Del Toro is a dreamer. He's a visionary. If you give him a pile of money to make enormous robots fight enormous monsters at the end of civilization, he will work to make Pacific Rim a movie that makes you feel all the enormousness.

| Jan 3, 2014

Pacific Rim is a special-effects behemoth, a toy franchise with a deafeningly loud movie attached -- Transformers with an A-level.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 30, 2013

In essence, Pacific Rim features a series of Godzilla monsters battle an ever dwindling number of Transformers, layered over the plot from Independence Day, only dumber.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 30, 2013

Feels like it's always struggling to break through the screen-if only to grab you by the scruff of the neck and drag you in.

| Nov 4, 2013

It is possible to applaud Pacific Rim for the efficacy of its business model while deploring the tale that has been engendered -- long, loud, dark, and very wet. You might as well watch the birth of an elephant.

| Jul 18, 2013

As adventures in mechanised mayhem go, the picture does, of course, crush the Transformers franchise into iron filings.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 14, 2013

For "Pacific Rim" to work we have to believe in this future world...and we do.

| Jul 12, 2013

Its visual achievements notwithstanding, Pacific Rim's greatest breakthrough may be that it's the first Hollywood blockbuster to sport a title less descriptive of its plot than of its intended market.

| Jul 12, 2013

It's as if Del Toro neuro-linked with a robot and then couldn't figure out how to work the controls -- and so watched impotently as the machine made the major creative decisions.

| Jul 12, 2013

If it's human drama you like ... you'll be less richly served.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 12, 2013

The fights are well-staged and there's just enough interstitial humanity among boxing matches to keep things from getting monotonous.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 12, 2013

Del Toro is reveling in blockbuster clichés at the same time he's pounding them into the pavement, and somehow that self-consciousness lets us all in on the joke.

| Original Score: B | Jul 12, 2013

After a long cycle of action movies in which the protagonists spend most of their downtime introspecting about their heroic obligations, Pacific Rim is something different: a heart-warming team-building exercise.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2013

Monsters, robots, grand heroism and a few clever jokes: Sounds like a perfect Saturday afternoon to me.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Jul 11, 2013

Pacific Rim knows what sort of film it wishes to be; it is that film, and much more.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 11, 2013

Pacific Rim's ability to make monster-walloping feel fun again will no doubt make Atlantic Seaboard (or maybe Mediterranean Coastal Region) as inevitable a follow-up as the return of the Kaiju through that pesky underwater portal.

| Jul 11, 2013

That humanistic touch is pure del Toro, and it makes all the difference in Pacific Rim, whose own whirring, glowing heart doesn't belong to any machine but to the director himself.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 11, 2013

It's the quintessential mindless summer sci-fi action film and while it's successful in that respect, it's also disappointing because it could have been so much more.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 11, 2013

My head is still ringing, and hurting, from long stretches of this aliens vs. robots extravaganza that are no better than the worst brain-pounders of the genre.

| Jul 11, 2013

If you ever wanted to see a movie that is nothing but giant monsters battling giant robots, this is it.

| Original Score: B | Jul 11, 2013