Pacific Rim Faces A 260-Foot-Tall Honest Trailer

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

It’s almost unfair to give Pacific Rim the “Honest Trailers” treatment, as it’s one of the first big movies I’ve watched with a “YouTube video that points out all of a film’s faults in humorous ways” on my mind. Obviously I’m capable of processing and accepting the hammy and erroneous details that blockbuster films chunk at us in high speeds, but it’s a whole other thing to have the voiceover guy’s stoic voice rattling through the brain, anticipating jibes against names like Newton Geiszler and Stacker Pentecost, and wondering what was to be said about the inane ways in which characters treat the importance of drift compatibility needed in order to run a Jaeger. It made for something of an aggravating experience and speaks to the culture we live in and the job that I do, when I can’t watch giant robots fighting giant monsters without thinking about what other people are going to say about the terrible dialogue scenes between Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi.

But that’s my cross to bear. It’s not like I can lie and say the above video isn’t incredibly funny and spot on with much of its silly finger-pointing. And it’s nice to see quite a few compliments, albeit backhanded ones, still made their way through. Dumbest awesome movie ever made? Or the most awesome dumb movie ever made? We all win if we aren’t being turds about it. It’s also cool that they pointed out how gratifying it was that Hunnam and Kikuchi’s characters didn’t have any kind of a romantic tie-up in the end. It’s nice that they can be warriors together and have it left at that. We all knew that Idris Elba’s speech would run second to only President Whitmore’s speech in Independence Day.

The entire ADHD-addled ending in which our collective inner nine-year-old becomes enamored with all the pretty shit happening on screen is possibly my favorite bit from any of these videos. I would love be go back in time to be nine years old while watching this movie. I had to walk 15 miles barefoot in the snow to get to the IMAX theater.

Then, of course, it gets ripped for ripping off of an entire region’s film genre and for being pretty dumb overall. But that’s okay, because “cool” doesn’t always get to outrank “smart” in the sci-fi genre. And if anyone can do it, it’s the Latin Peter Jackson.

Last week, The Walking Dead got an “Honest Trailer” that was a lot more harsh and biting, though still incredibly on point. Check it out below.