Definitely a 'shut your brain off for a few hours' kind of movie- very enjoyable, though parts made no sense to me. The best way to use a Jaeger is... wrestling a kaiju down? Really? I never saw any of them utilize a ranged attack other than spitting acid (and then only from ONE), seems like going less 'fists of fury' and more of the missiles and such would be a better idea. There have to be some ruined warships around, can we get a couple of five-inch guns mounted up in the shoulder Shadow Hawk-style please? SOMETHING so I'm not fighting kaiju on their own terms?
That bothered me through the whole movie, but otherwise it was pretty good stuff. Typical summer fare-a bit of story wrapped in a spectacle-and I'm fine with that. At least, compared to Battleship, this had decent enough acting and a plot that made a passing attempt at making sense. Very intriguing universe they have here, I hope they expand on it a bit further...
...And while the ending makes it difficult to expand further on the kaiju themselves as an enemy (not impossible, of course), I admit I'm intrigued more than them anyway by the idea of the world that remains after that ending. Now we have cities walled off against attacks that will never come-at least from kaiju- and several nations who have the ability (even if none remain right now) to build jaegers. Looks like the potential for a pretty interesting arms race could brew up in the years following the end of the movie- and if we're being honest, who doesn't want to see a couple of jaegers beat the hell out of each other as part of a Pacific war?
(As an aside, did it seem like there wasn't any point to the Chinese and Russian teams other than 'go die'? At least the Chinese landed a few good hits before dropping, did the Russians land one hit before going down? I was looking forward to seeing what their jaeger could do, and was deeply disappointed in that regard.)
I'd give it a solid B- entertaining and beautiful, but I'd have loved a little more plot- it feels like there's a huge universe here, and we saw very little of it. I want more.