Pacific Rim

[Rasix]

Dude.

[Margalis]

This might be an error, but I'm going to actually respond to one of the things just to provide a diversion from all the boring meta-commentary.  

Come on, at least throw in a random insult out of nowhere to keep the true spirit of movie discussion intact!

I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that all multicellular organisms are built out of a consistent set of DNA that differentiates into different cells and organs during development.

I believe that in the film he says they have the exact same DNA, not just a consistent set.

It's actually very strange, what he says is:

1. All the monsters look super different
2. But here's a inner body part that looks the same
3. Turns out they all have the same DNA and are clones
4. (Even though they look super different)

Kind of a weird concept to throw into a dumb monster movie IMO, but I guess the idea was that it was a clue that all these different monsters were being sent by a single intelligence, or they all came from the same hive, or something like that, and that provided the impetus to go through the rift and take out whatever that single point of origin was.

Yeah, my problem is less the science of it, even though the science is weird, and more that it doesn't serve much purpose that wouldn't be better served by something else. Many of my "nerd rage" complaints about "plot holes" are actually complaints about script construction and the way scenes play out.

There's a hole with monsters coming out of it - obviously you want to close the hole, figure out what's on the other side, and destroy that thing as well probably. Whether or not the monsters are clones or are being sent by evil masters doesn't change any of that.

Here's the script reason the monsters are clones: (by script reason I mean "reason it needs to be in the script")

1. The plan is to bomb the hole closed
2. This is silly on a number of levels, including that they must have tried something similar already.
3. There needs to be some reason why this plan works in the end while just going through the hole or bombing it didn't before.
4. Turns out the hole has a lock and DNA is the key!

It's their solution to make that part of the narrative function.

That's really my primary complaint with the movie - so many things happen only to make plot points work out or to hit emotional beats, when in the context of the movie those things don't make much sense.

Dude

I want to discuss the movie. If nobody else does fine, the thread will die. It appears that at least some other people are interested in discussing the movie though. So it would be cool if we could do that, without people like Lakov and Nevermore posting over and over just to prove how too-cool-for-school they are.

[Rendakor]

[Teleku]

[Margalis]

[Lakov_Sanite]

Again and this bears repeating. 

[Tannhauser]

Just watched it.  Pretty good movie. I was promised robots hitting monsters and was delivered same.  If you go past that then you're just dividing by zero.

[Margalis]

Again and this bears repeating.  

It appears that your new schtick is shit up every movie thread with incessant crying about how people don't like the same movies you do.

You should probably get over it.

[HaemishM]

Dude.

This.

[Velorath]

Are you the WUA replacement ?

Needs more cowbell.

I always thought it kinda sad that after all WUA's ups and downs here it was a fucking thread about the Battleship movie that ended things for him. Apparently his spirit lives on though and continues to haunt movie threads dedicated to sci-fi popcorn action films.

[Ironwood]

You knew it would be something like Battleship though - what got him going was shite movies that made a fuckton of money.

It had to be a Bay Ripoff really.

[Sir T]

Did you know that Saint Bonaventura is the patron saint of Bowel disorders. Its true!

[Simond]

If it was valid criticism, they might not be raging.

If it's not valid say why.

That's how discussion works.

You're applying real life science and logic to a shonen mecha movie. That's why it's not valid.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Pacific Rim was discussed ad naseam both before and after it's release. This thread is actually twenty three pages long now and full of all sides of the issue with both extreme praise and scorn as well as everything in between.  There is no reason to continue a discussion like this beyond adding one's agreement or disagreement with what has been said.  To write a pages long review on a DVD release copy is extreme but to not even have read the thread you are posting in is just lazy and narcissistic. 

Snappy one liners are about all the response that deserves.

[Venkman]

I love this thread. Every few weeks someone else gets around to seeing it for the first time and comes back to reignite the nerd rage.

It all goes back to the premise being dumb if you think about the movie at all as anything but anime without the cartoons. There isn't a thing in this movie that can hold up to any kind of scrutiny, thus making it the kind of forgettable pap we'd usually not bother talking about.

Except that it has roots in some other something or other a few people recognize and therefore somehow it's defensable 

The short answer on how these monsters would have been dealt with has not changed in half a dozen pages:

An endless supply of dumb missiles just constantly barraging that whole until schild's cement dump is ready.

[Miasma]

You shouldn't be allowed nerd rage unless you spent money when it was still in the cinema.  That should be a rule.

[Venkman]

You shouldn't be allowed nerd rage unless you spent money when it was still in the cinema.  That should be a rule.

Where we don't even require people to have played a game to rant about 

[HaemishM]

Except that it has roots in some other something or other a few people recognize and therefore somehow it's defensable 

Actually it's defensible because some of us like me were actually quite entertained by it.

[Venkman]

When I said "defensible", I meant defensible as a story (the chief complaint I had), not as a whole movie.

I personally enjoyed it, it's a great IMAX 3D showpiece. I enjoyed it even more than Avatar, which I found about as vacuous. But like I said when it was my turn to resurrect the ranting on this movie, I only enjoy it when I don't think about it.

So it's a defensible spend of a movie ticket. But it's not a story, plot, characters, nor narrative that can actually be critiqued in my opinion because none of it holds up. Any attempt to talk about "why X instead of Y" goes back to how stupid the whole concept is

[Margalis]

Pacific Rim was discussed ad naseam both before and after it's release. This thread is actually twenty three pages long now and full of all sides of the issue with both extreme praise and scorn as well as everything in between.  There is no reason to continue a discussion like this beyond adding one's agreement or disagreement with what has been said.  To write a pages long review on a DVD release copy is extreme but to not even have read the thread you are posting in is just lazy and narcissistic.  

Snappy one liners are about all the response that deserves.

It just came out on DVD and someone bumped the thread. I've read the thread - lol. I even posted it in before, responding to specific people. Are you high? I re-read the thread yesterday - that doesn't mean I hadn't read it before.

Your one liners aren't snappy, they're idiotic. Posting an emoticon is not snappy, unless you consider tying your shoes in the morning an amazing accomplishment.

I'm sorry I made you feel sad inside by not liking a movie you liked. How many days are you going to spend crying and whining about it? It's been two so far - aiming for a week? If there's no reason to continue the discussion then stop posting?

Or just cry about it forever dispshit.

It all goes back to the premise being dumb if you think about the movie at all as anything but anime without the cartoons.

The premise is silly but accepting the premise is part and parcel with choosing to watch the film - I have no problem with the high level "robots punch monsters" part. I came in expecting that to be nonsense, and that's ok. What I wasn't expecting was dialog riddled with cliche yet not fun in a cheesy 80s-movie way, an extremely contrived script, plot points introduced only to be discarded two minutes later, characters that were neither fun over-the-top archetypes or real characters, etc.

It just was not a good movie by any standard other than "robots punched monsters so there's that."

As far as being like anime - the anime I've watched is typically a lot more interesting in terms of themes. Eva (which I haven't seen all of) has all sorts of crazy psychological shit in it, Big O has a weird mystery, a noir atmosphere and some ruminations in the PKD vein. If by "like anime" you mean "like Voltron" then yes - it's like Voltron. I'm not sure it's like good anime though - it's an anime reduction that cooks off anything interesting.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Psycho.

[Margalis]

Actually it's defensible because some of us like me were actually quite entertained by it.

I have no problem with "I was entertained by the movie."

I watch a lot a stupid movies. I watched The House Bunny the other night ffs. However I think Pacific Rim would have been even more entertaining had the overall construction of the movie been a lot better.

It's certainly not "the Star Wars of our time" unless you're talking about the prequels, in which light-sabers are still rad but the rest of it is pretty bad. As opposed the first films, which had cool stuff like light-sabers but also memorable characters, fun non-combat scenes, good dialog and an at least serviceable narrative.

Pacific Rim had robots punching monsters and on that level it succeeded, and maybe the Charlie Day stuff worked for you. (I like Charlie Day but he did nothing for me here) But that doesn't excuse things like bringing up a plot point that serves no purpose and doesn't make sense only to discard it in the next scene anyway.

[Abagadro]

You have to look at the business side of it. They are making more movies where the profit margin is strictly overseas, particularly when it is a non-franchise, non-sequel. This is in fact a prime example of that.

They need it to be relatively easy to translate across 20 different cultures. Complexity is not what they are going for and is somewhat antithetical to that monetary goal.  May not be the best thing for great film making, but it is the way of things for 200 million dollar enterprises with a fairly high risk of failure.

[Margalis]

You have to look at the business side of it. They are making more movies where the profit margin is strictly overseas, particularly when it is a non-franchise, non-sequel. This is in fact a prime example of that.

I can understand that, just like I can understand why a subtle stealth-based adventure games gets remade as an FPS with XP and kill streaks. But I don't think consumers should take that sort of stuff into account when leveling content criticisms.

Now that said, in gaming right how financing and monetizing games is a clusterfuck, and sometimes a game is bad at least in part due to practical realities. This is something I have to think about basically every day and it sucks. If you want Kickstarter money or Greenlight approval you need a nostalgia play or Minecraft and zombies. (To oversimplify) If you want major publisher funding you have to make a game in a narrow range of genres tackling a narrow range of subjects. If you want to do F2P monetization you have to purposefully make your game annoying so that people will pay to make it fun again.

As a game developer it can be fair to say "yeah, our game did kind of suck in this way but that was the only way we could get it made." But I think criticism of the content should be completely divorced from that.

[Abagadro]

It certainly doesn't insulate it from criticism but if you go into these type of movies thinking it is going to be anything different it will just result in disappointment and frustration as I don't see it changing.

[Khaldun]

I think the point has been made before in various threads here, but the number of genre movies that actually stand up to witheringly intense attention both to the way they create a mood/setting and the kind of plot they develop is vanishingly small. The question is often more "how much artistry do they demonstrate in how they deflect those kinds of questions, and for how long does that work?" Which are questions where the YMMV Devil gets busily to work.

[lamaros]

Something can be simple and cliche without also being out and out dumb with it. I don't think the body of Margs criticisms come from an unreasonable expectation.

[schild]

I just caught up on this thread. A couple things:

1. Bad movies make money all the time. You all gonna tell me Titanic was good now? Fucking really?

2. The genre having a bunch of shitty stories doesn't mean it has to continue having shitty stories. Because Godzilla was bad, we can allow this to be an incoherent mess? Fucking really?

3. Need I remind everyone that in an alternate reality, the world got At the Mountains of Madness from del Toro instead of this piece of shit?

God damn, nerds are apologetic and unnecessarily defensive about shit they're genetically predisposed to enjoy.

It's ok to not like a thing. Fuck.

edit:

It certainly doesn't insulate it from criticism but if you go into these type of movies thinking it is going to be anything different it will just result in disappointment and frustration as I don't see it changing.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. When I go into a movie I'm told is good, I expect it to be good. Especially from someone like del Toro. When I go into said movie and it turns out to be hamfisted trash, well, I get a little amped up about it. I just wasted money, see - and that bothers me. I'm going to go watch The Thing or Pitch Black or something that's actually good to wash the taste of the last 3 pages out of my mouth.

[MediumHigh]

I grew up with the last 20 years of animation from the west and the east. The only real complaint is that the movie wasn't 4 hours long. Either your a fan of this type of shit or you aren't. For example no matter how many times me and my sister watch Lord of the Rings we both agree, that shits kinda dumb. Its claim to fame are the 15-30 minute sword and board porn nerd glory...followed by 2 hours of walking around, talking in circles, and watching frodo become a drug addict while being slightly disappointed that Sam wasn't gay. 3 times I've watched the trilogy, and still can't remember anything I liked besides a bunch of dudes getting slaughtered by a bunch of orcs..and trees. Yet fantasy nerds eat that shit up with coffee grinds and there's like a million and ten things wrong with that series. Bah.

Nerds have been settling for crap special affects and shitty stories for decades. And now just because nerd culture is slightly more mainstream than it was 30-50 years ago doesn't mean they suck less. None of the Marvel films hold up. The latest extension to the Alien franchise was garbage. Star Trek is a dubious series of random events called a movie. And the list kinda goes on. We are still happy with shit stories and continue to be because we just happy to have something to watch that isn't Baggage Claims or another "mysterious dude with improbably aiming skills mows down government/terrorist/secret organization mooks who can't hit a parked car with a mini-gun"

[Abagadro]

Meh, I was thoroughly entertained both times I saw it in the theater.  Delivered exactly what I was expecting and wanted. Best tweet I saw was "When my adult self complains about plot and characters in Pacific Rim my 12-year old self slips a knife between my ribs whispering "Shhhh, shhhh".

[Margalis]

Something can be simple and cliche without also being out and out dumb with it. I don't think the body of Margs criticisms come from an unreasonable expectation.

What I dislike about this "lol nerd rage" stuff is that people aren't distinguishing between "but a robot can't swing an oil tanker without it falling apart, and why isn't the robot just a tank" style objections and "much of what happened in the movie was contrived and didn't make sense in the context of the film's universe."

Extremely basic complaints about the fundamentals of movie-making are being written off as "nerd" complaints.

[Hoax]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4zmxFguxcY

[Ratman_tf]

The short answer on how these monsters would have been dealt with has not changed in half a dozen pages:

An endless supply of dumb missiles just constantly barraging that whole until schild's cement dump is ready.

Assuming they wouldn't run out of missiles or cement. How much cement would it take to plug up an interdimensional rift anyway? 

[Ratman_tf]

It's certainly not "the Star Wars of our time" unless you're talking about the prequels, in which light-sabers are still rad but the rest of it is pretty bad. As opposed the first films, which had cool stuff like light-sabers but also memorable characters, fun non-combat scenes, good dialog and an at least serviceable narrative.

I think we've moved far past anything like the original SW trilogy. Even the movies that I really like nowadays don't have the stuff you mention. Or gloss over it to save time for the hour long climax extravaganza.

[MediumHigh]

Original Star Wars was great example of "fill in the blank" narrative where relationships were hinted at but no details were given so the audience wow'ed by the lightsabers and spaceships had to fill in the blanks themselves, which makes the movie seem better than it is. It isn't just that nothing about that trilogy doesn't fall apart, it gets into laughable contrived and "yeah these guys are kinda stupid"... even to the point of "the only reason this plot point works is because half the actors are retards".  But there is a lot of great fantasy moments that define the franchise which is why we all like it. It's stupid but very very cool.