8. Narrative Filler
Once the opening fight sequence is out of the way and the title of the movie is finally displayed - by which point we're almost 20 minutes in - Pacific Rim grinds to a considerable halt, spending roughly thirty minutes getting the characters where they need to be - which is fair enough - but also wasting too much screen-time on needless flourishes that just bog the thing down. The most notably pointless scene occurs when Becket is demonstrating his martial arts skills, and he ends up facing off against Rinko Kikuchi's Mako. We get it; Mako is a strong woman both physically and intellectually - can we just get to the action we all paid to see now? All scenes like this do is keep us at an arm's length from the main attraction, and by the 45-minute mark, I'd become pretty exhausted waiting for the film to gain some forward momentum.