Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2013

A popcorner made mainly to provide work for CGI geeks, this is mostly 25-story good-guy robots battling enormous Toho monsters called Kaiju. It’s Transformers meets Godzilla by way of Top Gun. The production design is eye-popping, at least for the first half hour. It is, after all, by fantasy visionary Guillermo Del Toro, who crafted Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy. But there’s little of the human warmth of those movies, and the spectacle soon morphs into deafening repetition. Little for the diverse cast to do. Most of the dialogue is shouted. It’s like watching someone else play a very loud video game.