There was nothing horribly wrong, exactly, with Guillermo del Toro's giant robot vs. giant monster movie, Pacific Rim, but - given its awesome premise and its endless potential to be creative - there was something inherently underwhelming about the whole affair. To be fair to Pacific Rim, it did a lot of things right, and some of the battles (the reason we all flocked to see the movie in the first place) were something to behold on the big screen. But the movie is also lacking a narrative kick, and is too reliant on cheesy dialogue cues and cliches to mark it out as anything special. Set in a world where massive manually-operated robots must protect the world from colossal alien invaders, Del Toro's design work here was, of course, spectacular, and the details and touches he leaves all over the movie emphasise that this is very much a work in the brilliant auteur's canon. It's the cardboard characters and - to a degree - lack of dramatic tension that stops Pacific Rim from being anything over than a "good blockbuster." For those of us who expected a little more, it's safe to say that this monster mash was all a little underwhelming.
