It's hard to really get excited about a movie like this that has largely seemed to be keeping itself under the radar. While it allegedly tested well with audience during some early screenings, it's one of those situations where the trailers themselves seemed to really be stretching things to set this up, when to be honest a movie about giant robots fighting should be one of the easiest things in the world to make. I think half the problem is that too many people want to try and do "serious writing" and find ways of tacking on an unneeded focus on a human element to things like this, which is kind of what ruined Transformers.
To be honest I'm kind of expecting this one to come and go, I don't expect a spectacular failure, but I will be very surprised if this movie winds up impressing many people either.
To be honest ever since the old "D" grade "Robot Jox" movies, I've kind of been of the opinion that someone might just want to license "Battletech" and get it over with, I mean they did cartoons, but I always kind of felt that universe had a decent amount of potential. Honestly I think while the games benefitted from the "Clans", as far as the world went, it was better before that garbage. To be honest, prior to that, the actual storyline carried an entire "game of thrones" type vibe, but with giant mechs blowing the crap out of each other replacing the knights and warriors. Albiet it was fairly predictable, largely leading to the "solution" being the two generally "good" (or at least sympathetic) houses getting together in a marriage-based alliance. Then of course instead of leaving things once it got wrapped up, we had the clans introduced, and while popular with some, it pretty much turned the entire thing into a "don't think about it, just go with it" setting that increasingly focused less and less on why anyone was fighting given the painfully transparent reasons, and an excuse to roll out increasingly large lists of new and game breaking firepower on all sides to encourage people playing the game to run out and buy the latest sourcebooks.
At any rate, we'll see what happens with "Pacific Rim", I think it will be one of Del Toro's lower key works when all is said and done. 10-15 years it will probably come up mostly in the context of "oh yeah, you know he also did this... and it wasn't half bad for what it was". Perhaps even looked back on as ahead of it's time if someone actually DOES manage to create a successful mass-multi media giant robot franchise that captures the general public's imagination to the extent of "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" for a while (Gundam really doesn't count as it's mostly only that big a deal in Japan, and some parts of Asia it's pretty fringe through the western world).
