Guillermo del Toro's not-Hobbit/not-Lovecraft next movie, Pacific Rim

Synopsis:

When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity's resources for years on end. To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge. But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes-a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi)-who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past. Together, they stand as mankind's last hope against the mounting apocalypse.

Well...maybe.

I'm going with a YES.

Charlie Day is in it!

Movies Like Jaeger.

Thx for new display name idea , Gordo. PS - this sounds sad.

http://io9.com/5916944/first-official-picture-from-guillermo-del-toros-pacific-rim

did GdT recently overdose on manga

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17p5wdqhvfabigif/cmt-medium.gif

^from the comments

yeah, was wondering what the hell that was from

WHERE CAN I GET A CHAINSAW FLAMETHROWER

http://io9.com/5916944/first-official-picture-from-guillermo-del-toros-pacific-rim

well that's my weekend made

oops

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17p5y8nml4ib5gif/cmt-medium.gif

danger 5, aparently?

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/29/danger-5-1960s-superspies-fight-adolf-hitler.html

god bless you, Australia, you weird bastards

idris elba's character is named "stacker pentecost"

is this based off of a thomas pynchon novel?

Nope, anime, almost as weird

Haha I was reading the description and was like "this doesn't make any sense this is crazy" and then realized it had to be based on some anime or manga...

How come del Toro got the Pacific Rim job?

hes a good director

Of all the user names on ilx, you're the one who didn't notice the word choice in my post? Perfect.

damn... shit!!!!

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTP9HmNIm3l-xD9gG9IDaYdNW9Z0jzF0f5iwVlpg1_JE1f_iWDvrc4U9cNq

Some further details

why would THAT be the first picture you released? how about a robot or a monster?

i would guess they're saving the money stuff for when they start showing actual footage. first publicity still is just something for the fanboy sites to run, not something you use to sell to the public at large, with the avengers it was just a photo of some chairs

will there be more Idris squeezebox y/n

maybe he will sing Creedence songs in this one

i would guess they're saving the money stuff for when they start showing actual footage. first publicity still is just something for the fanboy sites to run, not something you use to sell to the public at large, with the avengers it was just a photo of some chairs

― Black_vegeta (Hungry4Ass), Thursday, June 21, 2012 11:54 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya i know. i hate those fanboy site still premieres. IDRIS ELBA STANDING IN A ROOM.

here's a li'l sneak peek:

http://media.comicbookmovie.com/images/articles/62034.jpg

so judging from the photo he races motorcycles and lives in some kind of horse stable

yeah i feel u

http://io9.com/5924179/first-look-at-the-giant-robots-in-guillermo-del-toros-pacific-rim

amuses me that Charlie Hunnam and Charlie Day are both in this since i remember there was like a week once where i could not remember who was who among 'guys named Charlie who have shows on FX'

Details details:

Guillermo del Toro's new movie Pacific Rim doesn't just feature enormous, insane robots — it also features totally massive monsters that trash cities with their terrifying limbs. We just saw the first footage from Pacific Rim in Hall H — and that included some insane glimpses of monster faces and monster limbs.

More there at the link, also that there's a trailer made so I suspect online scrounging will turn up something...

LOL at this, frankly:

A voiceover says: " Today at the edge of hope, the end of our time. We have chosen to believe in each other." Eventually we realize this is Idris Elba speaking to a group of robot pilots. "We are standing against the monsters outside our door," Elba says. And then louder, "TODAY WE ARE CANCELLING THE APOCALYPSE."

i hate movies these days

Interview, backstory details, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS6kk1bTqJs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9PFtl2tt9E&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=2vKz7WnU83E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vKz7WnU83E

GLaDOS!

I was sold at "giant skeleton on aircraft carrier." brb, buying tickets.

I'm on board.

Yeah, that works.

Not terribly interested in seeing another giant monster destroys cities movie, or another giant robot destroys cities movie. Not sure how I feel about this movie being both of those things. Maybe they'll pull a Godzilla on Monster Island and send both sets of giants to duke it out on some reserve or Planet X or whatever.

I'm expecting this to be either highly deconstructed emo weirdness like the back half of Eva or just a bunch of fanservicey explosions like the first few episodes of Eva. Either way, I hope it's going to be reminiscent of Eva.

lol @ "cancelling the apocalypse"

looks sort of stupid, would have preferred the Lovecraft movie

that line made me think of this song for the first time in years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XC6dyBWi4

GLaDOS!

― pun lovin criminal (polyphonic), Wednesday, December 12, 2012 6:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for real

the fact she's in this would suggest that this is going to be 100% fanboy indulgence (which might be a good thing)

that line made me think of this song for the first time in years:

Yeah me too. Good track.

looks sort of stupid, would have preferred the Lovecraft movie

― If I was a carpenter, and you were a douchebag (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, December 13

Same here -- this doesn't really look interesting at all.

may as well be Battleship 2

Anyone else remember the story in the New Yorker about bootleg Chinese films that cobbled together disaster footage from real life and movies into crazy all-star cast supercuts?

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/10/15/011015fa_fact_hessler

ha yeah that reminds me of another old NYer story about the bootleg Chinese Harry Potter books which had gotten up to something like Book 16 and had Gandalf in them, Harry screwing Hermione, etc. I still wanna read those!

surely a google for harry screwing hermione will give you rich returns in english

i want the weird semi-chaste version though!

xp: probably not as many hits as Harry screwing Ron

I want him to rescore "The Hobbit" with cues from Ornette Coleman's and Shore's "Naked Lunch" score.

Whoops, I'm going to put that in the tandem thread.

this has a skyscraper sized robot rocket-punching Godzilla in the face. this is exactly what i wanted

http://www.samuelowengallery.com/images/P/533.jpg

so psyched

fuck a hobbit

http://scifiwire.com/assets_c/2010/04/SpoofLordGStrings-thumb-330x464-37633.jpg

http://pornparody.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/whoreoftherings1-420.jpg

http://images.adultfilmdatabase.com/Graphics/Boxes/200/Front/68994.jpg

Oh, shit, sorry about that. NSFW!!!!!

Delete as needed.

what, the thread?

lol, "private movies"

when imagebombing goes bad

One last trailer, I'd say

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA92Rw6kNWw

yessssssssss

colorful!

dragging a tanker along like a club, monster head smash <3

Then the monster recovers from head smash = even better.

otm. still bummed about the loss of mtns, but this is looking better & better.

cat. 3 kaiju

Where is Asuka?

monster looks kind of like the cloverfield monster, doesn't it?

And yet one MORE trailer. Presumably the last.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMumPFBag

Hell Yeah

i'm gonna be overseas on opening weekend ;_;

With the kaiju chasing you

was that Charlie from Always Sunny?!? lol

well it looks like it'll open the week after at where i'll be

having just watched NGE this past fall, man, this is just a straight rip.... wish the robots were more angular / sleeker instead of some kind of weird american gladiators x50 aesthetic

a straight rip of Eva into an action blockbuster directed by GdT sounds like a getting-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate kind of problem

haha i mean it in the best possible way of course

i hope the last 10 minutes is just a blank screen with manic voiceovers

Our friends The Asylum bring you ATLANTIC RIM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVpQmZmKNmo

there's no such thing as an atlantic rim!!!

I heard you can get one in Philly for $25.

every time i hear the name of this movie i think of

Liz: You won an award! Did I not tell you?

Tracy : Come on, lemon.

Liz: Yes! You are getting.. A.. lifetime achievement award from the.. Pacific Rim Emmys.

Tracy : Pacific Rim? I love the Pacific Rim. I spent nine months in Japan shooting Samurai I Amurai. I fell in love with their culture, especially sharking.

lol

sharking

this looks like a formalist exercise by del toro and that gets me kind of excited

he always lets me down

i think he has a great movie in him though

i'll kind of rep for hellboy

totally rep for hellboy, and pan's lab

maybe it was just that the reviews were so ecstatic, but i was a little let down by PL... i still liked it, don't get me wrong.

i like his art-house movies (pan's, devil's backbone) better than his genre stuff. (a very un-ilx opinion i know). hellboy starts strong but it's not really very good

you're not really very etc

i think this looks really graceless and inelegant

i mean, i'll go see it anyway. but controlling giant robots via jazzercise is stupid

maybe it's intended, having nitro and turbo doing lunging pirouettes and twirling arabesques inside the control chambers while decked out in full halo combat gear. a touch of the comic.

blade 2 is fucking fantastic yall

the first blade is 100000x better

i feel like del toro is like tarantino w/o all the talent

the first blade's a masterpiece though... no shame in not measuring up imo

fair enough

for some reason i hated that the vampires were kind of indestructible (bone thing around their hearts) in blade 2, you just knew blade was never gonna kill them in any of the fights, it made them kind of tiresome

blade 2 has more wrestling moves. though trinity goes all the way and has triple h.

i feel like del toro is like tarantino w/o all the talent

― we're up all night to get (s1ocki), Sunday, June 16, 2013 12:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i admit the fact that he's really smart and knows his film history and i would love to just bro out with him probably means i overrate his movies a bit

ya he seems like he has great taste in geeky horror/sci-fi things and a genuine love for the craft but i don't think he's got... "it"

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LRYVFYpmZpI/TUg4PkacPhI/AAAAAAAABOY/aPDntLjhcEw/s1600/clara-bow-eight.jpg

This movie looks ugly. All the monster/robot fighting in the rain reminds me of the '98 Godzilla movie

it reminds me of blade runner or akira

i like all the lights and colors. the mech designs are too western. the stuff that isnt robots and monsters punching each other looks like it could be crummy. i dont know why they have some monotone asshole narrating the trailers, if he's the star of the movie that doesnt bode well

s10cki otm

pan's labyrinth is pretty good tho

mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes - a washed up former pilot and an untested trainee

These twenty words quoted in the OP speak volumes about this movie.

Crusty, lovable.

'll kind of rep for hellboy

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist),

All about Hellboy 2. Contender for the best superhero movie imo.

i like all the lights and colors. the mech designs are too western. the stuff that isnt robots and monsters punching each other looks like it could be crummy. i dont know why they have some monotone asshole narrating the trailers, if he's the star of the movie that doesnt bode well

― i wanna be a gabbneb baby (Hungry4Ass), Sunday, June 16, 2013 12:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he sounds like the sort of fellow who they'd get to dub a character for the american release of an anime

haha shit he kinda does. okay well that sells me on it a little

if this movie is basically a complete rip of Eva I'll be totally happy. I'll also be happy if it's pretty much anything else.

ontrolling giant robots via jazzercise is stupid

― 乒乓, Sunday, June 16, 2013 11:51 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

this more than anything is a turn off, for some dumb nerd reason. ~synchronized~ jazzercize no less

no dude they're not jazzercizing the pilots are obviously mind-linked via the neural bridge and acting as one being to control the jaegers which clearly are too massive to be controlled by one person do u see

expect a 75-second explanation of why this should be so somewhere during the first act

you guys are harshing my buzz. i mean of course this will probably be terrible but i hold out a faint glimmer of hope, if for no other reason than the evident glee w/ which del toro is making this. (was making this.)

I like all the neony stuff in the trailer

I'll end up seeing this, despite my reservations. You really can't beat "monsters and robots fighting" for a summer movie premise. I just hope the non-monster/robot stuff is bearable.

but controlling giant robots via jazzercise is stupid

Stolen from Gunbuster iirc (and probably a million other giant robot anime shows)

the trailer does nothing for me because idgiaf abt giant robots, but I will see it because of Guillermo

I want to see this in Japanese(w/ English fan subs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CBC5s5qmLY

ROKURATU PANCHU!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDLlGYsKC80

lol my friends tweet just now:

Pacific rim. Pathetic. Burn the film reel. Just ignite it.

http://screenrant.com/guillermo-del-toro-pacific-rim-mountains-of-madness-sandy-121451/

Okay I would really go for a movie of Mountains of Madness with Cruise at the helm. Seriously.

wtf, yet another trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e3h51pKZO9A
This one did make me laugh and groan several times (omg holding hands on deck -- omg dude holding back angry other dude as captaindude looks back all sternlike -- omg dude doing way-to-go chin-tap to girl and looking real doe-eyedlike -- omg jazzercise comments upthread OTM -- omg PREPARE FOR NEURAL HANDSHAKE)

Will watch this. Pretty sure I'd prefer it if the movie would be as quiet as this trailer, cuz goddamn smashypants cityburst with dun-dun-drums and gunshot blasts gets tiring for this cranky jerk. But Del Toro makes movies that I'd in theory hate, yet end up finding rather enjoyable -- so hopefully this too will somehow work out. My ten-year-old self would be so goddamn exciting about all these huge robots.

At this point I'm kinda hoping the "we're canceling the apocalypse" speech will be cut out.

Hellboy director's cut is great, Pan's Lab great, Devil's etc is great. Hellboy 2, not so great but well made. Blade II great. Was looking forward to this, but ... didn't we just get a giant fighting robot suit movie like last year?

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQkZSOO1ZvzAIjYO2vczAD4q2HO2ZYFggUKSDdyCK4uUmSa94QRUw

i'll say this much: Del Toro has much more respect for characters/words (which is to say, script) than your average big budget action sci-fi dude. He has yet to make a movie that could be summed up as "big and dumb with explosions."

real steel's robots werent giant and they didnt have pilots in them

Eh, close enough.

dun get all the del toro bashing itt. pan's labyrinth and the devil's backbone rank high among the best fantasy/horror/whatever films of the new century, and even his blatantly commercial productions are a hell of a lot better than most of the competition. he's never made a truly bad movie, and aside from an obvious fondness for genre filmmaking, he has nothing in common with quentin tarantino.

to his detriment

sure, but he can still shoot for "second best living human"

so pumped about this

http://25.media.tumblr.com/f407b66de7b57f7a8803e66d98eeecaa/tumblr_mpecraQQhU1rotb3io1_500.png

Not Another Robot Movie

Kanye and Ben Lyons oughta be good pals

Yuh yug yuck Yukon Yukon yucky yucko

uh oh... possible confirmation for my number one concern based on trailers... I know del Toro wanted to inject some "how it would feel on the ground" urgency but if that comes at the cost of satisfying establishing shots and choreography this is going to be a bummer.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/pacific-rim-review-monsters-somewhere-070219626.html

One guy in one rubber Godzilla suit stepping on a balsa-wood scale model of Tokyo provides lots more thrills than del Toro's Monster Armies of the Night...

Part of the film's problem is the whole "of the Night" thing: whenever the jaegers and the kaiju throw down in "Pacific Rim," it's at night in the pouring rain — unless they're both at the bottom of the ocean. What's the point, exactly, of cutting-edge CG monsters filmed in a way where we can barely see them? Would "Jurassic Park" have worked if our glimpses of the dinosaurs had been fleeting at best?

That's what I was worried about :(

The online movie dork crowd seems to be enthusiastic about this, but they're an easy bunch to butter up.

im hearing good things from ppl i know whove seen it

What's the point, exactly, of cutting-edge CG monsters filmed in a way where we can barely see them? Would "Jurassic Park" have worked if our glimpses of the dinosaurs had been fleeting at best?

― resulting post (rogermexico.), Monday, July 8, 2013 6:09 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

i approve of this btw - showing the monster is often deflating

not my words btw but imo we're not talking about Pumpkinhead chasing rednecks through the woods here. in a gojira/mecha type scenario the full monty is kinda traditional.

more to the point, if flick is selling giant robots battling kaiju imma be bitter if I don't see some dope battling.

Mecha-pseudo-Shiva. Underwater Cthulhu Jr. Charlie Day with sleeve tats. Not one comprehensible accent.

I loved this movie.

that's all I needed to hear

"We built several blocks of Hong Kong to destroy and then we destroyed them," said del Toro.

Yes

Zen.

that's all I needed to hear

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, July 9, 2013

+1 and i have no idea who charlie day is.

hey hey hey kanye likes it

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/352660601681625088

Ok, I can probably skip this one on the basis of this:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2013/07/pacific-rim.html#more

dude sounds bitter. he needs to relax. i hope del toro makes buckets of money and gets to do what he wants from now on. plus i will see the shit out of this movie.

(otm about the earth elemental's death in hellboy 2 tho)

Wonder if the inevitable porn parody of this goes big or small.

http://i.imgur.com/6xprh1K.jpg

looks like it went small, amirite

Fortune Nookie a much better title tbh.

I was very into this. Ripped some great stuff straight from the Eva playbook. Every name is ridiculous, but especially "Stacker Pentecost".

The script was no smarter than it needed to be, which was the right choice. Art direction and creature shop were triumphant. Del Toro and ILM deserve accolades for delivering this on time and under budget, because the fx work is spectacular.

Also this was a good movie because a monster carries a robot into the upper atmosphere to drop it to earth but is foiled when the robot kills the monster with a sword. At which point the robot crashes to earth anyway of course.

Also a robot survives what is supposedly a massive thermonuclear blast that detonates a few hundred meters away by crouching defensively.

if an EVAngelist gives it a thumbs up i'm gonna go see it

Can I take my daughter to this?

Or should I? She's 8.

There were a bunch of kids in my audience. I feel like I would've been scared at their age, but maybe I'm misremembering what freaked me out then. I think I'd seen Night of the Living Dead and a few Nightmare on Elm Streets by the time I was 8 or 9.

My girl did OK with Jurassic Park, so I assume this is cool. This must be less scary than that.

Whoa syncro jazzercize looks straight to mst3k in trailer lol

I also meant to mention that the post-converted 3D is pretty much fine, and even worthwhile on the hero robot and monster shots. Really the only jarringly bad result to my eye was a pile of spaghetti on a cafeteria tray hovering flatly above the background.

fsm?

Parmesan Rim

How Japanese are the mecha or kaiju designs?

Whether or not it sounds like damning the film with faint praise, the greatest virtue of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim may be that you can always understand what’s happening, what the characters are doing, and why they are doing it.

woot

This sucked...just kidding, I loved the hell out of it. Everything that I thought looked tacky in the trailers worked within the context of the cartoonish world of the movie. Monster fights were great. The lead dude was a little stiff I guess but all the character actors are having fun.

matt zoller seitz loves it. i can't make it til next week but i hope i see the flick he saw

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pacific-rim-2013

If I were nine years old, I would see the monsters-versus-robots adventure "Pacific Rim" 50 times. Because I'm in my forties and have two kids and two jobs, I'll have to be content with seeing it a couple more times in theaters and re-watching it on video.

thought it was fun. shallow, cartoonishly simplistic and predictable, with a procession of cardboard characters churning mechanically through achingly obvious story arcs. but it looks spectacular, the monster battles are genuinely thrilling, and there's something almost charming about the dunderheaded narrative, NGE dumbed down to the intellectual level of a pencil eraser. i did enjoy some of the supporting performances, like the bickering scientists and ron pearlman's foppish black marketeer and, well, that's it for "and". those three were were good. cute dog too.

it reminded me of both man of steel and avatar. it doesn't have the emotional depth or either (let that sink in), but all three get by mostly on looks. they're simple, perhaps even dull stories enlivened by truly gorgeous digital production design and sold by sharp, if rather workmanlike, cinematic craft. snyder's film, the weakest of the three, is the most narratively shapeless, and del toro's the most completely vapid, but they all succeed on their own terms.

agree with most that it's a sharp drop from hellboy 2, but i hope it makes a billion dollars. there were only about five people in the theater with me tonight :(

Only one of those three movies makes one feel good to be a nerd, and it ain't Man of Steel or Avatar.

yeah, that's true. pacific rim may be a dumb movie, but you never get the sense that it was made by dumb people.

also, MZS otm about the giddy, childlike joy pacific rim unreliably provides. my last post was more damn than praise, but at least half the running time is a massive, giddy, sugar-buzzed rush. i'd have LOVED it as a kid, and still had a pretty good time as a grumpy not-so-old man.

it's also a hell of a lot more artful and even (in it's geeky way) soulful than either avatar or man of steel. though this feels in many ways like work for hire, it's clearly made by someone who loves making movies, loves people and loves the genre he's working in.

^ its

Ooh I forgot to mention a funny thing that happened while watching this movie. It's been raining all summer here in South Carolina and right before I went into the theater there was a hailstorm. Halfway through the movie the power in the theater went out, right at a scene where something similar happens in the movie (that ain't a spoiler, sorry bub). Someone in the audience immediately yelled out "KAIJU!"

Thankfully the movie resumed a few minutes later.

And then we were all eaten

i didn't like this at all…i don't get what people liked about the effects, it had the same wobbly every-joint-moving-at-once weightless feel that all shitty CGI does, the monsters were so bland and looked like the godzilla 1998 model made even more sculpted-out-of-turds-y… they had to make them have incandescent veins and mouths just so you could kind of tell wtf you were looking at….and as for visual coherence/choreography i thought the fight scenes were as much a slurry as transformers.

almost every single line of dialogue was a dried out lifeless purely expository cliche…apparently del toro has built way more critical goodwill then i was aware of because every positive review of this seems to assign a level of intelligence and creativity and wit that i don't see present in the finished product at all.

thing is i really thought i would like it; i love the concept and was totally ready to enjoy a movie that stephanie zacharek of the village voice describes as "big and dumb in a smart way"!.

i don't really like any del toro movies though so i suppose we're just not on the same wavelength. he doesn't seem especially talented and doesn't have half the filmmaking chops of even, like, jj abrams. i was thirsting for the mediocrity of super 8 while i was watching this. such a bummer to me that spielberg is prepping for the iraq's most deadliest sniper movie or whatever instead of making a version of this movie that would boil people's brains in their skulls.

Bah. Spielberg would give us Godzilla vs. Tintin in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's annoying because as a director, he's still on top of his game - amazingly so, but he's too busy being America's Director to allow himself to be the fun-loving anarchist who made Jaws.

Also, we both know that Abrams would bring in Damon Lindelof and that will only end in tears of rage.

So I saw this tonight... I loved it's guilelessness. It's not a crass remake of an old Toho film, it IS Godzilla vs. Macross with all the same dumb WW2 b-movie cliches, troubled heroes and mad scientists. It really does feel like it's from that era, so every single lizard brain synapse I have lit up in joy. Of course I loved it. I also loved the Wachowski's Speed Racer for similar reasons.

There is zero fat in this. Loved the throwaway details, the kaiju underground, references to off-screen events... A lot of care went into the making, but the cgi is strained with so much detail (rain, water, display screens, building pieces, etc.) that the combat choreography gets lost. The fights are thrilling, but I couldn't tell you if it was the actual fight or that I was noticing how the vents on the vents on the back of the mechs open and closed.

seeing this in about 90 mins

while having a lunch time snack with mk2, i suggest we go see this film.
he has not heard of it, and is not interested.
30 minutes later i hear a loud shout from the living room : 'oh that looks so cool .. '
a red faced mk2 runs into the kitchen very excited.
he has just seen the trailer on tv.
think he wants to see it now ..

What are the odds that this is appropriate for 5- and 8-yr-old boys? I'm sure they'd like it, but afraid it might be too intense.

it reminded me of both man of steel and avatar. it doesn't have the emotional depth or either (let that sink in)

this movie has way more emotional heft than man of steel, at the very least

tipsy, its tailor-made for them

especially safe for kids in landlocked statew

states!

this movie somewhat improbably contains idris elba's best performance since The Wire

it reminded me of both man of steel and avatar.

i had trouble telling the maverick and iceman characters apart

i don't really like any del toro movies though so i suppose we're just not on the same wavelength. he doesn't seem especially talented and doesn't have half the filmmaking chops of even, like, jj abrams.

otm. we are not on the same wavelength.

Mild spoiler but this movie is so geared toward kids that the main love interests in the movie HUG at the end.

this movie has way more emotional heft than man of steel, at the very least

sorry, but i thought pacific rim was almost completely inert on an emotional level. the only story aspects with any spark were the hipster scientist's relationhip w the kaiju (underused) and the wonderful sequences involving young mako. the film certainly communicates del toro's honest affection for cinematic storytelling, monsters and genre, but the tale told seemed awfully bland.

it's funny that avatar gets so thoroughly trashed as a story, when this gets a pass. neither is any more original or less predictable than the other. they're both similarly knowing about and untroubled by their own hokeyness. where avatar builds its love story with care and attention to character, pacific rim settles for a sequence of absurdly loaded glances (efficient, at least). where avatar grounds its central struggle in a historically-resonant situation we might actually care about, pacific rim settles for yet another fight to save the earth from evil, boys

perhaps people find avatar's grandiose earnestness off-putting, reading it as self-importance. pacific rim is relatively efficient and modest, but it's not really risking anything. it's a blast, top-shelf cotton candy entertainment without a brain in its head. it deserves praise for the childlike joy it delivers, not for nonexistent "emotional heft".

SPOILER warning:

warned u...

speaking of avatar, the two movies have a few interesting points in common. there's the wounded hero drafted into service in the wake of his brother's death, the idea of inhabiting a different and more powerful body through technological mediation, the similarly stereotypical military commanders, the penultimate pieta. hell, the incredible journey in search of a crucial piece of monster anatomy looks so much like avatar that you could probably edit it in without anyone noticing.

and the wonderful sequences involving young mako. <- these work better than any scene in man of steel

*contendo watches amy adams say "what if i need to tinkle" in a weird barbie voice* this movie has som uch emotional depth

it IS Godzilla vs. Macross

Fuuuuuuuck yeah. Girlfriend's last shift at her old job is today, so we're seeing this tomorrow

this was dope. also this movie had way more emotional grounding/connection than Man of Steel fuiud. also loved the universe/reality they built.

Avatar was clearly aiming higher (and missing) than Pacific Rim, tho. I don't think anyone's giving the latter a "pass" on its story shortcomings so much as recognizing that anything more complicated would've tainted the movie's pleasure principle.

also lol at the song that plays during the credits essentially narrating the movie we just saw...WITH A RZA VERSE

GDT mentioned this movie also had luchador inspirations. Without spoiling any specifics, do they actually pull off any lucha libre/pro-wrestling moves? Because GOD I hope so.

not really. at least not in the blade 2 sense.

Rats

xposty, but (having not seen this yet) a lot of people say that it really captures the fun (and coherence) that Transformers 1-3 failed to capture. Like, it may not be a great movie, but those three underscore the myriad ways this could have been terrible, too.

ontendo watches amy adams say "what if i need to tinkle" in a weird barbie voice* this movie has som uch emotional depth

naw, my point was that pacific rim has less emotional weight than another basically vapid popcorn movie whose only resonant moments were provided by kevin costner. it's a comparison that doesn't flatter either film. and pacific rim is better than man of steel in every other respect.

x- - yeah, it's a thousand times better than the two (one and a half) transformers movies i've seen. when it comes to the big, silly/awesome, city-wrecking fun, del toro gets everything right. one fairweather daylight fight might have been nice, but that's a minor quibble.

i went into PR w/low expectations and i was pleasantly surprised by the movie's human core - it's not amazing in that respect and there's some real missed opportunities (would've been cool to see rinko & blondie building chemistry as they train together, then show them interacting more as they're actually fighting - give a sense of dynamism to the co-piloting thing), but its got more going on than the advertising showed. i mean, at the very least i can describe the personalities of a bunch of Pacific Rim's characters - mos is just a series of shots of talking mannequins glowering at each other and woodenly going "your not just a man clark... your a super man... and its your destiny to put a stop to chinese economic ascendancy"

the movie itself is good not great, the last action sequence underwater started to test my patience. i was along for the ride the whole time though. i liked how it didnt hesitate to give itself over to this crazy world it created. the warmth towards its characters and the vibrant visuals (those colors and lights in Hong Kong, man) gave me kind of a Speed Racer vibe, though its more self-conscious and restrained

I just saw this and I've only got 1 thing to say: so so glad there was no kissing at the end.

Agreed. It feels like Del Toro somehow snuck this movie through the studio without anyone higher up fucking it up with notes.

My dream: The Boredoms play live accompaniment to a silent Pacific Rim.

^^ oh dear god yes

FWIW, I saw it in regular 2D but with Dolby Atmos sound. Couldn't tell you what the actual difference is, but PR did sound terrific.

i fucking loved this but, like, it has robots fighting aliens and Idris Elba being a badass, it's basically made for me. In fact I found it better than I was expecting - more ambitious, more efficient at realising its ambition.

The comedy bits in this - esp the Ron Perlman stuff - felt straight out of The Fifth Element to me. That same, for want of a better word, wackiness.

also, yes, the Iceman and Maverick characters are basically impossible to tell apart. It was only after the film that I realised that the reason the name 'Charlie Hunnam' was familiar was because he was Nathan in Queer as Folk.

this was the first thing i'd seen him in. he looks kinda like brad pitt. monotone voice aside i thought he was pretty good

Hunnam's also the lead on Sons Of Anarchy (which also stars Ron Pearlman) so there was a bit of SoA: Futureworld ridiculousness to it. MZS OTM about how the further away you get from it, you remember it being better.

This was so awesome

Sons of Anarchy Futureworld = omg I am SO seeing this tomorrow

yah, really liked thi

yeah this was great anyone who says different was never a child.

worst you can say there's a bit left on the table character arc-wise and the hero's kind of uninteresting. other than that it's simply the finest live-action mecha vs kaiju film of our era. real sense of joy in the production.

and some really beautiful shots that didn't have to be.

Noticed that it's playing at a local drive-in. Kinda want to see it again, but will probably go IMAX

This was TRANSCENDENT.

sincerely wish i'd been able to see it that way. loved (LOVED) the action sequences & visuals. most of the rest didn't engage me at all.

Also, there was a lot of birth in this film, literal and metaphoric

Lot of emphasis on family, too. Literal and metaphoric.

The bit that happens in a fight about 3/4ths in where a character delivers a line followed by an action was so perfect it brought tears to my eyes.

The lady next to me tried to shush me when I was burst out laughing during some of the dialogue.

She sounds like a killjoy.

Love how everyone shouts their attack patterns in this. (Saw it for the second time already today.)

I didn't get to it this weekend ;_;

SOON

Better hurry. They're going to whisk it away to make room for more Grown Ups 2 showings.

so does this blow or not? Ad tagline seems to point at War on Terror metaphor.

Way less of a war on terror metaphor than any of the Batmans. Which is to say not whatsoever.

Like most monster movies, it's at most a metaphor for natural disaster; there's a bit of global warming going on but really just one throwaway line about that.

This monster movie is not your teacup, Mr. Whale.

undocumented immigration iirc

I actually went to see this and I never see things like this. In 3D too! I think Avatar and Beowulf are the only other recent 3D movies I've seen. But I was bored and on my own on a rainy Saturday, so I went. I should point out that I spend many hours a week watching experimental films and art movies, but even so I was actually frightened about how long and boring it might get, especially after sitting though about fifteen identical trailers featuring fireballs and people punching each other and things going boom.

Anyway, I did enjoy it for the most part. It was utterly formulaic and the acting was very uneven (Son of Anarchy was hellaciously bad but Perlman and Elba were decent). But I did enjoy that the aliens and robots were very very very big, I mean that's the main sell, right? They were bigger than most robots and aliens by some way and can eat whole bridges and stand up in the middle of the ocean. So that was good. And the 3D was fun although the edges of the screen seemed out of focus which bothered me. I guess I missed the "easter egg" but I probably don't care. I told my wife she should go see it but I probably won't go with her.

People seemed very excited to see it so it is obviously a big deal and I also stood in line for an ice cream sandwich which was delicious. More art theaters and avant-garde screening spaces should serve those.

And that's my report on Pacific Rim 3D. 7/10

the shipping boat/bat metaphor was very powerful, though he kinda hits you over the head with it

**POSSIBLE SPOILER**

Also did they explain why the little aliens under the sea made the big aliens and why only in the Pacific? Did they want to colonize the earth's surface? It sort of seemed like they were almost in the earth's core, so couldn't they theoretically send their kaiju to any hemisphere they wanted?

Careful. You're going down a wormhole with this line of thought.

*ABSOLUTE SPOILER DO NOT READ*

they were from a different planet and using a portal to transport kaiju to the earth. the portal was under the sea. i missed the first few minutes of the movie, but I assume that these portals are difficult to maintain (perhaps only one can be open at a time). anyway, the little aliens hoped to level the earth's cities, exterminate the inhabitants, and take over the planet. they originally did this in the dinosaur era (kaiju apparently killed the dinos), but they found the planet to be uninhabitable. global warming made the earth comfortable for the little aliens.

It sort of seemed like they were almost in the earth's core, so couldn't they theoretically send their kaiju to any hemisphere they wanted?

― admrl, Monday, July 15, 2013 12:24 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

they were in another dimension homie

was it really another dimension and not another planet?

Ah ok - yeah I totally missed the other dimension part. Now that makes total sense.

I guess I was just lost in some reverie when they explained all that

im pretty sure he says "another dimension" in the v/o but if they're on a planet a billion lightyears away its the same thing basically

I liked this, but it felt like it was at least twelve hours long.

I wish Charlie day played the main hero and Danny devito was his Japanese love interest/mindmeld robo copilot

im pretty sure he says "another dimension" in the v/o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qORYO0atB6g

this was the first time i have ever seen a modern 3-D movie and :o

when Major Weeks-to-Live told Sergeant Dickhead they were partnering up i was like, hmm movie logic dictates that you don't stand a chance in hell

everything that you expect to happen happens, and it is awesome

i really liked the emotionally constipated australian father & son saying bye to each other. thats another thing that i dug

I didn't expect the after credit thing or I would have stuck around for the after credit thing

i stayed around for the after credit thing purely because i was still in 3D OMG zone.

god people just watch the credits, you disgusting savages

the "after the credits" thing wasn't even after the credits, it was after the main titles, which when did it start being a thing to put those at the end of the movie instead of the beginning?

you know how they always showed the jaegers getting dropped into the water?

where were they being dropped from?

how did they get back into base?

shouldn't there have been giant robot doors with robot doorknobs?

they were dropped by fleets of helicopters i thought

haha you know what i thought was hilarious title/credits wise was how the title of the movie shows up what, 20 minutes into it?? like ohhhh shit this movie is going to be a fucking thick slice of movie if we're just now learning the TITLE of it.

I'm seeing this tonight, and looking at the times, at least for now it would take a ton of work not to see it in 3D. So I guess 3D it is. Apparently Del Toro, who did not originally want it to be 3D and only belatedly came around to post-conversion, insisted on some degree of control as to how 3D it would be, essentially. Like, I hear the 3D in this is pretty subtle, mostly. I'm more concerned about the stupid glasses dimming an already (literally) dim movie, but oh well.

it's the first time i've seen a 3D movie and it didn't seem "dim" at all.

i'm surprised that it was not originally planned as a 3D film because there are tons of visual details whose only reason for being seems to be that they look cool as fuck in 3D. i am TOTALLY sold on 3D for movies like this.

saw it in 2d and it was dim and constantly raining.
Would have preferred it if they set it in the bright locales of jackass3d

it was raining until the end..... when the sun came out! cue helicopter fly-by! HOORAY!

can only imagine what morbius would think of this

the "after the credits" thing wasn't even after the credits, it was after the main titles, which when did it start being a thing to put those at the end of the movie instead of the beginning?

I dunno. I'm starting to get weirded out when even the title of the movie shows up at the beginning anymore. (In Pacific Rim's case, it was because it showed up so ludicrously late -- 20 minutes on or so?)

i loved that tbh. it was like "giant robots giant robots oh crap we still haven't shown the title here's the title okay more giant robots let's go"

1) OK, that was totally awesome. I grew up watching creature double features on UHF, Godzilla movies left and right. I loved that stuff, and have sat through so many movies, from Cloverfield to the lame Godzilla remake, that could not get the simple formula of "giant monsters destroy stuff" right. Thankfully, the geek in Del Toro kept him in line, and he knocked it out of the park, repeatedly and loudly. I love that he got the scale and power absolutely down. Also, his attention to detail and occasional wit is so welcome.

2) I loved the brief preamble and the decision to just dive right in. It made it feel like the kickass sequel to a movie that was never made.

3) This movie felt more like a comic book movie than most comic book movies.

4) Whichever critic said Charlie Day was channeling Bobcat Goldthwait was OTM.

5) This may have been the loudest movie I’ve ever seen. Also, the way the dialogue was mixed, I could maybe understand every other line. But that was fine.

6) I am so glad I did not take my daughter, she would not have known what the fuck was going on.

7) At my screening, people were cheering like they were watching WWF.

8) Category 5 monster was a bit of a letdown.

9) 3-D was fine.

10) I doubt I’d ever want to see this again.

I grew up watching creature double features on UHF, Godzilla movies left and right. I loved that stuff, and have sat through so many movies, from Cloverfield to the lame Godzilla remake, that could not get the simple formula of "giant monsters destroy stuff" right.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, July 15, 2013

So very very OTM. Totally enjoyed this flick's very specific nods to those very specific failures (oh look these are kaiju skin parasites and they are completely nonthreatening! Behold this is an infant kaiju and it is pure comedy!

Dear studio exec: If people bought tickets to your giant monster movie, they're probably cool with not seeing a bunch of little monsters. There are other movies for that. L'il Mako sequence solved the "human-scale threat" puzzle quite elegantly.

7) At my screening, people were cheering like they were watching WWF.

at a monday night screening? man

Maybe they were just enthused by the A/C? There weren't, like, a million people there. Just a couple dozen. But some of them were into it.

this movie did not-so-good box office over the weekend. better see it quick.

you know people always get on the studios' case about making only sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and reboots... but when an "original" property (i put original in scare quotes only because this film is a proud mashup of some very specific sources) disappoints commercially like this--and that's been happening often enough this and the last few summers--you can't really blame them.

Honestly don't get why people would see Transformers and not this. Shitty toy nostalgia can't be that great, can it? Then again, name recognition means everything, I guess. See also:: Smurfs 2. Or don't.

Wow, beaten from Grown Ups 2. No surprise there, I guess. Though when my wife saw that trailer, she asked if it was a real movie, and then asked if there was a first Grown Ups.

Remember when sequels never made as much money as the originals?

Then again, name recognition means everything, I guess.

that's precisely it! that's why big media corps hoard their intellectual property.

do you think most of the audience for "the lone ranger" has actually seen the TV show (or listened to an episode of the radio series)? absolutely not. but the title is a culture meme. just that bare aspect of name recognition means that disney poured tons of money into it as a likely follow-up to the pirates series (which also was based almost solely on a recognizable piece of IP).

the writeup on deadline actually seemed kinda positive, apparently the box office anticipation before this was it looked like another flop and it outperformed expectations. next weekend will show if it tapped out its audience this weekend or if word of mouth can sustain. overseas markets probably made this almost failure proof anyway, i could almost imagine the american market not even being thought of as the primary market for a movie like this. found grown ups just astoundingly abysmal (fantastic soundtrack though), was wondering if sandler's string of flops would continue, maybe the flops prompted the sequel? this is the first sequel he's done right? caught a few minutes of zohan over the weekend, the existence of that movie just gets weirder w/ time. i wonder what mordy thinks of it.

Seems to me the marketing (non)strategy for this movie kind of doomed it from the get-go. It's got a generic and faintly misleading title, ridickerus smashy-bashy advertisements that sell neither the f/x nor the story, and a list of (sorry, but) B-list TV actors. I love Idris Elba and Ron Perlman nigh as much as the next fella, but I don't think either of 'em are box office draws to the lumpenpeople. I think a 'now, in theatres' Godzilla ARRRRRRR!" over-the-top schlock campaign would have put more asses in chairs than all the semi-serious 'Now... Heroes.... Mankind... Great Threats... de facto ads.

(Also, at what point is it going to be acknowledged that flashing 30-frame long images from the film does little more than induce epilepsy?)

well overseas market can ensure that it will make money but generally films that gross below expectations domestically don't become "tentpoles" (trust me i hate that word). but you're right we'll see if word of mouth increases its BO take next week.

xpost

that brand recognition trap is kinda highlighted by the lone ranger. everyone's heard of it but really that's all, it's like the shadow or the phantom or john carter it's not like superman or star trek or star wars. those kind of properties are really pretty scarce (which is why we're getting more star wars movies and why sony or whoever will never stop making x-men and spiderman movies), you can introduce lesser known characters but they have to come in as part of the same universe, they have to stand on those shoulders. curious if green lantern was a case of a character being too ill-defined for the mass market or if it was just the movie was awful (i haven't seen it) or if neither would've mattered if there had been an after credits scene in the dark knight where batman and green lantern play guitar hero or whatever.

green lantern probably combo of not really being a well-known character (relative to you-know-whats), movie being shitty, and... does ryan reynolds open movies?

Tied into the lack of brand recognition, I feel like this movie would've been helped a lot in the box-office just by having a flashier name. No 13yo boy knows what the hell "pacific rim" is a reference to, and that's the market they need to target, particularly with a dumb giant robot movie.

I'm in the middle of reading Lynda Obst's new book and she claims that The Biz is all about intellectual property right now. No matter how forgotten the character or story is, do a quick fixer-upper, add 3D and "a grittier journey though a beloved whateverthefuckitis" to taste, and pray that it's broad enough to play in all international markets.

Lone Ranger is this year's Dark Shadows

No 13yo boy knows what the hell "pacific rim" is a reference to, and that's the market they need to target, particularly with a dumb giant robot movie.

Is a 13 year old boy even going to care that this movie is in the theater? The marketing for this feels completely off somehow... and extremely generic. I know for a fact that if Guillermo del Toro asked the Internet "hey Internet, could you redesign the Pacific Rim marketing posters/trailers into something more exciting and, well, cooler?" he get something far better.

Talk of that whole IP thing from Deadline Hollywood...

Few tentpoles this summer and even this year have prompted more uninformed box office forecasting and just amateurish speculation (but not on Deadline) than the mecha anime inspired Pacific Rim. Headlines like “It’ll tank!” or “It’ll triumph!” sometimes within 24 hours of one another, ignored the fact that tracking is unreliable. And it sure has been this May, June, and July. One reason for the extra attention on Pacific Rim is that it cost an expensive $180M-$220M due to its Industrial Light & Magic CGI. And also because it was fully developed and produced and majority financed by Legendary (with Warner Bros minority financing as well as distributing and marketing) without stars from a home-grown IP. That has focused all eyes on Legendary’s Thomas Tull, screenwriter Travis Beacham (who had the idea for the film), and co-scribe/director Guillermo del Toro. Tracking initially lagged but then domestic interest in Pacific Rim climbed once the full impact of Sue Kroll’s marketing campaign hit the market. But I fear it was front-loaded with scifi fanboys and failed to widen. It also seemed too derivative of Transformers, Godzilla, and, well, everything else audiences have seen before. While a major studio might be disappointed with Pacific Rim‘s domestic gross, mega-financier Tull has the luxury of mining this marginal outcome into a franchise – especially depending on how foreign performs.

But I did enjoy that the aliens and robots were very very very big, I mean that's the main sell, right?

yeah i did enjoy how freaking huge they seemed!

And the rocket elbow

They were big, amirite? That's something none of us are likely to forget. At least until someone makes bigger ones.

Agree with post up thread that category 5 Kaiju was a bit of a letdown.

Hopefully the sequel will be set in the English Channel, would be rad.

i could almost imagine the american market not even being thought of as the primary market for a movie like this

i had this thought several times during the movie. like, mako's english was so bad that it was almost unintelligible, but if your primary audience is seeing it dubbed anyway, who gives a shit? i don't know much about anime but the characters felt like straight rips from something like ghost in the shell.

and i have to say, i really enjoyed that feeling, odd as it was. it felt like seeing an asian movie, except that the whole thing was in english. weird!

There were lots of subtitles!

I read some interesting stuff from Del Toro, like how he made a point of not making Mako some sexy Asian fetish object, or how he made sure to stress that cities are generally emptied before the monsters attack, so that the battles could be (in his words) "remorseless." Obviously the death toll is implicit, but he managed a movie without people getting stepped on our squashed.

Great graph from the wiki:

Del Toro, a self-described pacifist, avoided what he termed "car commercial aesthetics" or "army recruitment video aesthetics", and gave the characters Western ranks including "marshal" and "ranger" rather than military ranks such as "captain", "major" or "general". The director stated: "I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world."[14] Del Toro wanted to break from the mass death and destruction featured in contemporary blockbuster films, and made a point of showing the streets and buildings being evacuated before Kaiju attacks, ensuring that the destruction depicted is "completely remorseless". The director stated: "I don't want people being crushed. I want the joy that I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank... "What I think is you could do nothing but echo the moment you're in. There is a global anxiety about how fragile the status quo is and the safety of citizens, but in my mind—honestly—this film is in another realm. There is no correlation to the real world. There is no fear of a copycat Kaiju attack because a Kaiju saw it on the news and said, I'm going to destroy Seattle. In my case, I'm picking up a tradition. One that started right after World War II and was a coping mechanism, in a way, for Japan to heal the wounds of that war. And it's integral for a Kaiju to rampage in the city."

Maybe this explains any relative underperformance? His sensitivity and distaste for wanton death turned off the sadists?

Americans smelled that communist propaganda miles away.

i noticed that. apart from the absolutely fucking TERRIFYING creatures this would be a good kids' movie because everybody's safely out of the way.

Except for the one absolutely terrifying scene with a kid in danger!

a childhood without nightmares is a childhood unlived

is mako the only female character in the movie, except for the preggo beastie?

i think so, except for extras in crowd scenes

yeah, i don't mean this wouldn't be scary for kids but that nobody gets really obviously killed apart from ron perlman (and even then, eh?), i.e. you might expect to see bodies getting ripped apart or whatever but there is none of that.

No, one of the Russian (?) pilots is female.

I thought there was a female on the Russian Jaeger team (non speaking role - just glared)

Pretty sure there was a Russian.

Also, at least one of the monsters was possibly female.

The Russian monster, I think.

Did female monsters chat to each other about something other than a male monster

oh yeah, forgot about the russian. she was almost non-present in the film though.

Seems to me the marketing (non)strategy for this movie kind of doomed it from the get-go. It's got a generic and faintly misleading title, ridickerus smashy-bashy advertisements that sell neither the f/x nor the story, and a list of (sorry, but) B-list TV actors. I love Idris Elba and Ron Perlman nigh as much as the next fella, but I don't think either of 'em are box office draws to the lumpenpeople. I think a 'now, in theatres' Godzilla ARRRRRRR!" over-the-top schlock campaign would have put more asses in chairs than all the semi-serious 'Now... Heroes.... Mankind... Great Threats... de facto ads.

(Also, at what point is it going to be acknowledged that flashing 30-frame long images from the film does little more than induce epilepsy?)

― ®€ℳ¥ (soda), Tuesday, July 16, 2013 12:03 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

the advertising's been terrible. just random carnage set to dubstep.

No 13yo boy knows what the hell "pacific rim" is a reference to, and that's the market they need to target, particularly with a dumb giant robot movie.

― Fetchboy, Tuesday, July 16, 2013 1:09 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

getting 13 y/o boys excited for this isnt the problem. its getting anyone else to go, which you need to do on this kind of budget

if this movie had Ryan Reynolds in the lead i would have wished for someone better but this movie weirdly got me to acknowledge Ryan Reynolds could have done a better job.

Actress who played mako is eerily the same amount of bland as soylent-reynolds
I wonder if it was a deliberate choice?

yeah, leads made large parts of it feel like starship troopers with all the satire removed

fwiw, Rinko Kikuchi was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for "Babel," and for many was the only good thing about that movie.

Other dude, from Sons of Anarchy? Frankly, I'd rather they spend the money on the FX than on some actor hidden in a suit half the movie. Like (lol) Ryan Reynolds, of all people, would have made a difference. Maybe a bigger name than Idris, perhaps, but he was great in this.

maybe they were thinking the blander the leads are, the better kids can project themselves in the role
I'm fairly sure they could have gotten more interesting and dynamic leads for less money

Ha, I can't believe you think a more dynamic actor would have made a difference in a movie where the leads spend most of the time strapped in building sized robot fighting building sized monsters. A more dynamic lead would have meant more scenes of talking and yelling and less robots/monsters, which would mean adding, dunno, 15 minutes to a movie? A movie that, ironically, Del Toro I believe has said already had more lines of dialogue than anything else he's done.

Disagree -- Ron Perelman was only onscreen for like 3 minutes

i was not as swept away by the characters and non-robot stuff as i hoped i'd be

also the robot-kaiju fights and stuff were a little hard to understand, shades of transformers

really loved the first 30 minutes tho

SPOILER

i think my favorite shot was mako's finger poised over the Sword button

yeah the sword was dope

My eyes teared up from pure joy at that sword scene, especially from her dramatic line of dialogue in Japanese uttered right before the killing thrust.

It was so fucking perfect and my favorite part of the entire film.

I also enjoyed the shot ripped straight from Godzilla of the abandoned truck on the roadway getting flattened by a scaly foot coming in from out of frame.

this definitely peaked when the monster sprouted wings, flew into the upper atmosphere and then was decapitated in slo-mo while rinko kikuchi screamed THIS IS FOR MY FAMILY in japanese. i didnt need any more movie after that

Also, this film hasn't opened yet in China & Japan, right? Lets see what it does there.

did the sword come from the spine? it looked like it was self-assembling from the spine bolts.

xp yeah the godzilla foot was sick

i can't get over how freaking big everything looked, it was probably the best use of the 3d format i've seen yet.

Lots of X-COM in the film, too, from the varying backer countries pulling out of funding the international team of high tech monster killers to the science dudes freaking out over kaiju tissue and organs brought back from the skirmishes. and the psionic links giving a hint as to how to finally beat them.

imax 3d i should say

haha yeah, xcom!

This is actually a flick I want to see again but in IMAX 3D

Movie did have the modern genre blockbuster issue of the lead Anglo bro with blond/brown hair who's pretty bland and less interesting that all the other characters

re: the bigness -- it seems like they deliberately put the "camera" so close to the action so that the monsters and robots seem big, because they can't fit in the frame, but it was really disorienting. the rain didn't help as well.

all i want is a brightly-lit no-cut robot/monster battle dammit!

Can we all just breathe a fucking sigh of relief that Idris Elba was cast instead of Tom Cruise as originally planned

yes

"two things"

that look he gives before he says that communicated it way better than actually saying it.

yeah the look was intense, i would have peed my pants if that was me

a more dynamic lead would have peed his pants.

cocky mccockface

whoops i meant mccockyface

Did anyone else stay long enough to see the Thank Yous and dedication?

yes. wierdest moment of the evening was the fatbeard 3 rows back mansplaining harryhausen/honda two the two women who'd stayed with him til the end: "I have no idea who those guys are."

o_0

"TO the two women" obv

Can we all just breathe a fucking sigh of relief that Idris Elba was cast instead of Tom Cruise as originally planned

― Simon H., Tuesday, July 16, 2013 1:50 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

smh cruise would've rocked it

I dunno; Tom Cruise in the Tom Skerrit role woulda been weird

Tom Cruise could have been the Aussie dad. They could have made him the big cameo, like you only ever saw him in the suit, then on a final mission he takes off his helmet and offers the "I love you son" stuff.

Actually, tbh, Tom Cruise has repeatedly shown himself a good supporting team player, given the right project.

tom cruise emotionally closest to charlie day role

Cruise should have played the category 5 monster.

He should've played San Francisco.

Or a leader of a Kaiju cult.

Kai Juise

^ worth waiting for

this was awesome!

loved the colours and the lights. and the action scenes were terrific.

as adam said ya the monsters and stuff in this were BIG, but more than that, they were shot so that they FELT big.

the sword was hilarious—it was such a boner.

but ya honestly, anyone who complains that this was "dumb" is acting dumb

chainboner

the blonde star dude was pretty bad (god, there are just NO decent young male action-type actors out there, are they, and there havent been for a while—remember when josh hartnett was in everything? this generation really, really needs a harrison ford or kurt russell) but everyone else was fine.

there were enough emotional beats there, and they worked, complaining about the "emotional core" of this movie while still fucking talking about avatar, jesus christ contenderizer

Landry from Friday night lights would make for decent Nu-kurtrussell

¯\(°_°)/¯

i yam wot i yam. my catch-all reference points for spectacle-driven sci-fi are star wars, the matrix and avatar (which, yeah, i dug).

this was super fucking cool during the giant robot & monster bits, but otherwise i was often kinda bored.

since i didn't mention it before, the 3D in this was the best i've ever seen, and by a long shot. no distracting blurriness, smooth even during the action scenes, clear and bright all the way through. technology seems to have improved dramatically in the last year or two.

i was actually quite amazed how diverted i was during the non-battle scenes!

this is also far and away guillermo del toro's best movie btw

Is the 3d brightness amped up? The 2d I saw was a bit murky but I thought it was all the scenes being rainy nighttime

i didnt notice any brightness issues

this is also far and away guillermo del toro's best movie btw

i broke my brain trying to get it around this sentence

I have so many to see yet. But it's def better than Pan's Labyrinth.

none of his movies are really that good, despite all the things about them that make you (and me) want to like them

until this movie i always thought he had more taste than talent. but he did a great job here.

love pan's labyrinth. and the devil's backbone and most of hellboy 2.

prefer all three to pacific rim, though hellboy 2 is awfully inconsistent and the other two push the sadism a bit far for my delicate sensibilities.

dunno that he's ever made a "perfect film", but backbone comes close.

Backbone, which I haven't seen, is going to be the litmus test that tells me whether I love Pacific Rim because I love Del Toro, or because I hate him and it's anachronistic of his work.

backbone is definitely one of his best, i wasnt thinking of that one, but yeah

When your competition is transformers, that crap Hugh jackman movie, and robot jox, this is gonna be best giant robot movie till Wes Anderson decides to do moonrise gundam or something

you better not be shit talking robot jox.

Backbone could not be any more different from this.

In terms of "nu action stars" I find it weird that Taylor Kitsch got TWO shots at being that and all Josh Holloway got was a tiny cameo in the last Mission: Impossible movie.

this is gonna be best giant robot movie till Wes Anderson decides to do moonrise gundam or something

*shudders*

moonrise gundam

ahhhhhhhhhhhHHHH

this was super fucking cool during the giant robot & monster bits, but otherwise i was often kinda bored

so you were bored like 10% of the time? pretty good goin

pretty good groin

i mean dude the entire movie was giant robots and monsters! it was CHOCK A BLOCK. what little wasn't was 1) abs and 2) blood dripping ominously out of noses

at least 5% trembling shyly at the door

it's not just this movie but we don't get to see the monsters and robots in a steady and clear enough way to get a sense of what they look like other than "big"
i'm trying to draw them from memory and the only thing i can really remember visually is the red chinese robot had three arms somehow. and one of the last monsters had batwings that were somehow hidden until then.

that was a great thing about this movie's visual approach, and the main reason they SEEMED so big!

i mean, we finally get to the point where people have an idea how to film this stuff subjectively, and how much more exciting that is, and people are complaining about it? next thing you're going to be upset that there's no establishing shots of the white house

btw a really excellent thing about the way this movie was constructed was blowing through all the origin stuff in the first 10 minutes

i thought the movie did kinda drop the ball on the monsters. physically indistinct and with no personalities. my favorite (crab monster) didnt get enough screen time

i loved the way they looked and how their mouths glowed blue

i didn't really need much more than the movie gave me in that regard.

my stomach kind of dropped at the "they have the SAME DNA!" line and i couldn't figure out why until i remembered that somebody said almost exactly the same thing in prometheus (but it was about the aliens in that movie and us)

I wished it was a wee bit shorter

thought the first 10 mins were going to be a harbinger of tightness to come, alas

Gipsy danger was pretty memorable and you saw it a lot. Had a big energy circle, hands that became plasma cannons, a sword, etc. the Chinese robot had multiple arms with blades. Russian robot had square green head. It was all pretty memorable.

loved the russian one and the russian dudes, was sad we didnt get to see them do their thing a bit more

the robots were better done as far as having distinct silhouettes and having some character to the designs, though the way they were stylized wasnt really to my taste

definitely could've used some more of the russians

"we finally get to the point where people have an idea how to film this stuff subjectively"
the opening shot of star wars managed to communicate both size and an iconic shape in a pretty neat way that wasn't constantly disorienting, so it seems like the only thing we've figured out between then and now is how to bring people to the edge of nausea.

re: main robot, where did the sword come from? the whole fist bumping foreshadowing had me thinking they would form blazing sword voltron style but that didn't happen and it jumped too quickly for me to see.

the "analog vs. digital" dialog line still shitty.

i didnt QUITE get was going on in the end, like, who was supposed to blow up the thing or not, or how they could get back through the hole without the dead monster, or why they just floated up out of there... i was pretty sure that all of them were going to get killed and thought that was pretty cool

the "analog vs. digital" dialog line still shitty.

― Elvis Telecom, Wednesday, July 17, 2013 2:44 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark

that reminded me of BSG reboot pilot

Yeah, that line caused me to burst out laughing.

was it just them or did every robot have the analog treadmill/stilt things going on?

Guys. Maybe it had to do with the mind meld equipment or something. One could envision a tricky bit of neural circuitry that could be analog vs digital with a learning curve for either.

its pretty obvious that that one was powered by vinyl records

They are moving magnets through solenoid when they move their feet in gipsy danger. It's nuanced.

The kids with their digital jaegers don't know what they're missing

i agree that the monsters were sort of lumpy and shapeless

otoh they were freaking scary

http://csebo.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/jager_bomb_poster_image1.jpg

was really hoping for charlie day and sherlock von neumann to pilot a monster using their monster helmet.

also in missed opportunities, none of the robots combined to form super-idris.

i loved the way they looked and how their mouths glowed blue

that bit was very Attack the Block i thought!

yeah, analog/digital line was deliciously awful, just a little cherry of perfect stupidity (NB: i thought the heavy russian unit was the oldest? shouldn't it have been the analog one?)

was i the only one who, when Marshall Weeks-to-Live chooses Corporal Dickhead as his neural sidekick, was like "well that jaeger's DEFINITELY going down"

if they didn't want to telegraph that, he should have brought the dog with him and said "FUCK YOU DAD, I'M GONNA LIVE FOREVAAA"

yeah what happened to that fucking dog?? did he yip at the end when everybody back at MIssion Control cheered? he must have.

They should have hooked the dog up to his brain, and had the two drift and go feral-robot on a monster.

I loved it when Idris solemnly asked "would you rather die here...or IN A JAEGER???"

Moves Like Jaeger.

Movies Like Jaeger.

― EZ Snappin, Thursday, May 24, 2012 1:43 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Keep up, Josh in Chicago!

But my response was in IMAX 3D. Were you wearing your glasses?

none of the robots combined to form super-idris.

sequel

http://theimpactnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/1803578-222071_10150170688318271_117077868270_6779189_6428806_n.jpg

I loved it when Idris solemnly asked "would you rather die here...or IN A JAEGER???"

― Chantal Anchorman (admrl), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 4:00 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

idris killed it in this tbh

was i the only one who, when Marshall Weeks-to-Live chooses Corporal Dickhead as his neural sidekick, was like "well that jaeger's DEFINITELY going down"

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 3:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i bet you that both the oldies were originally going to be in that one but then someone realized that having two tough father figures die at the same time would just be too repetitive

digital/analog went so far beyond preposterous it got me over the hump to full suspension of disbelief. like just "that's my story and i'm sticking to it now do you want to see this or not?"

and i'm all like, yes show me this:

http://aracaud.free.fr/godz8p12.jpg

totally!!

xpost

the boat was so fucking dope

also can't believe nobody's mentioned the executive desk toy yet, come on people, that is surely one of the greatest action movie sight gags in the history of cinema

it was about as good as the 'days since accident' gag in man of steel

the boat bothered me because it should've buckled under its own weight when they were swinging it around

http://i.imgur.com/alTcn1G.jpg

it was a pred ship, my man.

also can't believe nobody's mentioned the executive desk toy yet, come on people, that is surely one of the greatest action movie sight gags in the history of cinema

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 5:05 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was about as good as the 'days since accident' gag in man of steel

― i wanna be a gabbneb baby (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 5:06 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

both of these were very spielbergy (in a great way)

what about "long and hard and full of sea-men" don't you understand

xposts

Iirc, Del Toro made sure the sea-men had already been evacuated.

I guess that's why there was so much feces

thread has gone into a dark place

Those feces run a good price

thread has gone into a dark place

Take off the glasses.

Is that a '3d movies are dim' joke?

Or a 'contendo dresses like blues brother' joke?

the boat was so fucking dope

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 2:05 PM (2 hours ago)

hell yeah. even though i'd seen it a bunch of times in the ads, the low-angle shot of gipsy danger swaggering up the street with that huge-ass boat in tow like a baseball bat -- that was my favorite moment in the film. wanted to cheer. did not because how my momma raised me.

i dress like i work in a game store

I totally cheered when the boat came into play. Did a couple other times, too. Couldn't really help myself.

i'm just gonna post the Chicago Reader's capsule review of this, so we can marvel at the forehead-slapping idiocy of the last sentence. y'all ready?:

Pacific Rim
2013 | 131 minutes | Rated PG-13
Another marathon of cacophony and cliché, this Warner Bros. release updates Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla with its tale of earth being continuously attacked by giant sea monsters and defended only by giant, human-controlled robots that excel in hand-to-hand combat. Guillermo del Toro directed the haunting Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and highly amusing Hellboy (2004), but here his nicely eccentric characters—Burn Gorman and Charlie Day as crazed scientists, Ron Perlman as an outsize western hustler who calls himself Hannibal Chau—are swallowed up by the deafening monster mash. Rinko Kikuchi and Charlie Hunnam hold down the bland East-West romance, calculated to increase the movie’s third-world commerciality.
By J.R. Jones

kind think the quick equation of "asian" with "third-world" is straight-up racist. at best it's a level of ignorance i couldn't previously imagine ascribing to a respected film critic. or any type of journalist.

The attacks aren't continuous. They are discrete to the point that they have a clock.

btw what's up with terraforming expansionist aliens as the villains du jour?

Global warming

That was actually the plot line of The Arrival - aliens have arrived, but the temperature of the Earth is too cool therefore...

seeing this monday on real IMAX (not fake small IMAX) and actually surprised at how excited i am.

I was kinda excited by this before it was released and went to see it on opening day (haven't done that in a while !).
not a great movie or anything (many action movie/sci fi clichés, pathos etc).
but as someone who loved mechas as a kid (a looong time ago...), it was very regressively cool.
so much better than transformers (just seen the first movie) it's not even in the same league.
if I had seen this as a kid I would have gone crazy !
loved how the jaegers seemed so massive and powerful. especially in the sea.
the chinese and russian ones got destroyed a bit tooo easily, though.
Idris was almost as cool as the jaegers.

the chinese and russian ones got destroyed a bit tooo easily, though.

especially for a movie supposedly designed to play to international audiences

it's good that the main part of the action takes place in HK instead of in the US like 99% of this kind of movies.

the chinese and russian ones got destroyed a bit tooo easily, though.

I think it was elided over that the monsters were evolving/adapting to do better against the robots? Like, the one monster that went straight for the humans in the robot head? How did they figure that out?

Also, when Charlie Day mind-melded with the monster? Why did that monster later try to dig him out of his shelter? What did they want with him?

to put him in a talent show on their world where each competitor comes from a different planet they've destroyed and the losers are fed to the children, obv

i am really a total sucker for Star Trek-style "let's come together as one and trade garden-variety racism for hatred of the real Other - non-humans"

also yay One World Government, Mark of the Beast etc

the idea that the kaijus adapt is OK but how can the two kaijus destroy the super cool chinese with 3 arms and the russian jaegers in like 5min and then have their ass kicked by the single old gypsy !

analog = warmer and punchier

ahah.
also why didn't the kaiju finish the aussie jaeger once it was deactivated ?

No thrill

the idea that the kaijus adapt is OK but how can the two kaijus destroy the super cool chinese with 3 arms and the russian jaegers in like 5min and then have their ass kicked by the single old gypsy !
― AlXTC from Paris, Friday, July 19, 2013

this post has convinced me pacific rim is worth seeing

The WWII Air Force nods were cute: pilots in bomber jackets, Idris Elba's non-country specific USAF/RAF officer's uniform, bomber nose art & enemy kills on the Jaegers

Also, the controller with the manga pompadour having a rosary wrapped around his left hand during encounters that was never remarked upon or drawn particular attention to was a nice touch.

Also, I wish more western reviewers caught the fact that the Gipsy jaeger holds(and swings) the tanker ship like a katana, not a baseball bat. This pays off the early set-up of their staff fighting scene. Mako's style is kendo; she holds and sheathes her staff like a side-slung katana after each round, and Charlie switches styles to match her from the kung fu(southern?) he fought the Chinese triplets with.

It was the little touches I liked so much about this film. More training sequences would have been great and help better develop the characters, or give them something of an arc, at least.

There's at least five flicks opening locally that I want to see this weekend(from the Big Star docu to An American Werewolf in London) but the drive to hit this movie again(only on a bigger screen) is so damn strong.

arc shmarc

Also, the Russian jaeger totally busts out an elbow drop during its scene.

good catches, kingfish. I need to see this again.

Also, I wish more western reviewers caught the fact that the Gipsy jaeger holds(and swings) the tanker ship like a katana, not a baseball bat. This pays off the early set-up of their staff fighting scene. Mako's style is kendo; she holds and sheathes her staff like a side-slung katana after each round, and Charlie switches styles to match her from the kung fu(southern?) he fought the Chinese triplets with.

― Your Own Personal El Guapo (kingfish), Friday, July 19, 2013

Great post. This was really clear in context and a very elegant character beat. As a reader I'd sort of just been mentally bracketing the error and moving along but that's too low a standard: If a professional writer on visual media missed this, I don't trust their eye; and if a pub felt the need to dumb this movie down I don't trust its taste.

I'm in 2 minds about the film. thought it could have been better, more intelligent etc.
& that the guy that I later found out was Idris Elba had me wondering if he was a sports star rather thahn an actor since he seemed a bit wooden and to me at least very reminiscent of Vinnie Jones. Just not convinced by him in the film much at all.
Also the 2 scientists who were presumably in for light relief, not very convinced by the brit geek.
Some roamntic cliches if taht isn't too much of a spoiler, but that has probably been said above anyway, haven't read the thread right through.
& bits of the end seem to be a bit tacked on. But if it went the way I thought it probably should it would be a bit of a downer. But somebody was talking about happy endings being apparently stuck on US films about 25 years back so I guess that's nothing new.
Does look great though. Nearly psychedelic in some of the kaiju encounters so must be interesting in 3D.

Nothing in the film suggests that anything other than a happy ending(high body count tho it had) was ever in the cards. The film is refreshingly optimistic and non-cynical; the whole production is shot thru with a sense of exhiberant joy. I mean, fuck, the best fight scene in the film _escalates_ when it could have ended, having the Kaiju sprout full-on dragon/Rodan wings.

All the trailers before this reminded me of something the RedLetterMedia guys mentioned during their Lone Ranger vid; that most modern blockbusters are an assault of quick action shots and noise making you feel nothing. Every single trailer(even for films I actually want to see, like Gravity) was cut to the exact same rhythms. Stack six or seven together and it's like hearing nothing but blast beats for an hour; you're numb to the onslaught by then.

bits of the end seem to be a bit tacked on. But if it went the way I thought it probably should it would be a bit of a downer. But somebody was talking about happy endings being apparently stuck on US films about 25 years back so I guess that's nothing new.

― Stevolende, Friday, July 19, 2013

SPOILER ALERT

http://www.digital-polyphony.com/the-player-1992-bruce-willis-julia-roberts-pic-4.jpg

If a professional writer on visual media missed this, I don't trust their eye; and if a pub felt the need to dumb this movie down I don't trust its taste.

― resulting post (rogermexico.), Friday, July 19, 2013 11:18 AM (1 hour ago)

as as non-professional non-writer who described gipsy dragging the boat "like a baseball bat" itt, i got no regrets

thread is spontaneous and unedited. regret nothing!

i grew up watching Godzilla movies, as many as i could find on the VHS shelves at Target, so im hoping this brings back some pleasant feelings.

The baseball bat is mentioned by like every online reviewer dude I've read. I mean, tbf, it's a more recognizable weapon and attack stance to us than a katana. But I'm pedantic about martial arts stuff, and since we already were shown how both pilots know kendo, I think the scene connects to that more.

Also, to be hella pedantic and way into non-essential details, I know little about japanese swordfightjng other than what an overconsumption of movies, anime, and video games has taught me. The jaeger holds the ship vertically and swings down and across like you wanna chop diagonally thru a dude. A baseball/cricket bat is both held and swung differently.

Again, much like with the LotR movies, the attention to little detail both shows how much the creative teams genuinely cared about what they were working on and poured their souls into. I just wish the screenplay had that level of perfection.

I appreciate these details as I definitely missed them. However, I'd note that a baseball bat can be swung in many ways when used as a weapon.

there was probably great care taken in developing the 3-armed robot, but because of the way it was shown, I can't remember exactly how there happen to be 3 arms.
is one of the arms attached to the armpit of the other? does it come out of the shoulder?
http://www.collectiondx.com/gallery2/gallery/d/35776-9/P5108631.jpg

http://comicbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/pacific-rim-toys-2.jpg

stupidity moments:
- the BSG-reboot 'gipsy danger is analog' thing -- if it is so analog and able to survive once an EMP has knocked the connection w/ main control out, then how was it that Control was able to shut down GD's plasma cannon during Mako's flashback-meltdown? (i can see how this could be handwaved but still)
- did they GENUINELY imply that the kaiju were the dinosaurs, did that actually happen (i chose to hear this as 'the kaiju were responsible for the dinosaurs' extinction' but my brother heard it as 'the kaiju were the dinosaurs', this cannot be possible, dinosaurs had feathers for heaven's sake)

also, given the film's set in HK it would have been nice to have the Chinese pilots get some lines. (apart from the girl in the shelter, are there any Chinese speaking roles?)

ALL THAT SAID i love this movie and I am v v v close to going to see it for a third time. also i choose to believe that mako and raleigh are not ~in love~ because i feel like they should just be mind-melded bros forever.

yeah, i thought they suggested that dinosaurs were beta kaiju

1. communication does not have to be digital. there is analog radio. (who knows what the digital vs. analog referred to anyway).
2. kaiju definitely killed the dinosaurs. kaiju were not the dinosaurs.
3. at least the TRUE LOVE in their mind meld was not the only force strong enough to destroy the portal or some corny shit like that.

I just saw this and I've only got 1 thing to say: so so glad there was no kissing at the end.

― free your spirit pig (La Lechera), Saturday, July 13, 2013 2:40 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

c# and LL OTM

I thought they said that the kaiju killed the dinosaurs b/c aliens were like 'hey, cool earth I could see myself here. hang my bob marley legend poster right here, etc.' but the climate was wrong, so they returned after global warming related climate change.

or was the implication that the dinosaurs were kaiju, sent to clear the earth of whatever might be found, and then disaster fucked earth up, and they had to wait?

I hope not b/c kaiju do not look like dinosaurs. And if the sole purpose of kaiju is to raze structures and eradicate life, the herbivore and small dinosaurs seem useless as kaiju.

"Kaiju killed the dinosaurs" definitely what was being argued in the movie

well that's a relief

1. not communication! the point of "analog" as i understood it was that gipsy danger has a twin nuclear core, is self-powering, so could not be knocked out by EMP and did not need to rely on control --- but if she's so self-powering then how were they able to turn her cannon off from outside?
2. kaiju so big they had 2 brains "like the dinosaurs" was also a thing a person said, i still refuse the they-were-the-dinos interpretation because it is unthinkably awful
3. true love is grossssss

The first time I assumed I missed a detail that made the analog/digital thing make sense. The second time I paid close attention, then decided it makes no sense and is basically a joke.

Could also be that Gipsy Danger was retrofitted with newer/different tech as parts were scavenged from other broken jaegers.

I need to see this again, but I understood it as "aliens killed the dinosaurs" and not "aliens killed the dinosaurs using kaiju" and that the kaiju were a new type of weapon/harbinger. The Lovecraft stan in me loved the plot of monsters coming through higher-dimensional rift, underworld cult that worships them, etc.

Would have loved it if this could have passed the Bechdel Test.

Haven't nerded out so primally on a movie in awhile.

Also, WTF is the base called the SHATTERDOME? I'm not complaining at all - I just can't shake the picture I have of a high-level meeting of the Pacific Army...

"Guys, we've got funding to build our base but we need a catchy name for it to rally the world. I need some suggestions..."
"PacComJag"
"Jägerhaus"
"The Chet Holyfield Memorial Jaeger Pen"
there's a short pause until Stacker Pentecost intones "THE SHATTERDOME"

I will be married in the shatterdome

yeah what happened to that fucking dog?? did he yip at the end when everybody back at MIssion Control cheered? he must
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, July 17, 2013 7:53 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he yipped