Pacific Rim
Jul. 23rd, 2013 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn the near future, giant monsters start emerging from the Pacific Ocean, causing physics to break down and humanity to decide giant robots (co-piloted by mind-melded martial artists) were the best way to beat them. But the monsters keep getting bigger and stronger, and more and more of the robots are getting destroyed. Can the threat be ended before the last Jaeger falls? (Spoiler: It’s an action movie. Seriously, what do you think?)
This really needed to be titled "Mecha vs. Kaiju" or even "Giant Robots Punch Monsters," because it's Snakes on a Plane levels of exactly what it says in the tin. There is not a single plot point you can't see coming twenty minutes earlier.
I give them a lot of credit on the visual effects and fight choreography, in that it was possible to follow exactly what was happening in the Jaeger/Kaiju fights, and also each monster (or Jaeger) went down relatively quickly. This was both an advantage over the Transformers movies (where everything was too fast, with too many moving shiny pieces and explosions to follow they actual action) and over Man of Steel (where Superman and various antagonists spent twenty minutes just punching each other back and forth).
Mithras commented on the lack of any middle eastern representation in the Jaeger crews, but that did actually make sense: The monsters are coming from the Pacific. The middle east and mainland Europe are the safest places to be, and probably the most economically stable. They’re also just generally insulated from the conflict and the danger. The super-rich likely all moved there and are spending their time learning to drift with zebras and buying powdered Kaiju bone as a male enhancement product.
I realize the entire movie was running on Rule of Cool, but you seriously have to turn off parts of your brain and accept certain premises about physics and about weapons, given that in the real world, shooting the Kaiju with ICBMs or just parking a nuclear sub right outside the rift would be a much better use of resources.
While I’m overthinking things: They could have made much, much better use of the “neutral linking with the Kaiju hivemind” plotline. The first link provides the Kaiju with the memories of a major member of the human force working against them, who (at that time) doesn’t realize this is the case. That means they know everything he knows about the human plans. For the second linkup, you don’t send in the same guy. You send in someone who has deliberately been briefed with misinformation about the human plans. Why do the last three Kaiju to come through stay at the rift? Because they know about the plans to bomb it. Because this is a human-centric action movie, the plan works anyway, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have the smart guys actually be smart enough to use actual tactics, once they realized they were fighting an intelligent foe?
Overall: For what it was trying to be, this could only have been better if the Jaegers required five pilots and could form blazing swords.
This really needed to be titled "Mecha vs. Kaiju" or even "Giant Robots Punch Monsters," because it's Snakes on a Plane levels of exactly what it says in the tin. There is not a single plot point you can't see coming twenty minutes earlier.
I give them a lot of credit on the visual effects and fight choreography, in that it was possible to follow exactly what was happening in the Jaeger/Kaiju fights, and also each monster (or Jaeger) went down relatively quickly. This was both an advantage over the Transformers movies (where everything was too fast, with too many moving shiny pieces and explosions to follow they actual action) and over Man of Steel (where Superman and various antagonists spent twenty minutes just punching each other back and forth).
Mithras commented on the lack of any middle eastern representation in the Jaeger crews, but that did actually make sense: The monsters are coming from the Pacific. The middle east and mainland Europe are the safest places to be, and probably the most economically stable. They’re also just generally insulated from the conflict and the danger. The super-rich likely all moved there and are spending their time learning to drift with zebras and buying powdered Kaiju bone as a male enhancement product.
I realize the entire movie was running on Rule of Cool, but you seriously have to turn off parts of your brain and accept certain premises about physics and about weapons, given that in the real world, shooting the Kaiju with ICBMs or just parking a nuclear sub right outside the rift would be a much better use of resources.
While I’m overthinking things: They could have made much, much better use of the “neutral linking with the Kaiju hivemind” plotline. The first link provides the Kaiju with the memories of a major member of the human force working against them, who (at that time) doesn’t realize this is the case. That means they know everything he knows about the human plans. For the second linkup, you don’t send in the same guy. You send in someone who has deliberately been briefed with misinformation about the human plans. Why do the last three Kaiju to come through stay at the rift? Because they know about the plans to bomb it. Because this is a human-centric action movie, the plan works anyway, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have the smart guys actually be smart enough to use actual tactics, once they realized they were fighting an intelligent foe?
Overall: For what it was trying to be, this could only have been better if the Jaegers required five pilots and could form blazing swords.
