Review: Some Smart Changes In PACIFIC RIM: THE BLACK
The Pacific Rim franchise has never terribly entertained me. Even as a fan of giant monsters, giant robots, and epic, city-destroying battles, Pacific Rim felt dry. The drama and the action always felt too unrealistic, bland, or too fake. And moving to anime has given the show a new perspective and the ability to tell a more personal and intimate story while still having big monsters and big battles. Pacific Rim: The Black improves on the human connection compared to the movies and has some epic fight scenes but because of mediocre enemies and formulaic plots, it never stood out as a unique series or particularly engaging and creative anime.
The story revolves around two siblings who are trying to deal with three major problems, a giant insanely powerful Kaiju, abandonment issues, and terribly cliché military commanders. The story actually moves along pretty quickly. I could’ve easily seen the show season be stretched out to two or three seasons were double the episodes, but it was nice to see that each episode had great pacing and some genuine shock factor. It’s refreshing to see the writers take some bold steps in how brutal the antagonists could be. Unfortunately, those unexpected moments were still undercut by predictable ending and plot devices. The show did a great job of presenting a story even though the story was ultimately not that innovative and had some lame antagonists.
The visuals here from Netflix are 3-D department(s) are finally starting to look pretty good. Things are smooth and the animation and character movements feel natural. Some extra detail and slightly better lighting could go a really a long way in making the fights and character models truly awesome to behold. The actual action scenes and fights were about as standard as Hollywood could be, there’s just a lot more anime screaming and slightly unbalanced and confusing power levels.
The best part of the show was the characters. Our main characters felt more tangible because their positions in life and their choices were reasonable, courageous, and relatable. This along with the other supporting characters helped to round out the band in a good, small group of characters. The acting went pretty well along with it, no complaints, but also no standouts. With all these good guys, it’s too bad that the bad guys were really subpar. There was only really one enemy Kaiju for almost all the episodes (other than a few small ones or brief, one-time appearances). The human antagonist also was neither cruel enough to be scary nor unique enough to be interesting to watch while he was on screen. The “good-guys” and their personal developments were the best part of the show, but they didn’t have the opportunity to do truly interesting things because the antagonists were hollow counterparts.
I would say that Pacific Rim: The Black is the best out of the Pacific Rim franchise, but not by very much. I wish that there was a bigger storyline other than survival and the cliché search for family. The animation is progressively getting better compared to other 3-D anime projects, but the style and quality of combat never wowed or impressed me. This is a fine show to watch, but it won’t leave a giant footprint in the sci-fi or anime world.
