Pacific Rim

The film world was shocked when director Guillermo del Toro gave up directing 'The Hobbit' trilogy because he could not wait around for MGM to get their financing issues sorted. Instead he went off to make this film.
Guillermo is a brilliant film director. He is not only a great visual director who creates wonderful creatures and beautiful images but he makes great stories as well. Sadly he was unable to bring that greatness to 'Pacific Rim' and why I hate it so much. While there are a few minor good points with the film I feel that in general it is a terrible film. Admittedly the films trailers did not heighten my expectations. The idea of giant robots fighting giant demons did not look all that thrilling. It looked too much like a mash-up of 'Godzilla' and 'Tranformers'. I did have a bit of faith that Guillermo might be the one to take a cheesy and bland concept like this and turn it into something interesting. Sadly for he has failed big time. He is guilty of doing what 'Oblivion' did and starts the film by using voice over to set up and explain the setting for the film. There are some visuals but they should have stuck with that and not used voice over. Then the rest of the film is pretty ordinary storytelling with all the familiar plot points you see in films of this kind. The characters are all the same as well. Only a few have any interesting features. What really lost it for me was when they decided to build walls around cities to protect them from the aliens. Besides the fact that a wall seemed flimsy there is the fact that they used humans to build the walls rather than the huge robots which were not being used. Considering the number of people who died while building the walls.
Charlie Hunnam does look and act like a typical hero but he is still boring. Charlie is unable to bring anything distinctive to the role. Equally as boring is the normally brilliant Idris Elba. He plays the typical boss who, when he is not making big speeches to inspire his men, is acting all angry and tough. The only actors that seemed to bring anything of interest to their roles are Charlie Day and the ever reliable Ron Pearlman. Their characters are the only fun thing in the film and keep it from being really terrible.
Being a film by Guillermo del Toro I am probably being more harsh on it than I should. But I expected more from this brilliant film maker.