As if my summer of discontent was not frothing at the rim, I compounded my misery by watching Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s $200 million ‘monstrosity’ Pacific Rim.

Huge Difference, Eh?

The essential difference between Pacific Rim and other Hollywood apocalyptic films is that this time the monsters come from under the sea instead of descending from the sky.

Monumental difference, right? 😉

Such are the Stygian depths to which Hollywood has sunk.

Monstrous Junk

Based on a threadbare script penned by del Toro and the story’s author Travis Beacham, Pacific Rim is the same old, same old soulless clash of computer generated giants laying waste to large cities.

Devastation of tall buildings by towering monsters and a vast Sahara of rubble evoke painful memories of much ennui and distaste experienced on multiple occasions at the multiplex.

This time the battle is between gigantic Kaijus (Japanese for monsters), with glowing blue lights in the mouth, that rise from fissures between the tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, and man-made giant Jaeger robots built to fight Kaijus destroying one large global city after another and decimating the human race.

Think of the Jaeger robot as Iron Man on a mega-dose of steroids!

On this epidermis of the Kaiju-Jaeger clash sits a wafer-thin human component centering around the pilots that are inside the gigantic Jaegers.

Using gobbledygook such as “neural handshakes,”  “mind melding” and “nuclear reactors,” the human pilots inside the Jaegers fight the monsters, increasingly with little success since the monsters are intelligent enough to adapt themselves to their foes’ tactics.

If there’s anything novel in Pacific Rim, it’s the idea of (human-created) giants battling (alien) giants.

Apparently, Hollywood has decided that a conventional human vs alien monster battle is either passé or too farcical given the size difference of the two warring sides.

Pacific Rim’s principal cast comprising of the Jaeger pilots Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba and Robert Kazinsky, and the two comedic scientists Charlie Day and Burn Gorman do the best under circumstances where they’re constrained to play second fiddle to software gimmickry.

As if the repetitious spectacle of hulking giants whipping each other in a wild frenzy were not tiresome enough, you have to endure the nonsense of pregnant monsters, baby monsters and the ridiculous scene of a man eaten by a Kaiju surviving the ordeal and emerging out of its body with an asinine joke at the end of the movie!

The special effects are not bad as they go but they are poor, grossly inadequate compensation for the absence of an engaging plot and the drudgery of watching mindless battle of giants wrought on a computer. 🙁

Pacific Rim’s clash of hulking giants left me completely cold.