Good movie but not great. I'll still buy this on BD though, that's for sure.
Positives first - the fight scenes were AMAZING. Like jaw-dropping good. Easily the best action scenes of the year, yes better than MoS. I found myself clenching my hands in the theater during the HK battle, you really got a sense of danger (despite not being emotionally invested in any of the characters, more on that later). I LOVE the score, it had a boyish cool center with Saturday morning cartoon, anime, and video game boss battle sprinkled all over it. Production value was way off the charts, you can see every penny they spent on that massive budget not only in CGI but also their practical effects and their sets. The pace was great, slow in the middle when they first get to HK Shatterdome but wasn't too bad. Overall writing was acceptable, nothing really original about the story and typical small plot holes for these types of films, but it worked and they got the movie to start off really strong. The movie knew its strengths (kaiju/mecha big battles) and played to it, thus avoiding the mistake Transformers made... well for the most part, which brings me to the negatives.
The acting was subpar, at best. It's not TERRIBLE - for a mindless popcorn flick like this, the acting was good enough to get me from one battle to the next. But there were parts throughout where I was cringing. Some of it was the script, A LOT of it was the actors, namely Hunnam (whose American accent was fading towards the end, wtf was that), Kikuchi (they made her WAYYY too fobby Asian), and Kazinsky (this guy was just terrible). Elba was unmemorable, I know he's got acting chops so I'm guessing this had a lot to do with the script. Martini was ok but his Aussie accent was also fading in the end; seriously what is up with the spotty accents?!? Day, Gorman, and Pearlman as comic relief was an epic fail, they were just annoying and from the reviews, it seems NOBODY found them funny at all. In fact Pearlman's character was completely pointless! Lastly, final battle in deep sea felt a little anti-climatic, maybe it was because I was spoiled by the HK battle.
Going back to my first comment on this movie being good but not great, it could've been a lot better with some small tweaks. I think the movie did somewhat fall victim to trying to squeeze human character development into a film where the audience doesn't care, and what really hurt it was they cast actors who failed to execute. I felt if they toned back the connections they tried to establish, namely between Raleigh and Mako, the acting would've been a lot more tolerable. Hell my vote is just to re-cast those two.
All in all, GDT delivers yet again and I walked out of the theater satisfied. I'll definitely be rooting for this movie in the box office, hope it does better than the projections. It's already exceeded the midnight box office haul expectations, hoping that trend continues through the weekend!
