I think the choppers were a homage. I’ve seen the same thing in other monster movies.
That’s exactly the right phrase.
I mean look at del Toro’s past work. We have many good reasons to be confident he knows what he’s doing here. “Mistakes” are on purpose.
The revelatory scene for me was in the Hong Kong fight. The kaiju was getting its ass kicked, so it said, “Oh yeah? Oh YEAH?! Okay, I have WINGS!” and busted out with a pair of wings that it really should have been using all along, and these wings were as powerful as six helicopters (i.e., they could carry a robot).
As those wings beat against the air, carrying the kaiju and robot into the upper atmosphere where there basically wasn’t any air, the robot pilot responded, “Oh yeah? You got wings? Well, if you get to have wings, I have a SWORD!” and busted out with the sword that it totally did NOT have up until that point.
There are two universes in which this exchange makes sense:
- An old Warner Brothers cartoon, in which the kaiju is Coyote and the robot is Roadrunner (or Animaniacs with Slappy Squirrel, you get the idea).
- Children playing robots-and-monsters.
Neither of these universes allow you to think too deeply about what’s going on in them. In both, if you do, everything falls apart. But they’re both immensely enjoyable universes.
I kind of want to watch it again, imagining that it’s a brilliant retelling of a robot-and-monster battle enacted by kids.
That’s a beautiful thing, LHoD.
Oh, and don’t forget that when falling from that height, the robot was in flames, like it was falling from orbit or something. Super silly, but cartoon coolness.
There’s a thing I’m glad the movie left out:
The cancerous, ubiquitous “but you gotta have ROMANCE!”
No, you don’t. Now get back to the punching robots.
They had a incredibly understated one going.
The protagonist even puts it into his little speech before the final mission. Something like “I never thought about the future before…blah blah blah…my timing was never good”.
And then he proceeds to go punch monsters and dimensional rifts. I appreciated that he mentioned it only to work it into an excuse to have more giant robots fights. It seems like just about every little plot point was used to stage more giant robot fights. And that was the genius of the movie.
Sure, it was obvious that the leads cared a lot for eachother, but on which level is left open. Which is good, because that also sidelines the mood whiplash and narm that usually accompany such scenes.
I don’t mean to detract from the effectiveness of LHOD’s explanation, but I will register that it’s also a completely damn obvious thing. How someone can watch the film without immediately understanding it is… I don’t know. I don’t get it.
There was definitely a romance, but it was awesomely underplayed. Right at the end when they should have had an end-of-action kiss scene, they just touched foreheads. That was an excellent decision. More evidence that the movie is brilliantly dumb, and not just dumb.
Just listened to the BBC’s Film Programme’s podcast in which Guillermo del Toro is interviewed.
I learned that the whole movie is about the evils of consumerism. Liked it better before I learned that.
Seems implausible.
yeah, I don’t buy that at all…
Hm… big goverment program to build Jagers abandoned to build a giant wall.
Former members of the Jager project rebuild their team and some of their Jagers using billions of dollars of private funding from a guy who got rich harvesting Kaiju.
Privately-funded Jager mercenaries save the planet.
Yup, clearly consumerism/capitalism are bad.
For the record, it wasn’t the host of the show that said this, it was Guillermo del Toro.
Oh I know, I understood that. Still seems implausible.
Ah on reading the explanation, I can see what he means, but I’d call that a very minor thematic point rather than what the movie’s all about.
its why I never understand ‘art’ — this picture represents mankinds eternal struggle for self identitiy - pointing at a picutre of a soup can.
If that was the message he was selling - it was so subtle that it failed.
That mankind finds a way to market anything- that message I got.
Well, I don’t think he’s saying it’s the message of the film. Like I said, it’s a minor thematic point.
And the idea here wouldn’t be for the audience to necessarily go away thinking “I have learned something about consumerism today,” but rather, to go away with a slightly raised tendency to think negatively of consumption.
It’s a movie about giant robots fighting giant space monsters. It isn’t any deeper than that, no matter what Del Toro says.