OK, so I posted a glaring review of Pacific Rim. It’s terrible. It makes me wish I’d taken my 8-year-old’s advice and gone to Despicable Me 2 instead.
But a line from Larry Niven kept running through my mind. In Footfall, Niven has one of his characters say, “Why couldn’t it have been Wells’ martians that invaded? We’d have had them in zoos in 2 weeks.” Feh, or something like that.
And looking at Pacific Rim and the kaiju…I’m honestly thinking that our existing military - just the US - would have wrapped them up quickly and efficiently. That’s without getting everyone else involved.
Seriously, even without nukes, a flight of B-2 bombers - which are speced to carry 80 500lb GPS-guided bombs each would have taken care of any of the kaiju we see. That’s outside of anything else we could throw at them.
Rant: instead we build enormous mechs so we can PUNCH them? Argh.
Anyway, am I wrong or would they have been a controllable threat?
Just responded in the “Seen It” thread with a similar comment
Like a lot of movies, the military tactics require a major suspension of disbelief. You have to ignore that humanity has forgotten everything it has learned in its rather well practiced efforts at destruction.
From a strategic standpoint, the main conceit of the movie, that we would take scarce resources and start building walls instead of Jaeger suits, was just silly. By World War II it was generally understood that fixed defenses are almost useless against a mobile force.
But beyond that, I’m with you. A B2, heck even a single B52 patrolling the coast with a load of bunker buster type bombs would be able to stop pretty much anything that we saw in the movie. The biggest issue might be that a 4700lb bunker buster that can smash through 20ft of concrete and still travel a mile down range might end up going in one side and out the other of the typical kaiju before it goes off.
Spinning from that, GPS or laser guided 2 ton iron darts would probably work just as well, you wouldn’t need the explosives, and you would likely be able to recover and reuse the darts.
Still, you have to ignore those capabilities and enjoy the film for what it is: cool kung-fu fights between human and dinosaur analogues.
Actually, I think that the way the military was dealt with in Pacific Rim was better than the way it often is in movies or shows with supernatural or quasi-supernatural monsters, in which it’s just taken for granted that the awesome destructive power of the modern military will just be totally useless against Godzilla, or vampires, or cloverfield, or whatever. Here at least it’s acknowledged that modern destructive weaponry has SOME effect, just not a very large effect. I guess it’s because it took place in an alternate reality in which the most destructive weapon the military has is very short range machine guns mounted on jet fighters…
Even more so, they specifically stated that early on they did beat several of them with ‘conventional’ weaponry - but they realized with the next wave, they needed something bigger/better.
The thing that gets me is that the military in these movies seem never to have heard of artillery. A battery of 155s would put paid to any group of monsters extant. And the National Guard (!) has units of same, so they could be positioned where needed.
Exactly! Heck, some of the minor league nations have armies that could have taken care of these guys in a heartbeat.
“It’s a triple event!”
“OK, call the Taiwanese AND the Malaysians.”
Granted, infantry won’t be a damn bit of help - other than as pickets and scouts - but that’s why we’ve developed all this new hardware…to improve on what infantry can do.
I literally started yellling at the screen when I was watching “Starship Troopers” and the huge waves of Bugs attacked, and all the infantry had was assault rifles.
I kept thinking that a battery of 155s and/or airstrikes could have taken care of the vast majority of Bugs in that attack, and crew-served machine guns would have taken care of the rest.
The main thing for me was the wall. There is no way a single country would have pushed for a simple wall (No dialogue or scene of turrets, towers, or any other type of weapons on the wall…apparently it was just going to be a wall). The idea of ALL countries pushing for a wall just seemed really stupid. And yes there are plenty of ways conventional military could have taken out even the category 5 kaiju.
I’d argue that even some snipers with .50 cal sniper rifle,s with SLAP ammo for the skull, could so some fairly decent damage to the brain.
But really, these critters come from the ocean…where were the submarines and torpedoes?
With all that said, I still loved this goofy ass movie.
And what’s with just sending fighters? Helllooo. Bombers.
Secondly, the military would not be patting itself on the back after the first attack and go back to business as normal. Biological creatures don’t just appear. They come from a population of other creatures. Okay, given that the narrator was 15 when the first event happened he couldn’t have known the extent of the work going on to prepare for future events. But as a jaeger pilot he should have know the history of the military response and research.
Secondly, walls aren’t meant to ‘stop’ an enemy. Walls are structures to place weapons on so you can get height to fire on the enemy. Still I thought the wall project was stupid from the get go. Walls are always breached. And walls built on the beach? Stupid.
I was amused by the WWII stereotyping in the movie. Especially the science geeks who could have been boffins in any British WWII movie.
Just watched it, and the previous posts are spot-on in terms of realistic military responses.
But so what? It’s a movie with giant robots and giant monsters. It’s like complaining that a Godzilla movie is fake and then going into a Trekkie-like diatribe about all the details about the toy tanks and fake buildings that were wrong.
It’s a B movie that happens to have a major budget. Basically Godzilla (done right - not like that '98 travesty) with some money. I don’t think people get that.
I was thinking what a company of M1 Abrams could do.
They wouldn’t even need to fire; just drive back-and-forth across the battlefield squishing bugs under their treads.
And that’s if the bugs somehow managed to get close; aerial/orbital surveillance could easily map their locations and either frag their asses with some artillery-delivered cluster munitions, or air strikes, or even orbital strikes.
“Bugs on a desert plain” is “infantry in the open,” the absolute last thing you want to be in this day and age.
Large, organic monsters stomping around L.A.? The M829A1 “Silver Bullet” can penetrate just over two feet of armor (hardened steel and/or composites) at 3,000 meters (almost two miles).
The destructive capability of modern militaries is something few can truly appreciate unless they’ve seen it in action.
You’d have to suspend the laws of physics for living things that massive to stand upright without collapsing structurally, so quibbling about their ability to take a hit seems sort of beside the point.
It gets worse when they establish that the kaiju are coming through “the rift”—a dimensional portal, at the bottom of the Pacific.
Apparently not too deep in the Pacific, at that. And in a fixed location, with a monster-spawning schedule that’s almost predictable.
Yeah, dumping a nuke into the wormhole apparently didn’t work, normally. But you know what you could try?* Just mining the exit.*
It doesn’t even have to be a nuke—although that might actually be an acceptable solution, seeing how destructive/poisonous the kaiju are by themselves—just ready huge loads of conventional explosives to set off whenever something comes through. If they were ready to fund a giant robot program or even building a wall around the world’s entire inhabited coastline.
Hell, the Jaegers seemed to operate underwater just fine—just station a garrison underwater at the rift, permanently, and shoot/bludgeon any monsters as soon as they come through. You could even do it with a turret system, or possibly even by covering the rift with a huge mass of rock, metal, or concrete. Again, if you’re able to commit to building continent-wrapping giant walls, this can’t be that much more outrageous a solution.
But really, the movie could have just sidestepped all that by having the rift move around, or only appear at certain times in random places on the seabed, or release deadly disruptor beams that make it nearly impossible to approach. Just a little effort, and it would have been golden. :smack:
Lots of people bring this point up when talking about things like King Kong or Godzilla or other giant monsters, but why can’t we just imagine they have stronger bones than what we’re used to? To ants, us humans must be biological marvels, able to be a thousand times bigger and still move with such agility. The kaiju must be the same way, their organs and everything is simply proportionately stronger
To get back on topic, I’m sure that, fanwanking, the reason conventional arms do so little damage is that they do have these super dense bones and armor that our weapons aren’t designed to penetrate, but a giant robot fist with rockets on the elbows can!
Yeah, I wish in all the scenes of dissection and the organs and mites and so forth had been a mention of “wow, it sure it hard to cut through this skin, of course it’s the skin that makes them so immune to most weapons” or something along those lines.
Hey, it was great fun! And the voice-over at the beginning specifically said that missiles (and other weapons I don’t remember) didn’t stop them. Why, it didn’t say.
And to nitpick, it was a breach, not a rift!
Are you kidding? Most of us can barely lift our own body weight! Ants can lift twenty times their own weight. They’re laughing at us.
In one of the scenes with Newton, he said that it takes hours to cut through the super-dense skull, which is why they can’t get an intact brain.
They said it took 6 days to destroy the kaiju with conventional weapons which it was moving inland. And apparently its blood poisons the land or something. So they needed something that could stop them immediately without them letting them travel far through populated areas.
The scifi effect they came through was a breach. It was located at a rift between tectonic plates.
