Blown up Kaiju release Kaiju Blue which does widespread environmental damage because it is so caustic.
So, build a robot to punch the Kaiju.
But, then:
Why do robots punch/slash/rocket open the Kaiju in the city in such a way that the Blue is released anyway? Therefore, go back to long range rocket attacks.
Why can the black marketeers so easily pick open a Kaiju in the city without causing the widespread Blue damage?
Why don’t they blast the Kaiju on the other side of the Walls before it breaks through containing the Blue to the oceanside?
Saw it last night. I went in hoping that there would be more to it than just a brainless summer action movie, and there was very little of that. Still, though, it was a very good brainless summer action movie.
I was bugged by the helicopters lifting the jägers, too. Not just because it shouldn’t have worked (the Otaku kaiju also shouldn’t, but at least it looked like it would if you ignored the square-cube effect), but also because it seemed unnecessary. Why are we lifting the jägers to the combat zone to begin with? Why can’t they just walk there?
Meanwhile, I’m also wondering: There’s talk that del Toro is also going to be making a Godzilla movie, and is likely to try to tie it in with Pacific Rim. OK, Godzilla fighting other giant monsters (biological or mechanical) is obviously a staple of the genre, so a tie-in makes some sense… But how? A Godzilla movie would lose a lot of its impact if it’s set in a world that’s already seen kaiju and learned to fight them, and this movie likewise wouldn’t make sense if Godzilla had already made an appearance in the past.
Until now, the Kaiju haven’t generally been walking right up to the local Shatterdome. The areas covered by each Shatterdome are huge, so the Jaegers need to be rapidly transported into place. And even when they do come walking up to the Shatterdome, it’s probably still faster to airlift the Jaegers rather than have them walk in. (Striker Eureka is fast. Cherno Alpha… isn’t.)
In the Battle for Hong Kong, the Kaiju were coming specifically after the Jaegers (and Newt). Knifehead went after Anchorage, where Gipsy Danger’s Shatterdome was, and Mutavore went after Sydney, where Striker Eureka’s Shatterdome used to be. So the fights we observe in the movie give a false impression that the Jaegers only have to jog a little way to get to work each day. (even with Onibaba, Coyote Tango was at the Tokyo Shatterdome.)
The novelization apparently states that Kaiju have never attacked the same city twice… despite the background that Sydney got hit at least twice (by Scissure and later by Mutavore).
Interesting that he was deliberately saturating the color. Second time watching, I was wondering if they’d filmed some shots immediately after a bad sea storm – the scenes in Stacker’s quarters with the door open to the sea had crazy lighting.
We wanted to go again, so I took the kids to see it at the IMAX in 3D. Before we went, I made them some more shirts, replaced my wrist saw with a fusion arc torch, and installed green lasers in the shoulder turrets.
The other element, Newt explained, was that the kaiju have a hive mind, so that whatever any one of them learns, the others could learn as well. Otachi was looking for Newt to get more information, but (s)he is also aware that Gipsy Danger has just finished checking Leatherback’s pulse and is on her way to deliver the goods.
To paraphrase Newt Geiszler, that movie was 2,500 tons of awful!
Yes! I totally wanted to see Cherno Alpha give the kaiju a proper seein’ to with those Incinerator Turbines!
I saw it both ways, and I didn’t notice much a of a difference visually. That the sound in the IMAX was teeth-cracking loud… now that made a difference.
I’m not gonna ask you to bite your tongue there, DigitalC, because now that we have Pacific Rim, we can forget that there were ever any live-action Transformers movies made. It also helps that I agree with your hypothesis.
Del Toro was very specific about the designs for the Jaegers; that you see the big armour-plated bodies from a distance, and only when you get in close do you get to see the working gears underneath and in between on the joints. In this featurette, he remarks on this at about the 2:47 mark.
She can only repeat what the computer says, though.
They are relying on the walls to protect the coasts. There is further explanation if you listen carefully to the news broadcasts in the film. The polictical leaders mention that they’re going to relocate people inland, away from the coastal areas, but this is working like you might imagine it: the rich and connected get to relocate to Cheyenne Mountain while us plebes have to wait behind the wall for the next kaiju attack and hope the wall can hold them.
You don’t have to have a secondary brain to know that this plan isn’t going to work.
Did you see the F-22’s shooting at Trespasser early in the movie? The shots from their cannons bounced off! Now, I realize those are intended for softer targets than the Avenger cannon, and surely A-10’s would have been part of whatever strike force finally knocked him down after he left San Francisco a smoking ruin, but by the time the kaiju were reaching categories three and four, they probably would have evolved a defense against even that. Striker Eureka is carrying some pretty heavy ordinance when he takes down Mutavore…
Maybe, maybe not. The kaiju are aiming for the populated areas at first. If their masters had figured out where people were living, they might have ignored even larger - but fairly isolated - areas like Honolulu in favour of places they could go on a real rampage and take out more of the “vermin”. Assuming nothing could stop them at Manila (but we did), they might just streamroll on over to mainland China for a big time feast!
Could be that the sword was a new feature Raleigh wasn’t familiar with - something added to Gipsy Danger after she was recovered by the Russians. After all, he’s been busy laying bricks for five years while Mako has had time to practice in the simulator.
That may have been part of the plan, or maybe, like I said above, that the bigwigs would just move inland and hide while the poor huddled masses would serve as a buffet line for whatever crawled up out of the breach. Dr. Gottlieb has (correctly) surmised that the rate at which the kaiju arrive is increasing at a frightening rate - and that we’ll soon be up to our eyeballs in kaiju - but the policiticians making the big money decisions don’t have the benefit of his sage advice.
The sword was a new feature that anyone who had been working in the Gipsy Danger simulator woudl have been aware of. Raleigh did not have a chance (or did not care) to go over the schematics for upgrades before being put back into the pilot seat.
Mako oversaw the restoration of Gipsy Danger. She wouldn’t’ve just known about the sword upgrade from the simulator – she’s the one who had it installed.
Drift is a coordination macguffin, not a mind-reading one. And she hid those memories from Raleigh because she really wanted to be the one to use the sword. Because it is cool.
She killed the kaiju Otachi for her family (who had been killed by the kaiju Onibaba in Tokyo). That’s the resolution of her character arc. Note she says “for my family” when they chop Otachi in twain – not when she tells Raleigh there’s swords installed.
Her family doesn’t have a sword fetish, or something.
Raleigh could have learned about the sword from the Drift, but there’s a lot of information there, and there’s a limit to how much a human can process at once. So the memories of the sword’s existence were in Mako’s mind, but he just never noticed it.
Heck, you don’t even need the Drift to get a similar scenario: He could also see the button for the sword in the cockpit. But again, he just didn’t notice it.
I know, right? I hope the whole cast got fired for that one! And I hope the animal supervisor got fired for the bit where the big gorilla monster jumped completely out of the water onto the robots back in one big leap. Come on, jumping out of water is hard, there is no way the big gorilla monster could have done that!
As usual for moriah’s nitpicks, these are all readily explained in the text of the movie. But paying attention to the dialogue and visuals is very difficult, so we should be forgiving. Let’s explain!
First of all, they aren’t trying to engage the kaiju “in the city” - the goal is always to kill them in open ocean before they make landfall. Once the kaiju gets into Hong Kong, long range rocket attacks don’t work so well when you’re trying to hit a monster that can literally use a skyscraper as cover.
Hannibal Chau has a whole monologue in which he explains how his guys get into the kaiju corpses without spraying acid everywhere. Hell, if it weren’t for Ron Perlman being the most charismatic bastard in the film, I would be criticizing that part of the script for wasting time telling rather than showing.
Did you miss the three different battle scenes that took place in the middle of the ocean? The jaegers always try to take out the kaiju before they reach the walls. They just don’t always succeed.
Seriously, there’s fanwank and then there’s just common sense. You may as well ask why the AIs in “The Matrix” use attack robots with ridiculously short-ranged laser beams rather than heat-seeking missiles, or why the Death Star doesn’t just blow up the gas giant Yavin first, rather than spending half an hour flying around it.
1: Others have already mentioned this, but they’re not really consistent with how important drift-compatibility is. The main character says that he and his brother were selected for the most elite force in the world, despite not being the greatest of fighters, just because they had the rare gift of being drift-compatible. Most of the teams we see are either close relatives, or have been in a close relationship of some sort for years. But then in the final battle, we have one team that’s on their third drift together and only met days previous, and another that’s never drifted together before?
2: Again already mentioned, but I would have liked to have seen at least a little bit of characterization for the Russian and Chinese pilots. I know it’s an action movie, but I’m not asking for much: “The young Aussie guy is a dick, and his father is trying to rein him in” was enough characterization for them, for instance. Did the other pilots even have any lines?
3: The improvised weapons. Humans grab objects from the environment to hit things with because they’re hard, and our fists are soft. But Jäger fists, made of exotic unobtainium alloys, are a lot harder than shipping containers are. Why bother? I can at least partly understand the big ship, if he wanted a bit more reach, and didn’t yet know about the sword, but how the heck did the ship survive for multiple hits? It should have smashed to pieces the first time it hit the kaiju.
Those criticisms are nigh unto moriah-level absurdity.
There is an extended series of scenes showing that Raleigh and Mako are drift-compatable – and yet, their first Drift goes horribly, horribly wrong. So much so that Pentecost grounds them, despite being desperate for jaeger pilots.
And Pentecost hangs a lampshade on it with him and Chuck: he’s the drift ninja. It’s addressed in the movie.
The triplets have no lines; I’m not even sure they were actors. Apparently it was a bit of a miracle they found three identical Chinese triplets at all.
The Kadinovskys have plenty of characterization – usually in the background of the scenes they’re in. They’re sort of parading and sneering at everyone as Cherno Alpha is moved through the Shatterdome, then Sascha is draped all over her husband (and sneering) in the messhall, and when Mako’s crappy drift is about to kill everyone they calmly saunter out of the way of the plasma cannon as though it’s beneath them to hurry.
Sasha has lines in Cherno Alpha – she’s the one calling out (in English) what tricks Otachi is pulling out in the fight, and she gives kind of a scream of inarticulate rage as they’re getting drowned.
When did it say that the jaeger fists are made of unobtanium alloys? Some of the background fluff mentions that Striker Eureka has “brass knuckles”, but I don’t recall any mention of magical materials in the movie. Regardless, fists with quarterrolls are heavier than fists alone, hence do more damage upon punching.
At this point, it’s gotten to the point that it’s not about nitpicking or disliking the movie but having a visceral need to make sure nobody else likes the movie. And I really don’t understand that attitude.
Why nitpick pointless details in an effort to make other people feel bad? It’s just a movie. A movie about giant robots punching giant alien monsters, I might add.
Continuing to harp on increasingly minor nitpicks serves no purpose but telling people they’re wrong for enjoying a piece of mindless entertainment. That’s ok (well…acceptable) the first couple times. But after a couple weeks, it’s rude and unnecessary.
