesting part (laying the narrative groundwork and inventing the Jaegers) at the very beginning. We learn that it took them a while to kill the first Kaiju using fairly conventional arms. Where's the dramatic scene where the President and his cabinet debated using nuclear weapons? Even effing Independence Day had that scene! Where's the scene where they build the first Jaeger, and it has an Apollo-1-style disaster? Where's the battle where the conventional military try desperately to hold off a Kaiju while the first working Jaeger gets into position? Where's the story about two people coming to grips with all the ramifications of being inside each others' heads?

But as I said, the film just fast-forwards through all that. Actually, "fast-forwards" is charitable. Imagine George Lazenby reading the narration from the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, because that's pretty much how awful the exposition at the beginning of the film is. (Actually it's worse, because Lazenby's inability to play Bond as larger-than-life wound up gelling nicely, if decidedly inadvertently, with OHMSS's more realistic tone. But this is a movie about giant robots fighting lawyer-friendly Godzillas.)  I'm not saying that the movie's problems could have been fixed with a better lead actor, by the way; he just helps distract us from several other problems.

For example, we establish that the Jaegers need two pilots because they're so big. Um. What. Actually, how do the Jaegers work? We see the pilots running on these futuristic treadmills, but are the pedals they're pumping actually making the Jaegers go? Or is it some additional neural link? It has to be the neural link, right, otherwise why would you need two pilots to handle the strain?  So then why are they rigged up inside those harnesses and perched atop nigh-bottomless pits? Doesn't that seem like a design oversight?

In fact, why are they in the Jaegers at all? We've clearly got some sort of rudimentary A.I. (voiced by GLaDOS; the non-irritating scientist is Owen from Torchwood, the female Russian pilot was a marine on Battlestar Galactica, the Game of Thrones composer did the music... look, I care. This sort of thing made this film watchable for me.) Where was I?  Oh yeah, why weren't they steering the Jaegers by remote? Would that have killed all the dramatic tension? Because I thought the narration at the beginning already took care of that. I think In Bruges is the only film I've ever seen where the narrator might be dead at the end. But besides that, I think any film where a monster can suddenly sprout wings and a robot can suddenly whip a sword out of nowhere is not a film where anyone was worried about any sort of dramatic tension.

So my next question is why they need two pilots. And I don't mean the explanation that's given in the film. What purpose did having two pilots to a Jaeger serve in terms of storytelling? Other than cutting down on the amount of work the design department had to do, I mean. (The Jaeger whose head looks like a nuclear power plant is named "Cherno." Not since "Project Lazarus" in Mass Effect 2 have I seen a similar case of lazy naming.) The point of having two people in a Jaeger, from a storytelling perspective, is so they can share memories (and also, I guess so the technology exists for Dr. Annoying Jitterbug to mind-meld with the monsters). Except the memory-sharing thing comes up, what, twice in the entire film? See, by mentioning this in the first five minutes, you made me think this was going to be an Inception-style meditation on subconscious guilt with some nifty and innovative action scenes thrown in. It's not. It's CGI vomit flecked with paper-thin characters. There is absolutely no reason why they couldn't have had one pilot per Jaeger now, insert one line into the exposition about how they used to need two in order to handle the neural load, and then have Dr. Please Get Chomped dig that old technology out at the appropriate time. Then maybe Mako might have actually had something to do outside of nagging the ostensible main character in the first act and turning into The Load in the second. (Okay, that was a little too harsh. But it's not at all clear to me how much Mako helped with anything other than sharing the mental strain. They could have done something interesting with the experienced, battle-scarred pilot and his naive-if-booksmart copilot, but I could write a Game of Thrones-length book on what this movie could have done.)

And, ah yes, the characters. Dr. Espresso - the JJ Abrams expy, not Owen from Torchwood - really needed to get killed off because goddamn he was annoying. The lead actor was terrible. He's passing acceptable when he's inside the cockpit yelling at people, but he's atrocious when it comes to exposition or normal human interaction.  Now, Starship Troopers had some atrocious actors in it too, but pretty much all of the adults knew what kind of movie they were making and let it show in their performances. Here, even Idris Elba is taking it seriously for some reason; of the three characters who are played by actors who actually know what kind of a movie they're in, one is unforgivably annoying and the other two are played by Ron Pearlman and Burn Gorman, who are old hands at this sort of thing. (The "mission control" guy might be a fourth, but only because he's cosplaying as the Eleventh Doctor.)

Okay, so here are some things that I liked. I liked when the AI dropped all pretense and just started using the GLaDOS voice. I liked when one of the monsters used an EMP (although... beating up on a disabled Jaeger when there's an entire helpless city nearby is a lot like ripping off a car door to get to a Skittle when there's an entire gourmet feast laid out on your dining room table). I liked when Ron Pearlman got eaten (oh by the way, SPOILERS), even if everything else in that scene was phenomenally stupid (hey, check out our genetically-engineered, cloned, what-have-you super-awesome human-killing monster! It'll strangle itself on its own umbilical cord if it's not careful!)  I thought the music was the best score that the Game of Thrones guy has done to date.

So yeah, that's my review. Apparently some people like that the male lead and his female costar didn't kiss at the end, but honestly, the notion that you wouldn't hop in bed with the first vaguely attractive human to cross your path when the world's ending just might be the most unrealistic thing in this whole film.