10 Wildly Overpraised Movies

What The Critics Said: “Whatever our ages, Del Toro’s miraculous entertainment boosts us all up to its gleeful point of view.” (The Telegraph)

Pacific Rim has a cute central idea: in the not too distant future, attacks by kaiju are so common that the forces defending humanity create Jaegers, giant robots controlled by two pilots that fight the monsters.

Once the idea’s been established, though, the film doesn’t know what to do with it and it’s a long haul to the climactic battle. A potentially rousing 100 minutes is bloated to two hours by psychobabble intended to give the characters depth that instead just weighs the whole film down.

Toho Studios were doing this sort of thing with more zip in the 1960s, and while Pacific Rim pays homage to its inspiration on several occasions (one Jaeger attacks a kaiju with a ship, just like in War Of The Gargantuas), those old movies knew better than to give their characters hackneyed back stories.

Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) quit piloting Jaegers after seeing his brother killed in combat while Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) still has childhood flashbacks to when kaiju destroyed her hometown. Who needs characters when you’ve got caricatures?