Idris Elba

Movie Monday: Pacific Rim

Peter Germany Movie Monday, Movie Review, Movies, Sci-Fi , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s been a while so I thought I’d write a Movie Monday post! Now how do I do one of these again…….lol

This Movie Monday post is all about Pacific Rim. The new movie by Guillermo del Toro where giant aliens on the scale of Godzilla are coming out of a portal at the bottom of the pacific and tearing cities apart. To solve this problem humanity came up with giant robots that are controlled by two pilots through neural pathways (I’ll admit I need to watch a couple of the details to be clear on them) this means the pilots are totally in sync with each other and feel the pain when the mechs are damaged by the Kaijus which come from the pacific. The film focuses on the attempt to shut this portal for good.

Now to me this sounded like Heaven! It has giant monster battling with giant mechs, not robots as I called them earlier (I can make excuses for wrong description 😛 ). What more could a geek like me want? A decent storyline for one and Pacific Rim has it. It’s not overly complicated which is good. The characters feel well developed and their back stories are dealt with well. Charlie Hunnam is very likeable as the lead but has great support from the deep Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, who looks like he had a lot of fun with this role and I especially liked Rinko Kikuchi who looked to have a lot of strength on screen. Burn Gorman and Charlie Day both deserve a mention as scientists who have differing opinions on the Kaiju.

The effects were great. All these battles were obviously CGI but not once did I think this was CGI because it was done that well. I would have preferred more of the action to have been in the daylight but that’s a minor quibble.

One thing I would like to mention is that this did not feel like a del Toro movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way but with del Toro you know what you as going to get and this surprised me because he’s taken a chance and pushed himself to do something that maybe is not in his safe zone. It has the depth that we expect and the right amount of humour with seriousness. The action scenes were just the right amount. Quite often I’m left feeling a little short changed with movies that have these sorts of CGI but Pacific Rim gave just the right amount of action.

All in all its a movie I really enjoyed and I will be buying the DVD when it comes out. If I’m honest I could quite easily go and watch it again at the cinema 🙂

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I would just like to make a quick mention about the 3D in this movie. I’m generally not a huge fan of 3D because it rarely compliments the movie. The best example of good 3D that I have experienced was the movie Dredd and this is probably the best use of 3D I’ve seen in a movie since then.

Prometheus (Spoilers)

Peter Germany Horror, Movie Review, Movies, Sci-Fi , , , , , , , , , , ,

******SPOILERS******

 

I’ll admit that I havent read any reviews or spoken to anyone about this film yet so hopefully my views on it is not influenced by anyone else.  I liked this film, but it’s not the film that I was expecting it to be.  If Ridley Scott (The Director),  Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof (The Writers) had taken away the Alien element that we are familiar with it I think it might have been a better film.

The cast of characters was pretty good.  I’m a fan of Charlize Theron but it seems rare that we see her in films and I like the way she played the bad corporate Scrooge here.  Michael Fassbender is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors.  I have only seen a couple of his films but he seems like an actor that has a wide scope of what he can do.  As the android David in this he does very well playing it straight and like the other androids in this franchise we’re never quite sure where his intentions lay until ter on in the film.  The rest of the cast is pretty good.  It’s great to see Guy Pearce is always good and Noomi Rapace did well dealing with the enormity of her role.  Idris Elba is beginning to pop up more and more which is not bad either.

The plot is quite simple really; a team of experts go off to a distant star system to find the beings that created mankind.  Obviously it does not work out like that and lots of chaos and death follows.  As I said at the start I am confident that if Ridley Scott and the two writers had removed the alien element then it would have still worked as well.  For me it took away from the original  Alien films because for one it reveals the origins of the monster of all these movies, but also there is better technology in this film then the originals.  Now I know that’s because our technology has improved but as I was watching Prometheus I could not get away from that single fact and that is the lasting impression of the film for me.  There is no reason why the film could have been made with a similar look and feel to the original films as far as technology is concerned.  Making it look retro would have tied it into the universe so much better as well.

I will be buying it when it comes out on DVD and I do like this film a lot but I am not sure that I will ever get past the crew of the Prometheus having better technology than those who follow in later films.