Round 2 of my month long battle against The Asylum, makers of crap and shit that I disdain since, like, I dunno…  2004 or something.  I don’t care how long they’ve been at this.  This time, I have a real offensive one: Atlantic Rim.

This is an instance where The Asylum simply took the title to a movie coming out (i.e. Pacific Rim), and modified it only slightly to give it a new title that cannot lead to a lawsuit against them, but, yet, still keep some sort of visual similarity to the movie it is ripping off.

I really loved Pacific Rim.  I mean, how could I not?  Giant robots fighting giant monsters?  That’s just about every 40 year old manchild’s dream come true!  It was Guillermo Del Toro’s take on the classic kaiju craze from Japan.  Giant monsters rise from the Pacific Ocean and wreak havoc all across the Pacific Rim.  Giant monster killing robots from Japan, China, Russia, and the United States fight back and discover the origin of the monsters – an inter-dimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific that the monsters crawl out of to attack Earth.

That’s fuckin’ rad.

What’s Atlantic Rim about?  The Amazon Prime synopsis reads: “When giant monsters crawl out of the Atlantic Ocean and attack the Eastern Seaboard, the US Government is forced to trust A.I. robots to defend the country.”  So…  It’s Pacific Rim but the robots are A.I.s and not controlled by humans.  Also it takes place on the Eastern Seaboard instead of the Pacific.  And this is The Asylum so it’s gonna suck.

Ugh.  Okay.  Let’s roll film.

The movie starts with reports about an oil spill that has occurred in the Atlantic.  A girl comes up to a guy to tell him an underwater team has reached the impact point for what caused the spill.  A couple things.  First, the girl who tells the guy the team is in position looks like a ten year old girl playing with her daddy’s hard helmet and it cracked me up big time.  Next, the team looking at the spill, is in a sub, but they are clearly being filmed in a soundstage made up to look like a cockpit, but in a Plan 9 from Outer Space way.  Just two chairs in front of a console with some computers in the background.  It is kind of amazing.  Additionally, that team is supposedly at the bottom of the “ocean”, but their radar equipment keeps pinging them in the Red Sea which… need I say it?  Yeah, I guess I do.  The Red Sea is NOT an Ocean.

Doesn’t matter, they are all killed by a giant snakey like monster.

Some military guys and a couple broads from NASA (because sure what the fuck ever…  NASA cares about missing oil rigs) talk about the missing oil rig.  They keep talking about doing a deep sea dive in “the Gulf”.  And they keep saying that part of “the Gulf” is as deep as the ocean.  They are also meeting in New Orleans during what seems to be Mardi Gras.  Was that rig supposedly in the Gulf of Mexico?  If so, that is not where the deep sea sub thing was pinging in their radar.  Fuuuuuuuuuck.  Asylum, you lazy shit suckers.

Along with the two NASA ladies, there’s a military guy with an eye patch who is totally ridiculous, Graham Greene (of fucking Dances with Wolves fame – a goddamn Academy Award Nominee now stuck in this shitty flick), and a team of giant robot operators who consist of a reckless bad boy (who is a real piece of work – stay tuned), his hot girlfriend, and the black guy.  I considered calling the black guy “the third wheel”, but, well…  He’s the black guy.  And I’m putting $100 on him being killed before the end of this movie.

Great.  Two weeks into this Asylum Month and it’s turned me into a racist.

Two more things I want to talk about real quick…  First, the fucking synopsis said these robots are A.I.s.  They are being driven by people.  Amazon has lied to me.  Maybe they aren’t the liars, but they are, at least, complicit in perpetrating a lie about these robots.  Second, the picture of the trio I posted above spent about two minutes out of the first ten minutes of this movie’s runtime to walk slo-mo, Right Stuff style toward their robots.  These assholes have done NOTHING to earn this badass slow motion walk toward the camera looking all cool and shit.

For the next several minutes, our “heroes” are shown descending to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico (which is neither the Atlantic Ocean or the Red Sea where the readouts said in the first scene).  I can already see an uncanny parallel to last week’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.  We have a group of people who are doing one thing, in this case the military guys and the NASA ladies.  We also have a second group of people sitting in cockpits doing techy/sci-fi shit.  Asylum….  This shit is booooooorrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnggggggggg.  Make with the fucking monsters.  Make with the action.  It’s not cool to have people just talking to each other in a control room or from one cockpit to another.  It’s not fun to have dark scenes of giant robots walking along the bottom of the ocean.  It’s really not fucking appreciated when you have people talking about seeing some sort of strange creature without showing us what they are describing.  The movie has spent so much of these first twenty minutes just pulling this bullshit.

Okay.  Let’s get back to the movie and I’ll catch you up what all this has revealed in the most boring way possible.  The robots got to the bottom of the gulf.  There, they found all sorts of wrecks.  While they were down there, they start tracking some sort of large creature.  At first they think it is a whale, but then they realize it is some sort of monster.  They start to pursue it, but in hopes to protect the secrecy of the project that birthed these giant robots, Graham Greene orders the robots to be shut down.  The hot girl and black guy’s robots are turned off, but the hot shot main guy’s robot is “out of range”.  He surfaces on a beach on the Eastern Seaboard – not sure how he got there so quickly from the Gulf of Mexico, but okay.  The monster they were tracking also surfaces and the monster and the robot scrap.  We don’t see most of it, only what The Asylum could afford.  Mostly we just see the beach people running away and the Marines approaching to help engage the monster.

Oh boy, guys.  This movie…  This movie is really bad.

The Marines show up.  With five soldiers.  Five.  No more than five.  No less than five.  Five is the number they showed up with.  They fire their machine guns from like a quarter mile away from the monster and a pizza-faced jarhead said the bullets were not penetrating the skin.  No shit, Sherlock.  It’s a Godzilla and you’re tiny little people with what isn’t much more than a pea shooter from a way far distance.  Yeah, I don’t count on your bullets doing shit.

The soldiers get killed because the monster can reach far enough to bite and kill them all in one snap of his jaws.  I don’t think this movie understands geography at all.  At this point, the movie devolves into utter chaos and insanity.  The monster and the “Red” robot (because they don’t have any cool names like “Gipsy Danger” or anything – just “Red”, “Blue”, and “Green”), the girl and black guy in the underwater robots are begging to be turned back on to help, there are now planes engaging the monster, and Graham Greene and co. are in a helicopter watching the happenings.  A jet does succeed, though, in blowing up the monster.  So…  These robots are basically useless, huh?  One jet with a normal pilot guy blew up the monster.

With some absolutely unbelievably bad dialog from the main guy who pilots “Red” describing the fight in the worst, douchiest way to the black guy and hot chick (who pilot the Green and Blue robots, respectively), we get to relive the entire fight from the point of view from a dirtbag douche who hangs out in front of the local Shell gas station.  The army arrests Red after a pretty tense and mostly ADR’d series of lines yelling about how this is no way to treat a hero who just blew up a monster, etc.

At this point, I’m starting to seriously consider slitting my wrists.  The guy who plays Red, David Chokachi, spouts his dialog like he’s drunk or high on some sort of near-lethal combination of Red Bull and crystal meth.  He acts like a child, he’s almost constantly drunk, and he says some of the dumbest shit to both his girlfriend (“Blue, are you ready to get wet?” as they were about to go into the Gulf) and everyone else around him.  He started a fight with a guy he bumped into within seconds of when we first see him in the movie.  He wants to party and accept an award for saving the day while Green is wanting to help clean up the wrecked city.  He gets obliterated drunk at the party and says to Blue while showing off his medal, “Maybe someday the mayor will give you one of these too.”  She doesn’t handle that too well.  Which she absolutely should not.  He eventually talks her into staying and partying with him when she tries to leave to go help Green out with the Red Cross.  This guy is an utter monster and a fucking asshole.  Most certainly more of a monster than the giant ones coming out of whatever body of water they are trying to say they are coming from.

Eye patch guy has a talk with Graham Greene and tells him there are two eggs they found that came from these monsters.  Guess what?  The eggs hatch and the monsters start tossing around subs out of the water into some aircraft carriers and comes aground at the same spot the other did.  Based on the picture below, I think it’s supposed to be a bigger monster?  I dunno.  Frankly, I’m a little preoccupied with how long it will take me to choke to death if I shut my throat in the closet door.

Blue and Green go to retrieve Red who was thrown back into the brig after playing hero at the party the night before.  To be honest…  I would have gladly left Red behind.  The building is already on fire thanks to the monster attack.  Red will die slowly, painfully, deservedly.  Also, it’s been hinted at that A) seemingly Green likes Blue and B) Blue doesn’t seem to really like how Red acts.  Garbage dialog in a few scenes have led me to believe this, but it could also be the noose around my neck cutting off oxygen to my brain making me hallucinate these subplots.  Actually, it’s possible that I hung myself after watching Journey to the Center of the Earth last week, and this whole movie this week is just a fever dream coming to life in my brain as the last seconds of life is ebbing out of me.

Atlantic Rim might be my own Jacob’s Ladder because no one in their right mind would make this movie.

Our trio of so-called heroes escape the base that was blown up by the monster.  What do they do?  Go to a bar.  I am not shitting you.  They go to a bar and drink.  Red gives Green some shit about something.  Probably race related because I suspect Red is that kind of guy.  So, in retribution, Green tells Red that he and Blue made out once while drunk.  Red just laughs it off by saying it’s all water under the bridge after all they have been through and based on all the times Red hooked up with his brothers’ girlfriends…  Sigh.  I said earlier Red is an utter asshole. I really mean it.

Ugh…  I just want this movie to end.  Or for those last few seconds of my life to finally drain out of me so I can stop Jacob’s Laddering this shit.

The robots get an upgrade that allows for the pilots to both control them with their own minds and fly.  This is good because a monster attack is heading for New York.  I don’t know where they are currently, but New York is supposedly kinda far so they get to test out the new flight feature.  At the command center, Graham Greene is holding off the crazy officer with the eye patch from ordering a nuclear launch to stop the monsters.

In New York, a handful of army guys with shitty camouflage face paint tell a handful of tourists and residents to “Get out now!  Death is coming!”  At least that is what I swear I heard the guy say to them.  Again, the noose is trying real hard to end it all, but it isn’t quite getting it done yet.  The robots show up and Blue says, “Oh my god, it’s killing the city!”  Green says, “It’s three or four times bigger than the last one, yo!”  Red says he can smell its “stank ass breath from here.”

For real.  Those were lines in this movie.

Here’s why I’m fairly sure this is a product of the last few neurons firing off crazy bad movie things while I’m dying.  The dialog is absolute bonkers.  In fact, I’m fairly sure there was no dialog written.  Things are said that don’t really mean anything.  They’re said at odd times and in strange circumstances.  Graham Greene is here, and I think he may be some sort of spirit animal of mine considering how much I love Dances with Wolves.  The “hero”, Red, is an absolute villain.  He’s a drunk.  He treats his girlfriend like dogshit.  He’s a garbage friend to Green.  There’s an eye patch guy who talks like he’s trying everything in his power to prevent his skull from breaking out of his face.  Actually…  All of this movie is why I’m sure this is a product of the last few moments of my life causing my brain to do weird shit to me.

In these last several minutes, the robots fight the monster, Eye patch man orders the nuclear attack despite Graham Greene’s protests to allow the robots to do their job.  Red is able to jam the nuclear detonation signal and hijack the missile to use against the monster.  Eye patch guy goes crazy and tries to demand the robot suits be shut down and threatens to kill some people to do it, but he’s stopped.  When Red makes his final run against the monster, he uses the missile and the robot suit to take the monster to space and detonates the nuke.  Red falls back to Earth and crashes.  All my hopes and dreams of something good to come from this movie dies when Red climbs out of the suit and raises his arms triumphantly as the most undeserved hero in movie history.  He also apparently gets to keep the girl too.

There is no light in this existence we call life.

I fucking hate this movie.  It may seriously be one of the most frustrating movies I have ever seen in my whole goddamn life.  Red is absolutely the WORST person on the planet.  Seriously, if we found out that he kicked kittens in the balls on the weekends, I wouldn’t be surprised.  For it to also end with Blue clearly still Red’s girlfriend makes her the dumbest broad in movie history.

Green probably should have been the hero.  He was modest.  He didn’t necessarily want to party all the time like that dude-bro Red.  When they won the first battle, Green helped the Red Cross give aid to the people effected by Red’s idiocy in disobeying his orders to not engage the monster.  Red and Blue ended up getting drunk at a party instead.  Well, Red was drunk.  Blue had no agency in this movie and was simply convinced to stay at the party with the fuckiest of fucks ever.  I’m fairly sure Green would have been the hero if The Asylum wasn’t 100% cognoscente that their dumb audience probably is mostly made up of guys JUST like Red, and possibly racist.  At the very least, not so cool with blonde, white Blue being Green’s girl being that he’s a black dude.

Yeah, I just accused The Asylum’s fans of being racist.  But this movie makes me so fucking angry that I’m kinda okay with that accusation.

I shit you not.  For a movie called Atlantic Rim, this movie starts with an oil rig sinking in the Red Sea.  Then, NASA and the army send their robots to search for the sunken oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico – where they launch from New Orleans.  The robots chase the monster to some place in South Florida.  The final battle is in New York City.  None of these fucking writers knew anything about geography.  Just like their fans.  Yeah, I just accused The Asylum’s fans of being bad at geography.  Again, my anger makes me feel kinda okay with that accusation.

Thank fuck I can finally put this movie behind me.  I guess I’ll come back next week for another one of these asshole movies from The Asylum.  I dunno.  Maybe this is the one that finally breaks me.  Maybe this is the one that makes me hang up the cleats and call it a career.  Oh who am I kidding?  I’ll be back next week because I’m dead inside and these fucking flicks are the only thing that makes me feel anything anymore.

Even if all I have left is eternal pain.