[Adapted from my Flixster Review] This film fires beautifully on every one of its diesel and thermo-nuclear powered cylinders. Many of the critics who panned this movie demonstrate unfortunate (albiet understandable) ignorance of the genres that gave rise to this piece. Not all of us grew up on mech anime and the kaiju films of the 60s and 70s. I'm just one of those geeks who loved these movies every bit as much as Guillermo Del Toro did. I remember as a kid going to one of those drive-ins with two screens separated by a berm. You could see the top half of the other screen from the back window of your car. I no longer recall what movie we were actually there to watch that night, but my breath fogged the window at the back of our car as "Destroy All Monsters" played on the other screen. It was years before I got a chance to watch it on TV. Fans like me have been waiting decades for the movie-making technology to catch up with this larger-than-life subject matter. The 1988 remake of "Godzilla" featuring Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno didn't cut it. Nor have the ridiculously cheesy "live action" versions of "Transformers." But "Pacific Rim" fills the ticket on just about every level. Each aspect of the film: the dialog, the characters, the casting, the story structure, the epic battles and even the acting, tap into the best aspects of genre tradition in sometimes surprisingly innovative ways. "Pacific Rim" could have been as laughable as its predecessors on one hand or a ludicrous send-off of kaiju/mech on the other, but instead the film picks and chooses elements from the "canon" and gives them a very fine new digital polish. Del Toro said he didn't want to do an homage or an updating of the old films--he wanted something that could stand on its own feet. He succeeds in a gigantic way. Word is there's an hour or more of footage on the cutting room floor--expanded Blu-Ray anyone? And a sequel is already in the planning stages. We may be witnessing the birth of a franchise.
