Movie reviews: Monsters University
The pair meet at college, where monsters go to learn the various aspects of terror, although only the cream of the crop will graduate as child-scarers. Mike, a green ‘beachball’ with one eye, is determined to succeed but simply not terrifying; Sulley, the son of a famous father, coasts through his classes on reputation and his appearance. Lumped together with all the other also-rans in a competition to decide who will move up to the elite programme, Mike and Sulley must join forces to prove the sceptical Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren) of their worth. The latest offering from Disney / Pixar, Monsters University is a vibrant and lushly colourful affair — the eponymous college is both a parody of, and a love letter to, Ivy League academia — and the detail, as always, is fabulous. The story lacks a little of the oomph of the first outing, however. That concept — monsters are terrified of children, but must scare them as the monster’s world runs on the energy of human children’s screams — was delightfully original and subversive, but Monsters University is a straightforward tale of the geeks inheriting the earth, as our heroes, spurned by the cool frat house fraternity, deploy brain to overcome brawn.
Steven Spielberg recently predicted that Hollywood is heading for some kind of apocalypse, that a handful of big blockbusters will tank at the box office and their failures will change the way movies are made forever. Pacific Rim (12A) won’t suffer such disaster thanks to those intriguing posters but unless you’re a 12-year-old boy who hasn’t seen Transformers, Godzilla, or Power Rangers (quite possible, actually), there’s nothing going on here. Set in the near future where giant monsters called Kaigus creep out of the Pacific Ocean from a ‘breach’ between their universe and ours (don’t ask), our last line of defence, Jaegers — giant robots piloted by two controllers that are connected by a neural ‘drift’ (don’t ask) — have been successful until a new wave of Kaigus prove too powerful. The UN pulls funding so in steps Undeclared’s Charlie Hunnam, a maverick pilot who likes to disobey Idris Elba’s (The Wire) orders, to convince the world that Jaegers can still bring the pain. A big B Movie, or a cheapo Japanese TV series with a budget, Pacific Rim will live and die on its action scenes — basically big robots hitting bigger monsters — but when those scenes are set at night, in the rain, or underwater, and delivered with choppy cuts, visibility becomes an issue. Maybe it’s to disguise any potential special effects snafus.
