Didn’t see the thread on search. Reposting from here:
What, no thread?
So I decided to go watch the movie, Pacific Rim, over the weekend.
Premise: Godzilla-like monsters are coming through a transdimensional crack in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, so humanity builds giant human-driven robots to engage them in hand-to-hand combat. Yay!
First interesting detail: this could easily have been an “origins” movie, detailing the discovery of the aliens and trying to fight them with conventional weapons before finally determining a better solution was needed, and choosing to build the “jaegers” (i.e. giant robots) for the climactic finale. Instead, they tell that story in the opening montage and set up the story of this movie. So points for that.
Second, the movie is enjoyable and funny and exciting, assuming you don’t actually think about the premise or any of the details. Because there’s lots of stupid Rule of Cool going on. But within those premises, it is fun and engaging. A bit predicatable - there doesn’t seem to be a cliche they avoided.
So first big “don’t think about it” - the Jaegers are giant, overly-complicated robots built to essentially move like giant humans and engage in combat directly with the beasts. Okay. They walk like humans. Okay. Except they fight the Kaiju (giant monsters) in the middle of the ocean. That’s right, giant anthropomorphic robots standing at the surface of the ocean (knee deep or so) so they can fist-fight giant monsters like a barroom brawl. Uh huh.
They do get the occassional cool weaponry to aid their effectiveness. One Jaeger has hands that transform into giant energy cannons that deliver repeated blows. Another Jaeger opens its chest to reveal a battery of gaint missile-cannons.
The Kaiju are described by a category scale, based upon size and something vaguely about shape. The story we follow is at a point where the humans have been winning for several years, but the Kaiju start getting bigger and coming for frequently, making them tougher to kill and destroying the Jaegers.
So to make these Jaegers more interesting (because anthropomorphic robots that walk on water isn’t interesting enough), the control process uses dual pilots that use a combination motion-capture system and switches and knobs. The motion capture system places them in controller suits and then mounts those suits into the control center in the robot’s head, and the body movements drive the robot’s body movements. So walking involves walking, moving your feet, and thereby moving controllers that then tell the legs to move.
Second “don’t think about it” - there’s a serious issue with scaling up of this nature. Think how fast you can move your body, then think about a robot the size of 30 story building moving at that speed. Hmmm. Alternately, think about the lag-time issues of tracking your motions at normal speed and then translating them to that 30 story building and making it move at reasonable speeds. Hmmm.
Oh yeah, I mentioned the dual pilot issue. The robot drive system involves linking to the brain in order to control the actions. For some reason there is brain synch and body synch. Anyway, due to unexplained difficulties of the neural load or whatever, they quickly discovered that one person could not control the robots, so they invented the dual pilot system, whereby each pilot takes half the robot’s brain load. But in order to keep the pilots in synch, they devised a system of brain merging whereby the pilots link consciousnesses. This I assume is to help them coordinate body movements so they aren’t working out of synch with each other. The complication is that their memories get intermingled and so it is important to stay in the moment and not get sidetracked into memories and thus get lost.
Um, whatever all that means.
Let’s see, there’s not only plenty of robot on monster combat, but also human drama. The hero is a pilot who lost his brother in combat, ran off to hide building the “Coastal Wall”, only to be called back into service when the wall is shown inffective and the invasion is ramping up and the last of the Jaeger defenders need the best they can scrounge up.
Don’t think about it moment: apparently someone decides that the giant robots are costly and losing ground to the Kaiju, so the solution they come up with is to build a giant coastal wall all around the Pacific ocean. That’s right, all along the coast not only of North America, but South America, Austrailia, Russia, China, Japan, and probably around all of the islands in the Pacific. A giant wall. Big enough to keep out monsters the size of 30 story buildings. Because that’s cheaper.
The leader of the Jaeger program is a tough old former pilot, who is the epitome of the combat veteran/moral leader. He’s tough, he’s smart, he’s a force of personality and admirability, and he’s (duh duh duh) sick with some mysterious illness that he hides from everyone.
There’s a couple of other pilot sets, the throw away groups (a couple Russian stereotypes, and a set of three Chinese dudes/brothers with a three-armed Jaeger). And then there’s the Australian duo, an older vet and a young, brash, cocky shit who doesn’t like the hero because that’s just the way things go in these movies.
And then there’s the hot Japanese chick, who was rescued by the old military leader and raised as his daughter, trying to become a pilot but being kept out of the fray by her pop even though she’s got the best reflexes and training of all the new crop of pilots. And she’s hot.
So we’re treated to the combat screening technique to find a suitable partner for our returning hero (since his brother is dead), which involves stick-fighting in a floor mat. Because that somehow allows evaluating fighting style and mental compatibiliity, how is not explained.
More fun ensues when our heros go off to battle in the restored Jaeger against the new bigger Kaiju. These Kaiju are able to take blows that rip off parts and break joints and then still function. And they leak glowy blue gunk.
So we get lots of fun combat techniques, including dragging a ship from the harbor to use as a stick and emulate the stick fighting we saw before, smashing robots and Kaiju all over Hong Kong, and then a magic sword deployed out of nowhere (from within the robot’s arm) to cut up Kaiju. Wait, there’s a giant sword hiding in the arm of the Jaeger, but they didn’t think to deploy that earlier in the fight, and rather waited until a last ditch effort? Instead, they’ve been duking it out with fists? :smack:
And if robot-monster fist-fights isn’t cool enough, they drag in the crazy scientist angle, with not 1, but 2 crazy scientists, each with an independent approach and crazy theory. One guy is a stuffy British statistician, studying the patterns and predicting the future activity ramp up. The other is a flaky biologist and Kaiju groupy, who has tattoos of his favorite Kaiju and knows their stats like trading cards. He has this brilliant idea to use the brain-bonding technology to try to read the aliens’ minds. And that works out well. 
And then there’s the opportunist, the guy who runs a shadow network harvesting Kaiju bodies and selling the parts on the black market. Want some ground up Kaiju bone to act as a boner enhancer? He plays a useful comedic angle.
One moment of tactical genius I did approve: in the climactic battle, two Jaegers are approaching the undersea rift by walking along the ocean floor, they get jumped by some Kaiju guarding the gateway. One of the Kaiju is swimming toward our hero at breakneck speed, going to slam into the Jaeger and beat it up some more (it’s already half crippled). Our hero instead deploys the giant sword and ducks the strike, bracing the sword and letting the Kaiju split itself from head to tail as the momentum carries it across the blade. Neato.
One more “wait a minute” moment: one of the Kaiju shows up and sprouts wings. Now we’re talking about a flesh and bone monster the size of a building, that sprouts flesh wings, and then no only takes flight, but does so carrying a Jaeger. And the wings themselves aren’t much longer than the body of the beast itself. Right.
So it carries the Jaeger up to 50,000 feet (as clearly stated) before the Jaeger gets free and starts falling toward the ground. And starts glowing from the plasma cloud of atmospheric reentry. :smack:
Okay, stupid movie, but a lot of fun.
Now that I’ve read this thread, I see many of my comments have been made. I also see some comments that change my perspective a little, like the visual elements.
Okay, I seriously didn’t get all the depth some of you are pulling out with respect to character names, Jaeger names, and especially Kaiju names.
I mean, the character’s name is “Stacker Pentacost”? Seriously?
[QUOTE=Frylock]
I liked it, but I kept wondering if being a giant douche was a requirement for Jager pilots.
[/QUOTE]
It’s already a stereotype for fighter jocks - look at Top Gun. So yeah, only more so.
[QUOTE=Ranchoth]
Even the robots, with their control systems, left so much unexplored. So two pilots have to use the mind-link system to control it, together? All we really see is that it can send you into a flashback fugue, it can cause you pain if the robot or the other pilot is damaged, and the pilots move slightly more in synch. So much possibility there, just kind of…left sitting.
[/QUOTE]
But we do see it working. There’s never a moment when the pilots are moving against each other in any of the Jaegers. There’s never a moment when the left pilot tries to move left and the right pilot moves right, and the jaeger falls over. When they move, they move in unison, just like they are choreographed. The exceptions are when they drive the arms independently, or when one disengages arm controls to flip switches. And those exceptions make sense.
[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
My big issue was that “hero” and “aussie dickwad” both looked alike in that “Robert Redford -> Brad Pitt -> Chris Pine” sort of way and I really couldn’t tell them apart.
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I kinda felt the same way, the two actors looked a lot alike.
[QUOTE=Push You Down]
It being the only test was dumb but it being a test of compatibility I thought was pretty interesting. The test should have been how long they could go without scoring on each other–showing ability to get in the other’s head.
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That would actually make some sense, versus whatever we saw.
[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Really, my only real complaint was about the scientist subplot. For the most part it works, in a ridiculous anime sort of way, but revealing that they had tried to nuke the rift multiple times with no success and that was their great plan again without any alteration really just made them all look stupid. I would have prefered a slight twist.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think they were doing it just they way they’d tried before. This time they weren’t dropping the nuke on top of the portal, but hiking to the portal to stuff it down the portal. They still had to learn that one detail about the alien DNA scan thing, but they were adding a twist to their prior nuke attempts.
[QUOTE=moriah]
And, most importantly, you must be able to ‘slide’ with your partner with your thoughts linked as one, which will only be tested once in your life, when we put you into a fully armed Jeager with the fate of the world in balance knowing that many people fall apart under such conditions.
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To some degree, I agree - their first drift together was inside the full Jaeger, powered and armed and all. A simulator drift together would have made sense. Perhaps they didn’t feel they had time? Of course the problem was each carried extra baggage into the drift. Raleigh carried the linked death of his brother, and Mako carried her revenge and fear. So Raleigh triggered his emotions and had to get them in check, but that triggered Mako’s emotions and she wasn’t used to drift and got stuck. Without Raleigh’s goof, Mako would probably have been okay. Still, a simulator link would have been nice. Or a “calibration mode” setting in the system, where weapons aren’t active.
[QUOTE=moriah]
So, when she first slided, Mako becomes obsessed of a traumatic event in her past… which was in no way some sort of repressed memory or something not dealt with. [snip]. Mako has clearly been dealing with this memory her whole life. So… why would the invading memory and mind of someone else make it seem like she was unlocking a repressed memory? It would have made more sense for Raleigh to follow that memory and become entranced by it.
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It has to do with the mechanics of the drift, and what it does. We’re explicitly told when they start to drift not to latch on to the memories, but stay in the current moment. When Rayleigh gets hit, he briefly starts the emotional ride on his memory, but because he’s experienced, he recognized what was happenening, so he was able to shake it off and get back to the now. However, when he pulled off, that put Mako with less solid foothold, and she fell into one of her own memory threads, probably triggered by the fear that Raleigh felt as well as her own defining moment. But because she’s not experienced, she latches onto the memory to relive it, since it is her defining moment. That’s why she can’t break free. It’s not a recovered memory, it’s reliving the memory.
That’s what Pentacost was afraid of, that Mako would be too caught up in that moment to let it go. Don’t bring revenge into the drift.
[QUOTE=moriah]
You know, you can like the movie and still think it’s pretty stupid that throwing a swimming sea monster into the sea two body lengths away is a move that would do actual harm.
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You mean the sea surface that the robots are standing on, that is functioning like a floor? Yeah, falling on the floor two body lengths away can hurt.
[QUOTE=AaronX]
But stayed for Mako (not really, it was a good movie, but didn’t anyone else find her cute?).
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Very. This is the summer of hot japanese actresses. (See Wolverine.)
[QUOTE=Nzinga, Seated]
I know this is going to be sacrilege in a thread like this, but I NEVER love the action scenes in movies, because I can’t ever make out what’s going on.
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I agree. The current trend in movie editing makes action sequences a blurred mess. This wasn’t as bad as some movies, but still uses that method. The idea seems to be to wrap you up in the action to make you feel involved. I’d rather be able to see the action.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
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?
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Their whole role in this movie was simply to die in combat to prove how badass the kaiju are and make the heros’ situation more dire. Who needs characterization? “Big mean Russians, Chinese triplets. Done.”
Because you’re envisioning a ship as a mostly hollow framework for carrying stuff across the ocean, whereas they were envisioning the sword as a solid stick for hitting things. See the difference? And yes, that was totally pointless if they have swords up their sleeves. “But it was cool!”
[QUOTE=Lightray]
3. When did it say that the jaeger fists are made of unobtanium alloys?
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I think the point is that scaling up designs like that is not linear, and material properties are in question for what they were doing.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Think about the position we were in at the time we started building it: We’d been at war for twenty years with an enemy that could destroy cities nearly on demand; the best defense we have against them (which doesn’t even always work) is probably killing even more people than the kaiju themselves do; and we don’t have any real means of offense available.
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Well, the thing is the Jaegers were pretty effective for a while. Then the Kaiju got bigger.
Interesting interpretation.
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