Finally watched this.
This movie is freaking excellent and full of heart during all the moments of robot vs monster fighting. It's also pretty ****ing terrible in everything else. And there's a lot more "everything else" than fighting.
Before I'll start piling on him, lets give Del Toro his due. He absolutely nailed the visual spirit and energy of the genre. The Jaeger vs Kaiju moments will bring out the inner child in anyone with a soul
The premise behind this movie, this entire genre is so silly and so fun, it can make a man giddy, and Del Toro uses it perfectly in the fight scenes. It's fun, it's very heartfelt, it's suitably visualy pompous and over-the-top, it has the kinetic energy and "weight" proper for such titan battles, and it will make You pumped almost like a Rocky fight. Plus, I've watched it at home, so I can only imagine how powerful it must have looked on Imax for example.
But everything else was just so cringe worthy. It's not even that Del Toro stuffs the film with typical Hollywood filler in between the fights. Couse I can dig hollywood filler. Even if it's the same old bull**** we've seen a hundred times before, I can still dig it, if said filler serves to elegantly connect the fight scenes and wrap the movie into some semblance of a proper story. But here it was all so badly written, so crude, so desperately trying to stuff some melodrama and failing miserably. There's not one redeeming character among the main cast. Not one. The lead is wooden and souless, the two guys playing scientists are so annoying it's almost impressive, the japanese lady is wasted completely as an independent character and her relation with the lead is deviod of absolutely any semblence of energy, drama or...anything really. Ron Perlman serves only to show Del Toro's man-crush on him and even the mighty Idris Elba will soon have to realise that the power of his charisma alone won't save him if he'll keep playing the role of Janek to other directors "Promethei" (Promethanes? Prometheuses?) for the rest of his career. The whole cast was outplayed by a small, japanese crying child. No wait...I quite liked Max Martini in this, couse he's rugged and australian apparently, so + 10 to charisma.
I am not saying that PR should be all about CGI fights. There were so many ways they've could have handled this more elegantly. Ways to put more charismatic characters that would make You care that one of them is dying out of radiation poisoning, instead of sighing or shrugging with resign. Ways to invite the viewer into an interesting, SF setting, to connect the fight scenes with filler that would make this feel like a coherent, nicely flowing movie, instead of like a sprinkling of few nice, juicy bits and a load of worthless **** inbetween that I wished to skip. The idea behind the Giant Robots vs Giant Monsters can be full of heart and fun and needed something overally better.
Oh, and Charlie Hunnam. This was the first time I saw him in action. Apparently he's supposed to be pretty awesome in SoA. Sure, I can believe that. But here? I don't know if it's his lack of acting skills, or the ****ty, cringe worthy dialogue he had to speak, or maybe even something as simple as his accent, but damn he sounded awkward. Every single line spoken by him in this movie, had that strange, unnatural "weight" to it. He sounded like a male **** star desperatly trying to infuse his opening lines with some drama. Combined with the melodramatic dialogue, this had a really bad effect.
6/10