(Yes, I am going this at a weird time. I just finished watching the thing so I figured, might as well. Oh, and SPOILERS. Duh. )

That movie was way better than it had to be.

I’m serious. Hollywood could have totally gotten away with crapping out another fat culture turd with absolutely no soul, no spirit, and an eye-watering amount of contempt for the audience, but instead, they made something significantly better.

I guess it’s good to be Guillermo Del Toro. He has a lot of clout in The Biz these days, and this movie seems like a labour of love to me. Someone wanted to not just make this movie but to do it right.

And I have a lot of love and respect for people like that.

Now I am not saying this is the next Casablanca. It’s nobody’s idea of high cinema and nobody is going to be studying this movie in snooty movie courses. But only an idiot would expect it to be.

It’s your typical American corny action movie. You have your all American hero of the salt-of-the-earth New Yorker variety. You have the traumatic event early in the movie (monster kills his brother while they were psychically linked…. harsh!) that puts him into a funk for a long time (five years). This is where the hardassed boss of the anti-monster program finds him when the world needs his monster killing abilities again. There’s a female love interest/co-pilot, a hotheaded brash rival whose respect he eventually gains, characters you meet once and then again when it’s time for them to get killed, and of course, lots of cool giant robot versus monster fights.

I am serious. They are kickass.

But the older I get, the less I give a shit about originality, and I never gave many shits about it in the first place. I suppose that’s for the best. The older I get, the more things I have seen, and hence the harder it is for anything to strike me as entirely original. I try not to be jaded about it, but it’s not easy.

Anyhow, I did not go into this movie thinking it would be a beacon of originality.

Hell, I liked Avatar, and it was constructed entirely out of tvtropes.org entries.

One thing that bothered me was that, for a while, it was looking like the movie was going to be super goddamned sexist. It looked like there was exactly one female pilot (Ms. Love Interest) and the first time she tries to pilot a mech, she fails spectacularly because she can’t control her emotions.

Fut the WUCK? I was getting pretty pissed off. But apparently they anticipated that, because shortly after, there is a (very brief) scene that reveals another female pilot, and then later in the movie, our hero says the first time is always harsh.

And I am nearly positive he was talking about mech piloting.

So I canceled the male feminist red alert and calmed the fuck down. This was almost a very different kind of review. That shit pisses me off severely.

Instead, it was a highly fun movie with way better acting and production values than necessary. Like I said above, there is a real feeling of something very corny being made with love, care, and attention, and that is a rare thing indeed.

One little nitpick : quite annoyingly, all the mech versus monster battles take place underwater, in the rain, or in the fog. I am positive that this is a way to conceal the crappiness of your graphics (plus it gives you an excuse to skip the background on closeups). It’s the CGI equivalent of concealing Elizabeth Taylor’s weight gain by putting gauze over the lens.

It’s better than having desperately inadequate graphics, but it’s frustrating to always be straining to see what is going on. Makes me resent the movie for making me work so hard.

That aside, the fight scenes are awesome. Tightly paced but expertly staged and edited so it doesn’t become a nonsensical series of rapid cuts seemingly made just to have rapid cuts.

The human eye can only resolve the image it sees so fast, people. After that, it’s a visual seizure.

I love how the main character fights. There’s elements of American style boxing, professional wrestling, and good old fashioned brawling in the mix, but the main thing is that it is just fucking brutal.

And after being shown that these monsters have killed millions via attacking cities, that’s what I want to see. This isn’t the martial arts, honorable combat, or war. There’s no humanitarian concerns and no Geneva Convention.

This is monster killing, and there’s only one rule : kill the fucking thing.

I mean, at one point, he rips a monster’s acid-spitting tongue out. And I was like FUCK YEAH. The movie sets up the monsters as essentially pure fucking evil, and that clears the way for total carnage.

But my fave thing about the fights is the main mech’s weapons, and I am not talking about the lame shit like missiles or plasma beams. I don’t give a shit about those, they are boring. I want to see hand to hand combat, not special effects shots.

No, the one I am talking about are two things I absolutely love : rocket punch, where there’s a rocket in the elbow of the mech and you can fire it to punch REALLY HARD, and my favorite (fictional, I assume) weapon of all time : the CHAINSWORD.

It’s the weapon Female George Washington is using in this clip :

It’s a whip. It’s a sword. It’s an entanglement weapon. And it is so freaking boss.

And when a corny action movie delivers on the fight scenes, making even someone like me who has been watching the damned things since the 80’s want to stand up and shout, someone has done something very, very tight.

So I recommend this movie. It’s tons of fun and better than you’d think, and while you will recognize most of the elements in it, they are better made than usual, and workmanship counts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.