What I should have expected was current cult-hit anime Attack on Titan. Pacific Rim is a very different, and far less cynical, beast – which is fair enough, considering that Guillermo del Toro’s most popular movies have generally been made for children.Īnyway, I was wrong to expect classic cult-hit anime Evangelion. Some plot points are similar to Evangelion’s – the monsters that suddenly appear from a portal over Antarctica/the Arctic, the shadowy global organization that requires pilots to mind-meld in giant robots to fight them, the pilot-pilot romance – but those are pretty superficial similarities, really. (Headstrong protagonist check, strong female love interest check, stern commanding officer check, eccentric scientist double-check, minorities in non-speaking roles, check). #Pacfifc rim mind meld movie#Instead I found a movie built for defense, not suspense: it’s armor-coated against anyone’s possible complaint that it didn’t hit the right note at the right time. So maybe my problem with Pacific Rim isn’t that the movie was awful, but that I went into it with the wrong mindset – because truthfully I was expecting something much, much better.ĭescribed to me as “Guillermo del Toro makes a live-action Evangelion“, I was expecting a very different movie: not Evangelion, obviously, but something with at least a little bit of the psychological depth and roller-coaster pacing of that anime. Or, if they are less passionate in their opinions, they’ll say what everyone says: that it’s just a mindless summer blockbuster, so really, what were you expecting? Don’t you know that all of these big-budget action movies are being made for an overseas audience, anyway? They’ll even defend the fact that nearly every character is a walking cliche. Or that between the big set pieces, the movie was mostly one long planning or training sequence. I am your obligatory knucklehead fly-boy protagonist”. (The first twist is the exception – that one was surprising and quite moving.) Or that there didn’t need to be a 15-minute narrated prologue that boiled down to “monsters appeared so we built giant robots to fight them, P.S. They’ll defend the movie against people who point out that there didn’t need to be four – count ’em, four – “plot twists” or reversals, mostly all predictable. They loved the Kaiju designs, cast, and art direction. I mean, my friends liked – no, loved – this movie. But somehow gentle criticism doesn’t seem like enough when Pacific Rim is – really – the best example yet of why screenwriters shouldn’t force every blockbuster into the Save the Cat! mold. #Pacfifc rim mind meld full#I mean, I know the critics agree with me – even the ones who liked the movie admit it lacks psychological complexity, is full of one-dimensional stock characters, and often drags. I’m starting to feel alone in my disappointment with Pacific Rim. Editor’s Note by Noah: Attack on Titan is currently being serialized in English, by Kodansha USA.
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