The fact that if this happened, it occurred entirely off-camera, pretty much fits my definition of the writers pulling something out of nowhere.
I don’ t think Calaghan is a super-villain at all. The heroes interpret him that way because he fits that trope. But if he’d gotten his (arguably justified) revenge, there’s no reason to think he would have started robbing banks and being Lex-Luthor-esque.
Definitely a good fun film. It’s nice that there are studios other than Pixar that are making good CGI movies now.
Yup! It wasn’t much of a surprise who he was considering the portraits in the house didn’t even try to alter his appearance, but it was cute anyway.
Saw it, liked it. Thought it was good, not great. It was hampered by being overly predictable and just a bit too afraid to take any risks - the two “twists” could be seen coming a mile away, and a lot of stuff just feels like I’ve seen it a million times before (such as the ‘learning to fly’ scene).
Eh, Disney Animation and Pixar are technically separate studios, but with Lasseter and Catmull in charge of both companies, I can’t help but feel there’s a lot of crossover between the two.
One thing that sort of impressed-horrified me when it occurred to me: Callaghan knew who these kids were when he say them. He’d worked alongside them for years and one was maybe 13 and he’d been very cordial to him earlier. When he sees them on the dock, he tries to kill them instantly. No one would believe their story, but he brutally attacks anyway. Pretty hardcore for a Disney flick.
The second is that apparently a lot of the science in the film is based on real ideas and advances, of course exaggerated for the sake of excitement. Still pretty interesting.
Saw it the other day; loved it. Fred totally fuckin’ rocked!
Saw it last night.
I wanted to like it more than I did, but I think that’s because it was SO overly predictable that nothing was really that new or surprising to me. I didn’t have as much of a problem with the ending because during the tearful goodbye scene in The Great Beyond I was distracting myself from the sadness by saying “grab the green chip! grab the green chip!!” And then with the reveal in the fist it made me smile.
Speaking of the ending, the whole “daughter is alive and in hypersleep (what?) so she’s actually ok” thing made me mad. Death happens all the time in Disney, it happened twice in this movie, having everything just be ok there? Not so much.
Not that anyone cares, but here’s how I wish it would have ended: Hiro keeps the fist, and there is some graphic of “6 months later” or something like that. We see him with the group and he tells them he’ll “be right there!”, they all leave and it’s just him in his little garage lab. He takes off a sheet and under it is a mini version of the portal, he turns it on, waits a beat, then says “ow!”. From the portal we hear “Hi I’m Baymax…” roll credits.
Speaking of credits, I left too early. Can someone spoil the AC scene for me?
[spoiler]Fred is in his family house talking to the portrait of his parents. He touches the portrait and it moves aside to reveal a secret room. In the room are computer terminals, various equipment and, hanging on the wall, two superhero-ish costumes. Fred grabs a pair of the blue-and-red briefs off the wall but is interrupted by a silhouetted figure entering the room. The newcomer also grabs a pair of the briefs off the wall and as the face from the portrait is revealed by the light he intones “I wear them front and back and then inside out I go front and I go back.” Fred is astonished. His father tells him, in Stan Lee’s voice, “We have a lot to talk about, son.”
Roll credits.[/spoiler]
I can’t wait to see it again and see how close I was to the actual dialogue, etc.
Saw it last night, loved every minute of it. I don’t care if it had plot holes. Every movie has plot holes. This was just fun.
Spouse came up with one interesting question, though: since Hiro invented the neural transmitter and the microbots, why couldn’t he have (a) made more to use himself against Callaghan, and (b) designed a neutotransmitter that would have let him take control of Callaghan’s microbots (or at least vie for control of them?)
I don’t mind this, though. I was too busy enjoying the film.
“Hairrrrry baby!” 
Sweet! Thanks Bo!
a) That would be a lot of grunt effort. Callaghan was able to produce his on a factory line. Hiro had to individually make his, by hand, and didn’t really know how many Callaghan posessed. Most likely he would have been unable to compete in numbers nor quality. Plus, I’m not sure that microbots are an ideal weapon against other microbots. Personally, I thought that the chemist girl’s goo would have been the best recipe for fighting them - locking them into a set configuration. But the writers seemed to ignore that possibility, completely.
b) The microbots are, presumably, paired with that specific neurotransmitter. There’s no reason to think that he would be able to determine and spoof the unique identifiers that the microbots have been made to respond to. He’s a roboticist, not a hacker. He may have used off-the-shelf security packages, implemented them correctly and securely, and left no backdoor for himself. The real question is, why didn’t he build a signal jammer?
Works for me. 
I didn’t even spot the plot hole, because I was too busy just enjoying the movie.
I can’t be the first person to call it How to Train Your Iron Giant, but I am the first person here to, so…
It was fine but I guess this was a sign that my tipping point for superhero movies may have finally been met. I didn’t know that it would eventually become a Nerd Avengers but admit to being a little disappointed that it was. And the similarities to the two films I cited are so pronounced, that it felt particularly formulaic (no matter how good the execution).
Being a Bay Area resident, the best parts for me were identifying the SF analogous location of the vistas of San Fransokyo.
Speaking of which I found it rather amusing to think of this as taking place in an alternate reality where Japan took over the US, or California anyway.
As a longtime Shadowrun player, this didn’t bother me at all. (In SR, San Francisco has been pretty much taken over by Japanese megacorporations.)
For people who liked the skylines and the near-future fusion-flavor, I give you THE BAT.
http://www.altaerosenergies.com/
Now all they have to do is make it look like a kite or an origami, and we’re set. I’ll have twenty, please thank you.
bump
So this opened here, saw it , loved it.
Don’t care about the plot holes (although I did think “why not build a second headset” to my wife, but then realised that Callaghan likely changed the frequency), or the predictability or the genericism - I just loved the design and animation, and laughed out loud so many times. The sellotape scene…
Also loved there was no romance subplot.
The thing I loved about the movie was the world itself and the general tone. This is a world where everyone has access to ultra-advanced technology, and there’s a very positive, upbeat tone to things. Even a kid can just dream up ideas and create them with a few pieces of commonly available equipment in his garage. College students don’t waste all their hours in class, they actually work in labs that have access to sufficient materials to actually create unique, advanced technology.
The city was at least partially wind powered, as we saw in the flight scene. And, in the climax of the film, I was thinking to myself, “the advantage of using a robot is that the only irreplaceable part is their memory card and/or the schematics for their hardware and firmware”. The movie pleasantly acknowledged this in the ending to the film.
Was the villain supposed to be extremely sympathetic?
Hell his plan was the ONLY reason Betamax had a chance to scan the portal and realize his daughter was still alive but in suspended animation(why did her ship have this feature?).
I couldn’t figure out why he looked sad and disappointed in the last scene he was in, his scheme worked far better than he could have hoped for, his damn daughter is alive and recovered what is he dejected about? If he had not done all his super villain nonsense that would have never happened!
He won!
Because though his daughter is back, she is back to a world in which he had become a monstrous murderer?