Another Asylum cash-in on a summer blockbuster. Like they did with "Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies" just in time before the release of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "I am Omega" as "I am Legend" came out, so again they do it with "Atlantic Rim" in the time of "Pacific Rim".

It is just shameful, isn't it? But still, you know what you get with the productions and movies spewed out by The Asylum. Lower budget version of potential blockbusters, with failing dialogue and even worse CGI effects.

However, I will say that in the more recent time, The Asylum has started to post more money into the CGI effects, and it is paying off. The effects in "Atlantic Rim" were actually quite alright. Though the movie was just suffering from being a cheap knock off of "Pacific Rim".

The storyline in this movie requires no brain activity, just switch into auto-pilot and watch the movie as the three good guys in their mecha armor suits beat up some colossus aquatic monster that came from God knows where.

As for the dialogue in the movie, well it was bad, really bad. I have never heard soldiers talk or communicate in the way that they did in this movie. And some of the things they say was just downright embarrassing to witness.

And the acting in the movie was equally bad. Steven Marlow (playing Sheldon Geise) looked like he had a bad case of diarrhea, while Graham Greene (playing Admiral Hadley) was like a drone totally devoid of emotions at all. And David Chokachi (playing Red) looked like he was trying to do a reenactment of "American Ninja: The Musical" - if there was such a thing.

This is not one of the better movies to make it out of The Asylum's drawing board, not even by a long shot. Everything here was rushed and seemed to be half-hearted. If you are going to copy something and cash in on something, at least do it properly.

For a Sci-Fi movie, then "Atlantic Rim" was a really plain and below mediocre experience. Although I have seen a lot, and I do mean a lot, of questionable and low-budget movies, then "Atlantic Rim" is not the worst amongst those movie, but it is up there on the high ends of the scale.

Just about the worst Asylum movie ever. I don't expect much from them, but recently (AE Apocalypse Earth) wasn't so bad, so I thought I'd try out another. Holy crap was I burned! The acting is just non-existent. In fact, only one actor even tried to be wooden, and that was Graham Greene. I'm convinced he did it deliberately because I know he can act. Probably realised what a pile he'd signed on for and decided to robot-speak all his lines from then on.

And man! What lines! This is dire-logue at its finest. At one point one characters says something like "We should go and help!" to which his companion replies "No! It's against orders!". The first then says "Well, I'm going anyway!" to which the second says "Well, I'm coming too!" That's what you are dealing with. As far as characterization goes, there is little in the way of it here. The three "soldiers" have all the military skills and mentality of three year-olds. One is permanently drunk, the other thinks she is Katee Sackhoff and the third is...well, let's just be honest and say he is along to make up the racial diversity quota for the movie.

The robots and the monsters are not explained, come out of nowhere and, as you might expect, are less than convincing in their discount CGI goofiness. In many instances, the scenes look like an 80's video game, they are that bad.

The robot cockpit sets are basically a small room, decorated with flexible air-conditioning tubes and disco rope lights. All expense HAS been spared with this one. They make the Blake's 7 sets look fantastic by comparison.

They also violate (due to budgetary constraints, no doubt) the primary rule of story-telling. "Show, don't tell." Here, we are treated to painfully long scenes where you see nothing other than the faces of the characters as they describe how amazing, or terrible, the imagined view in front of them is. You never get to see it. Just their unconvincingly surprised or shocked-looking faces as they describe it to you.

I plead with you not to watch this. You'll hate yourself if you do. It is just abysmal in every way imaginable.

SUMMARY: Another awful Asylum rip-off of a better product. Don't bother with it.

How can I explain this film? It goes so far beyond words. I simply cannot use words to describe it. Words are simply not suitable, they are not powerful enough to explain the range of emotions one feels when watching this... artwork.

While watching this film, I experienced uncontrollable laughter. It was wonderful at first, but then it tapered off and left me with a general nausea induced by a profound feeling of pity. I felt so sorry for the actors. The shame of being in this movie must surely weigh heavily upon them.

Enough hyperbole. Let's get to the heart of it.

The movie's production value was actually reasonable. But almost every minute of it was an assault on my brain. The acting was atrocious, the CGI was not horrible, but was far from convincing. Think Power Rangers. The soundtrack was utterly miserable, a straight run of "epic-ish-action-ish-wow-you" muzak that never seemed to fit the scenes, but instead served as the only consistent tie between them.

The flow of the plot, the aspect of a movie that ties each scene together into a cohesive storyline, was just deplorable. The director leaps from scene to scene, the actors doing things that make no sense at all, only to end up at the bar drinking as much as possible (apparently this is what the writers feel good soldiers should do). I suppose it's reasonably difficult to outline a respectable plot when the story itself is so full of haphazard clichés. The soldiers don't act like soldiers, the monsters don't act like monsters, the civilians act like cannon fodder (of course. And they do such a good job of it). I can't say the movie was completely predictable because NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE.

I felt like a 5 year old boy was leaping on his bed swinging around his Jedi light-saber telling me, "And then the robots had weapons! And then the monster threw a submarine! And then they drank too much!" And all when while I just want him to calm down and go to bed so that I can think straight and make sense of the world again.

I feel my score is accurate, but despite that, this is a must watch. It will teach you so much about good movie making, using the time honored "See what they did? DON'T EVER DO THAT" method of teaching.