Film Review #8: Pacific Rim

Yes, an actual FEATURE FILM.

So, I could go in depth about what makes this movie good and bad, but really, depth would just mean perpetuating the same sentence or two over and over.  What's good?  Stringer Bell, cool CG, giant monsters, awesome fights, good plot initiation (mostly), body (mostly), and ending (mostly).  What's bad?  Thinks too highly of itself and thus slurs everything in an overdone virtuous epic-music soundtrack (which can be really great, but not in every damn scene from beginning to end.  IE, Flyboys.  Awful movie.  Someone should burn for that.)  Plus lots of predictable, cliche plot elements.  Not very well-thought-out, depth-wise.  Everything's made overly clear to the viewer, like he/she's a 4-year-old with severe ADHD and deafness in one ear (IE Inception.  Great, until you realize how much it's attempted to appeal to idiots by blatantly explaining every even remotely implied thought/gesture/meaning).
Now, what's my real problem with this?  It's a classic half-decent big-budget film.  The fact that it's big-budget means it's made by a company with a ton of money, with a massive fanbase.  Unfortunately, these fanbases tend to consist most generally of hipsters and obsessive movie-goers who go less for the movie so much as for the vanity of seeing a movie, along with plenty of normal people.  All of these groups consist widely of people who simply don't appreciate films that require thought, and thus won't attempt to understand (if they're even capable).  This effectively means that while they sit in their seats monologuing about some awkward dinner with a friend two nights ago to the people in their general vicinity (not necessarily even acquaintances, just random people) they'll subconsciously perceive the general amount of loud classical music and explosions and the occasionally uttered statement thrown in that explains the past ten minutes of the film that they've managed to completely ignore, but nothing more.  Then, when they walk out of the theater chewing on over-"buttered" popcorn and sipping their Fanta soda, they'll reflect: was the film good?  What will hence come to mind is a sensation of bewilderment determined in intensity by the amount of loud classical ("epic") music their sugar-jacked minds have picked up on within the past two hours...  And this bewilderment and awe is what they will use to determine what they thought of the movie.  The louder the music, the more subtly deaf they will be, and they will sink into the delusion that they've been drawn into themselves by the deepness of the film, and somewhat closed off from reality in awe (though, of course, they're really just a little deaf).  Hence, big movie companies, to maintain these fanbases of noise-crazed, garrulous cretins and thus money flow, must make their films very loud, very "epic", and very obvious in meaning/plot.  Pacific Rim was one of the better ones of these.  All around, they didn't painfully draw out the movie dialogue by throwing in little summaries of what had just happened, and though the epic music/happenings were maintained throughout the film, there were breaks, and the epic music actually corresponded to a plot that worked.

So, yeah.  It was a decent film.  Not amazing, not mind-blowing, not deep, but cool.  Very cool.  Not necessarily genius...  Just...  Just entertaining.  Yeah.