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In a nutshell, though, I thought Pacific Rim was a badly structured, badly paced, badly acted and badly written film that had a few, really good, robot fighting monster sequences that were, sadly, not serviced by the film around them.
You can throw all effects, lighting, dramatic music and wobbly camera you want at the screen, if the build up and the dramatic tension isn't there and if you don't give two rabid owl hoots for your protagonists then all your work will be in vain.
It's not like it's difficult to do either. Hell! even the odd Chuck Norris movie can elicit a fist clench and a manly cheer, from the right crowd, during the action climax and he wonders through his films like a lobotomised clothes rack of pale skin attached to a comical moustache.
Dammit, I really hate to say it but as woeful and ineptly made as it was, even Sharknado worked out the formula for how to be entertaining as all heck and structure a 'monsters-attack' movie in such a way that it's actually, in parts, exciting.
I know its supporters hate the comparison but Independence Day is the modern blueprint for these disaster/alien attack films, whether they like it or not, and one of the script writers on Pacific Rim certainly thought so as they borrow, wholesale, vast chunks of the plot, script and ideas from Roland Emmerich's fun action/disaster/alien invasion flick. Unfortunately they seem to have done so and then dropped all the pages of the script, shuffled them up and put them back together in such a way that they don't really work or they just shuffled them around in the hope that no one noticed the comparison. Like an amateurish Tarantino might.
(please notice in that previous paragraph I said 'modern blueprint', I AM aware all these movie formulas date back to H.G.Wells novel War of the Worlds)
The cast of 'plucked from TV' actors fall, sadly, into the bland, confused or, in the case of the anti-funny Charlie Day, just plain annoying and aggressively drown-able. Ron Perlman does his best to liven up proceedings but gets, really, very little to do.
It's shot ok, there are some sections that are very impressive to look at and then there are some that are edited poorly and render the whole thing just a series of confusing flashes of neon. On the whole though the action was pretty well done considering it was entirely built inside a computer.
I would argue, though, that if you're thinking, even for a moment, "wait? their robot has a sword?? and it can cut through monsters like they are cheap, knock off, vinyl handbags? Why haven't they been using this all along" or maybe "why do the plasma guns take such an annoyingly long time to load and then run out of ammo so easily? This is the future, it's make believe, why do they not have ever lasting plasma guns or, 15 plasma canons strapped to their robot faces??" then the film hasn't done its job of suspending disbelief and instead is dragging and appalling enough for you to notice these things and ask these questions.
I'll stop attacking it now and just basically end by saying, while I enjoyed the robot versus monster stuff a bit, it didn't justify the long running time or the pain of sitting through bland, confused or just plain bad actors massacring shitty dialogue.
3 out of 10 fried alien lizard burgers