“Aww, damn! There’s something in my eye!” “CUT! TAKE 37!” “Come on, Leonardo, get it together!”
Atlantic Rim: Resurrection (2018) is part of a genre called mockbuster: movies that pretend to be part of a blockbuster movie’s universe, but are almost certainly not, made and released to take advantage of audiences who fail to do the research, like me, that would make them realize this is not an official product of the blockbuster’s producers.
But a cheap ripoff.
And so it is with Atlantic Rim: Resurrection. Set years prior to the fabulous Pacific Rim (2013), it follows the trials – no lawyers – and tribulations of a military force attempting to stand up the giant robots later used in Pacific Rim to defend the world. Battling mysterious lags buried in the robots’ programming, a couple of kaiju, a horde of child kaiju, malfunctioning weapons, and some innovative ideas for monsters working together, the whole smorgasbord is driven along by meaningless side plots that trail off, characters with potential that are under-used (Go Bugs!), and the inevitable outcast scientist who knows better than everyone else.
While programming in … Python. Yeah, no kidding. Yes, there is such a language. No, it’s not a heavy duty AI language, at least not that I’ve ever heard.
A very sloppy plot, crappy special effects, actors who can only do so much with bad dialog, and some historical inaccuracies which will irritate those with at least a little knowledge of US Naval history[1], overwhelm some right ideas, such as killing off good guys and some monster ideas that I thought were interesting. This made for a movie that will not be forgotten, but not for the right reasons.
1 Oh, you want to know? The movie opens on a battleship firing on a kaiju. It’s clearly a battleship, as that’s a three gun turret with what are clearly 16 inch caliber guns. The US Navy retired its last battleship sometime in the 1990s, and even that was a “reactivated” battleship that was in service only for political purposes. I do not believe any are even functional at this time, much less in service.
