I can’t remember a single human character from the Godzilla movies of my youth, but “Pacific Rim” spends a respectable amount of time establishing memorable personalities for the Jaeger pilots, scientists and supporting cast - an impressively diverse crowd who must band together to “cancel the apocalypse” (instead of relying on a lone white hero to save the day, the way American movies typically do). Cohen’s making-of book), but then decided to hide them amid quick cutting and camera tricks in the finished film. Del Toro put all this attention into designing the creatures (the evidence of which you can see in my Variety colleague David S. They attack almost exclusively at night, preferably in the pouring rain.

And “Pacific Rim” promised the opportunity to see it done right, in a way adults could also appreciate.įor whatever reason, del Toro doesn’t seem to have faith in his monsters. That’s when the rubber-suit, clunky-puppet effects of a movie like 1968’s “Destroy All Monsters” stopped being fun. Del Toro has long since established his film-geek bona fides, and there’s no one I trust more to tackle a guilty-pleasure genre I outgrew somewhere around age 13. This is a massive-scale mecha-vs.- kaiju showdown, guys. But I never expected “Pacific Rim” to resemble the three Spanish-language pics of his that I adore. Lovecraft adaptation “ At the Mountains of Madness” are as much passion projects for the director as “Cronos” was? In her conflicted Washington Post review, Ann Hornaday sniped, “‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ it most decidedly ain’t,” putting down del Toro’s “vortex of garish visual effects and risibly cartoonish action.” Doesn’t she realize that nearly the entire fighting-robot tradition comes from cartoons? That “Hellboy,” “The Hobbit” (which he developed with Peter Jackson intending to direct) and the aborted H.P.

Nashawaty’s review went on to complain, “It’s more like a mash-up of ‘Real Steel’ and the ‘Transformers’ pictures,” as if del Toro wouldn’t agree, or wouldn’t take that as a compliment, the same way certain fanboys found a ringing endorsement of the film they wanted “Pacific Rim” to be when Variety’s Justin Chang slammed it as “an extended 3D episode of ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ on very expensive acid.”

The explanation is simple: The highbrow set doesn’t especially like movies like “Mimic” - or “Godzilla,” for that matter. It’s downright strange to consider how many of the critics referenced the director’s lower-budget, foreign-language Spanish Civil War allegories “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone” in their reviews, as if those were the most representative examples of del Toro’s oeuvre, when “Pacific Rim” actually has so much more in common with del Toro’s early, Weinstein-compromised monster movie “Mimic.”

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