How can I begin to explain Pacific Rim? Pacific Rim is flawless. I hear its Jaegers are insured for $10,000,000. I hear it beats up Kaiju… in Japan. Well, Hong Kong. OK, that Mean Girls reference got away from me. All the same, while it'd be hyperbolic to say Pacific Rim really is flawless, it's still an amazing movie. All the people saying "But what's so special about it? It's just a stupid summer action movie!" are missing the point. It is a stupid summer action movie, one with explosions and a premise that makes no sense and the occasional stupid sight gag. But it's a well-made action movie with heart, and one that breaks the mold of the macho-man savior of humanity and the subservient love interest he hooks up with besides. Do I wish some of the other female characters had had more screen time? Yes. But as it stands, Pacific Rim is still worth more than several dozen Transformers movies. —Rebecca
I wound up seeing Pacific Rim a few weeks after its release so it had been hyped up in my mind to a ridiculous degree. Thankfully, it mostly lived up to the hype. While I would have appreciated the characters being fleshed out more (think Independance Day), Pacific Rim was exactly what it was sold as. A fun summer movie about giant robots and monsters. Still annoyed they didn’t use the sword earlier, though. - Jill
Another summer movie that succeeded by not pretending to be more than it was, and probably the only one from this batch that I actually want to own. And what it was was a saving the world movie where the ability that put humanity over the top was not our ability to survive at any cost, our intelligence, our breeding power, or our common cold virus, but rather our ability to form strong interpersonal relationships of all kinds: friend to friend, parent to child, lover to lover, and sibling to sibling (to sibling, even). Also it had a giant robot cutting a giant monster in half with a sword, in space. If you think Pacific Rim was a bad movie, you are not allowed in my house. - Susana