I love mecha, I really do! I’ve longed to wake up and find out that I am a pilot of a Veritech fighter and can fly around and transform at will and kick some Zentradi ass! I’d even be happy to control a Gundam. I’ve hoped and wondered how would that even look on the big screen? We did have a glimps of that in the B movie Robot Jox and it was about as good as you could get with a B movie budget in the 80’s. So it was back to anime. But, decades later, we got our bigass robots fighting bigass monsters… and not the cheesy Power Rangers kind, either! We got 2 and 3 person controlled Jaegers, or hunters, who moved and fought with finesse – it was the mecha we had been waiting for for so long! 

Now, in the Pacific Rim world, the pilots have to be mentally linked in order for the Jaeger to work. It is a novel concept, but it does make sense. But for the sheer pressure it would take for a human to be able to control the thing, a minimum of 2 pilots is required. The armaments are not too far out, either. There’re missiles, a chainsaw blade and a plasma cannon. Considering the thing is a giant, walking nuclear reactor, I’m not arguing over the plasma cannon!! The combat is very smooth, all things considered. Now the Jaegers can be damaged so much that it can injure, if not kill, the pilots. I like that there is still that sense of danger… and they don’t move “too” fast, either. All in all, the creators do a very good job of taking mecha and bringing them to the big screen.

If you love mecha but have not seen either one of the Pacific Rim movies, at least give them a shot. The story isn’t as multilayered as what you would get in most anime, but the battles are really good. It will have you wishing that you could hop in your mecha and walk home!