Three Amigos: Pacific Rim

Quentin: You should have laid your bet on this one, Jake.

Jake: Is it just me, or are all these movies starting to look the same?

Jason: It’s not just you.

Quentin: We went to see Pacific Rim today, but I could have sworn we walked into Transformers 4.

Jake: There was a little Top Gun in there too.

Quentin: And Star Wars.

Jason: And some Armageddon.

Quentin: I honestly don’t know where that 85% on Rotten Tomatoes comes from.

Jake: It’s down to 72%.

Jason: It’s a competent Monsters vs. Robots movie with a cool central premise. And I think a lot of the cliché peddling was intentional.

Jake: Really? I like to think I understand self-referential movies, but I didn’t see that awareness at work here.

Quentin: You want to give us an overview, Jason?

http://youtu.be/5guMumPFBag

Jason: I could have done without the first-person voice over, as usual, but you basically have an Earth where alien monsters are attacking through a kind of wormhole, but instead of being in space, the breach is in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Earthlings have developed giant robots that are piloted by two people who must form a mind meld in order to operate the giant scraps of metal.

Jake: They looked like enormous Iron Men.

Quentin: That’s why I thought I just saw this movie.

Jason: This mind meld is called the drift, and two people must be “drift compatible” in order to pilot a robot together. That’s the cool premise.

Quentin: But then they never really define what “drift compatible” means.

Jake: Or what “drift incompatible” looks like.

Jason: You would think it has something to do with chemistry or a common wave length.

Quentin: You would think. And yet they proceed to throw our hero into one of these tin cans with the only person in the cast with which he has no chemistry.

Jason: I was shocked at the end when he didn’t even kiss her.

Jake: They were more like brother and sister. I wonder if there was a version where he kissed her and they didn’t use it because it felt so wrong.

Quentin: It was very strange, that’s for sure.

Jake: And if you were hoping that Guillermo del Toro would bring his art-house flare to this genre, you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Quentin: The character development was painfully thin.

Jason: At first I thought the monsters were cool, until they all started looking the same.

Jake: It was hard to follow the battles because of that. And Q, I liked your mumble about “destroy the Death Star.”

Jason: What do you mean?

Quentin: That’s the whole movie in a nutshell. As soon as they showed that graphic of the wormhole, it became “destroy the Death Star.” Make your way into the heart of the enemy and blow them up from within.

Jake: Only add a digital clock counting down because otherwise we wouldn’t understand what’s going on.

Jason: I liked Charlie Hunnam.