Friday Night In A Suburb Of The Big Town - Pacific Rim Review

Greetings from Moore, OK.  Tidy little suburb of Oklahoma City that tornadoes try (and fail) to erase, home of one of the best public libraries in the whole universe, and home of the absolutely fabulous Moore Warren Theatre and IMAX Theatre. 
It was the IMAX theatre that got our attention this Friday Night.  (By the way, for those of you NOT from the 405, Friday Night In The Big Town is a favorite phrase of our local weather forecasting god, Gary England. )  Matt and I went to see Pacific Rim at the Warren IMAX.  It is absolutely gobsmackingly astounding.  This is one of the most fun movies I've seen in a long time.  Takes you back to the monster movies of yesteryear, when the good guys fought hard, came close to losing, but mustered the strength to go on. 
I HAD to see this movie.  Not just because I started watching Gigantor

(See picture right) when I was a little kid, but because Ron Perlman is in  it, and he is someone whose skill as an actor (and sense of humor) I admire. 
He plays a Kaiju parts dealer (on the black market, of course)  in the film.  For a girl who grew up loving giant robots, and who fell in love with Perlman's acting abilities in Beauty and the Beast, this movie is most definitely a MUST SEE. 

I loved the Jaegers.  They were such lovely tributes to the Mecha characters that had come before, while also being very new and unique.  My favorite, of course, was Gypsy Danger. A classic and beautiful design. The story was well developed enough to let you care about the characters and their world, but not overblown.  The movie was above all else, fun.  Perlman's character provides a lot of that fun, and so so do the two scientists.  Watching giant robots fight giant monsters is most of the fun, though.  The Jaegers are impressive.  The detail that Guillermo Del Toro puts in all his movies served this one best of all.  Pacific Rim is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.  There is more detail here than you will ever see in one viewing.  I wish I could afford to see it in 3-D IMAX again. 

It was a visceral experience.  Sounds you could feel, and I kept fighting the urge to duck objects flying toward me during the battle scenes.
If you want to feel like a kid again, to enjoy a movie just for the fun of it, you NEED to go see Pacific Rim. 

When we saw it this evening, so did a BUNCH more people.  There were all ages and all walks of life in there to see this movie.  And one of the most polite crowds you'll find anywhere.  (Hey, we are in Moore, OK, and  even the folks who drive up from Texas are nice when they're here.)  This town seems to do that to people.  Makes everyone feel closer and less like strangers.  Especially lately, and especially at the theater, where you can look across and see the wreckage of the hospital that the tornado ate.  The buildings are down now, it's just a big rubble pile that is being systematically sorted through and taken away, but still.  It is jarring.  There are few trees on that side of town anymore.  There are a few of what I call "Tornado trees" still standing.  They are broken off , few branches left, but still defiantly leafing out all over the ends of their truncated branches.  Still alive and daring the world to do something about it.  Kind of like the Jaegers at one point in this film.

There is a tornado tree at the right of this picture, taken 3 days ago at Veteran's Memorial Park here in Moore.  (By the way, go to parks.livepositively.com  and vote for Veteran's Memorial Park in Moore, so that we have a chance to win a $100,000.00 grant to help rebuild the park!  Voting ends July 15.)

That is about all for tonight.  It was one of the best and most entertaining Friday nights I've had for a LONG time.  It was kind of nice to see something besides weather bashing humanity around, and nice that humanity could actually fight back.  'Cause when the monsters came smashing through our town, there wasn't any way to fight.  I think this movie was very satisfying to many of us just because of that.  Thanks, Mr. Del Toro.  We needed this.