ATLANTIC RIM - REVIEW


And you thought Pacific Rim was a crappy title...

Yes, Atlantic Rim is the infamous B-movie-making machine that is The Asylum's own take on the new Robot Jox-style blockbuster. Taking the rough idea of big robots (with people in 'em) versus big reptilian monsters, we are once again given a healthy dose of godawful performances and cheap CGI.

The one kinda known actor in this one is Graham Greene, who was most recently seen in The Twilight Saga. He plays an admiral in a movie which, sadly, isn't much of a step up from the teen vampire franchise. After an oil rig gets sunk by something no-one can explain, a group of pilots are sent down underwater inside giant robots to find the wreckage and stop whatever is causing such chaos. Why the army had Transformers in the first place and why they couldn't have just sent cameras down to the ocean floor instead of risking lives and billions of dollars is still beyond me. In any event, we focus on a pilot trio who are all selected to control those goofy-looking bots from within. You've got NOT Idris Elba, NOT Claire Danes and NOT Aaron Eckhart at the helm and a really weird and somewhat unpleasant love triangle going on between them. This whole love triangle aspect of the film is introduced about halfway through then quickly forgotten, probably because it wasn't necessary to begin with and only made its key trio more dislikable!

It's as poorly edited and constructed of a film as you'd expect but luckily, it builds up to some images silly enough to warrant a laugh. By the time the pilots plug themselves into the robots and control them Real Steel-style, you'll be having a lot of fun, trust me. The few battles with the monsters don't look too bad and could have carried the entire film had they been more substantial and had the camera focused on them for more than 3 seconds at a time. It's a shame because had the movie cut its dialog, exposition and plot WAY down, perhaps re-written the whole thing as a kind of Transformers thing where we follow these robots from another world as they save humanity from Godzilla-style monsters, we could have had...

Well, Transmorphers, I guess.

Never mind :S

Less talking and more nonsense is what I meant.

As it stands, the film goes for a relatively serious, almost dark tone at times but is so ineptly put together that most of it comes off as odd. You've got corpses peppering streets that shouldn't have been affected by any of the attacks, characters turning villainous just because they have an eye-patch, tons of bad slo-mo walking, people over-celebrating despite the big robots killing hundreds of people by mistake Man Of Steel-style. It's, in a word, ludicrous but it's exactly the sort of thing you expect from The Asylum and, as an Asylum film, it's one of the most entertaining ones I've seen in some time. Far better than garbage like Dragon but just short of being as goofy and entertaining as Sherlock Holmes, it falls in between: some fun moments but nothing too mind-blowing.

Guess what?

I recommend checking out Pacific Rim instead lol

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