f13.net

A film to finally end the mechs vs tanks debate?

A teaser of sorts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS6kk1bTqJs)

Plus:

Guillermo Del Toro does Shogun Warriors vs. Godzilla. Be there.

TRAILER.

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

I'll be in my bunk.

Why would that fighter jet ever be that near the monster!  :why_so_serious:

Did.....did they actually use the voice of GLADOS for the suits?   :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:


I'm totally down for this.  I'll do them a favor and pretend there is a really good reason that building a giant robot to punch the monsters in the face is the only way to kill them.   As opposed to developing some sort of mega armor piercing missile/cannon/laser/bomb that could be fired through their giant slow asses.  Then they wont have to, and we'll both be happy.

Evangelion + GladOS + Jax Teller + Inception Horn.

I think the trailer had everything I need.  I don't even need to see the movie now.

It has Idris Elba speaking with his normal accent. MADNESS.

Cloverfield: teh San Fran version

GLaDOS AND Faith from Mirror's Edge. Giant robots. Giant Monsters. Geek heaven.

"I'm still alive" will surly be said at some point.

There is so much awesome and so much stupidity in that trailer that my mind doesn't know which direction to go.

It's everything I want it to be.  :drill:

Damn, I am ALL over this.

It's a total nerd porn movie.

Ok.

FUCK YEAH.

I'll fucking be there.

Hehe that looks like a lot of fun.

Thought... is using, for instance, the voice of GLaDOS so blatantly homage or plagiarism?

It's so definitley GLaDOS I can't help but wonder if the story is tied into Portal somehow.

Apparently Guillermo Del Toro got permission from Valve and hired Ellen McClain (the voice actor of GLaDOS.) So it's the real deal.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120087-Guillermo-del-Toro-Has-GlaDOS-On-Board-for-Sci-Fi-Movie (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120087-Guillermo-del-Toro-Has-GlaDOS-On-Board-for-Sci-Fi-Movie)

Well, Aperture science finally managed to sell it as a disk operating system for giant robots. Got to watch out for the Aperture Science logo on those things...  :awesome_for_real:

Wow, fair enough then, nice to see someone using someone else's IP properly, i.e. not just stealing it :)

See the realistic combat in ME discussion.

Seeing as how the aliens came from a Portal in the sea, the connection to GlaDOS is lolworthy.  Be awesome if there's a twist involving some such near the end of the movie.  Cant wait.


The aliens are radar invisible and hence cant be targeted by the F-22's normal weapon systems.  They had no choice but to get in close with depleted uranium cannon shots.

It's the fucking Shogun Warriors vs. Godzilla on the big-screen. Fuck a bunch of "this doesn't make sense." This is a movie that was made for the 6-year old geek in all of us. The trailer is like one long nerd-rection.

When the giant robot gets flung over the highway at the end of the trailer, I said to my friend "Take that Michael Bay! TRANSFORM THIS!!!!!!"

This movie will have to do a shitton of really stupid things for me not to like it.

A kaiju movie isn't supposed to make too much sense even if it's a tale about the consequences of atomic explosions á la original Godzilla. I'm just excited that it actually seems to have a good director and a big budget!

I'm so going to see this, probably by myself because the husband just won't get it.

I for one am completely disinterested in this Avatar meets Cloverfield. If shit is going to come out of a portal under the sea, it better have tentacles on its face and wings on its back.  :why_so_serious:

This has fuckall in common with avatar and if you think the idea of piloting giant robots is like avatar then you are a terrible person and need to die in a car fire.

Apparently Charlie Day from It's always sunny in philadelphia is on this too, he gets to hose the robots down (Charlie work).  Which explains Guillermo del Toros cameo on this season of sunny.

Man it even had the inception horn at the end of the trailer...

I look forward to all the discussion about how people in this movie make stupid discussions, how this adds nothing to the genre, how the use of lenses on cameras have are bringing down the art, how motion blur is a lost art and how this should have been directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Tolkien staring Tom Baker.



Also the jet propelled punch was really cool.

Please stop.

Robot Jox Vs Mega Monster.

Ok.

Looks like they got Tony Stark to design the power source.

Idris Elba plus GLADos? Oh my Goddy.

When do the cake jokes start?

The cake jokes are a lie.

So this is Evangelion without the emo?

(http://i.imgur.com/g0hW1.gif)

what in the fuck.

 :ye_gods:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfB09Wie6yk&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RgIU5tgCkA

Wryyyyyyyyyy!

WHAT THE FUCK.

 :ye_gods:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=955YlyLhm8E

Stop it.

They asked for it.  :grin:

what is this I don't even

Someone just linked me this Official Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vKz7WnU83E) and oh my. This is too stupid even for the 6 year old in me. That narration makes 300 seem subtle.  :uhrr:

Ummm... isn't that what we've been talking about since the third post of this thread?

[please delete]

Ok finally watched the trailer.

At first I was all like "wtf"? Then I got it. Looks awesome!

Can anyone tell me why it's two men per mech ?  I don't think that makes any sense.

Other stuff doesn't make sense, but I don't care.

Maybe the blueprint for the Version 1.0 of the mech design helps you understand.

Oh God, that made me laugh.

I didn't think it was. During that bit they show two mechs standing next to each other, so I assume it was one person per mech.

That's what I get, too.  They're remote piloting them like drones, so there's no need for a huge room for each individual. Their control 'platforms' can be stacked right next to each other to control the mechs since the pilot isn't moving in space.

Right.

They're in a "bilateral pilot rig" enaged in a "neural bridge" (as GlaDOS says in the trailer) that's in the head of the mech - which really makes no sense at all because its a vulnerable spot, easily targeted by tanks and enraged Kaiju.

(Click to see bigger version.)

(http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerGipsyDanger.jpg)
 (http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerGipsyDanger.jpg)

The three armed Chinese jaeger, "Crimson Typhoon (http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerCrimsonTyphoon.jpg)", has three pilots but the Japanese mech (http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerCoyoteTango.jpg) only has one pilot.

Take your filthy logic away from the mech thread, it has no place here.

That picture however belongs in the Awesome Pictures Thread.

The Russians managed it with Cherno Alpha. (http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerChernoAlpha.jpg)



 :why_so_serious:

EDIT: Fuck it - we like mech pictures!

(http://www.panpacificdefense.com/files/images/shared/documents/PPDC_Blueprint_JaegerChernoAlpha.jpg)

Two pilots for a mech based on human form factor.  Ok.  :uhrr:

Maybe one controls weapons?

I think the way of reasoning is that one human brain would short out trying to do it so it needs more redundancy.  Just a pair of double A's.

No, the second pilot is there to die needlessly, so the protagonist can
1) hold his co-piolot's limp body
2) shake his fist at the sky
3) scream "GOOOOOOOOOSSSSSE" as the camera pulls back

http://tinylink.net/75744

http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2012/11/12/guillermo-del-toro-talks-pacific-rim-rise-of-the-guardians-and-more/


Each pilot makes up the right and left "hemispheres" of the robot's "brain".

This movie better have a beach volleyball scene.

With giant robots!

Scored to new Kenny Loggins song: "Playing With the Droids".

Setting my Droid to vibrate mode... :drillf:

http://io9.com/5969657/yet-another-sexy-reason-why-robots-will-replace-humans-%5Bnsfw%5D

I... I hate you.

 :awesome_for_real:

Still don't get the Neural Net thing. Sure you had the binars from thet ST:TNG episode where they loaded their civilizations entire internet into the ship's computer. Sure ok kinda can go there. You also have The Beak from that Pineas & Ferb episode where Ferb is the legs and Phineas the torso. But as smart as that show is, that was a very kid-centric approach to it.

Here, it makes no even semi-logical sense to have two humans playing the role of a single humanoid robot.

But then, if this was actually an argument about giant robots, I wouldn't put them just on two feet anyway. That horse pic from the last page makes a whole heck of a lot more sense. And you can put a huge ass BFG on that rather than the stupid Real Steel like punching this film seems to be featuring.

I didn't make the movie, but my kneejerk rationalizations are:

The big robots require two people in a neural net acting as right/left hemispheres because that's how the robot gets so quick. One person can't control the whole shebang at once, and conventional controls are too slow.

These Kaiju are supposed to have acid for blood. I would not be surprised if bullets and explosions break their skin and send acidic chunks of monster flying everywhere, increasing property damage and casualties. The solution is to beat them to death with giant robot fists.  :drill:

Just to put those two ideas out there.

It may be because I'm drunk right now but  will fucking nut punch anyone trying to make sense of what is going to be an awesomely stupid monster movie.

The duo pilot thing is basically them just running with Evangelion.  Instead of needing a pilot and his/hers dead mother inside the robot to operate it, they just need two very different human pilots.

Aww come on, that's the best time to rationalize it!

I personally don't need it to be realistic. I just want it to make sense in the context of the movie. I'm fine with Flux Capacitors and Mr Fusion and transwarp drive and shit, as long as there's a foundation for it.

Ratman's point about acid blood makes sense. I had to look up Teleku's Evangelions. I'll take both explanations.

Just as long as it's more than just a plot device like Father mike said earlier (Character A losing Character B stuff).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FfB09Wie6yk

Pretty sure that's a Bloodworth.  :grin:

This is as silly as the 'Clerics don't use edged weapons so they don't draw blood' Hit something hard and you get plenty of blood and fluids. I just want to see the monsters rampage through TokyoLA. Logic for why things happen would be nice, but not really seen since original Godzilla in kaiju.

Derail: silly or not, it was based in historical "fact" as this guy was alleged to have used a club instead of a sword so he wouldn't draw blood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odo,_Earl_of_Kent

I Am Mad About Unrealistic Walking Robots, They Do Not Make Sense, I Would Like To Bring Attention To My Previous Treatise On The Subject Regarding The Viability of Battlemechs

*gets punched in the face by the entire group of people gaily skipping to the theater for Pacific Rim*

It's Giant Robots punching out Cthulhu.  Fuck off with your realism, if they're going to jump the shark, all we ask is that they do it with *style*.

--Dave

Giant robots bother me far less than the need for a two-pilot system that screams "Contrived plot device so the hero has a moment of anguish and failure when partner one dies, only to be redeemed by pairing-up with rival/ love interest to kick ass in the final act!"

Yeah, if this movie sucks, it will be for completely different reasons than giant walking robots.

The most likely problem is not enough giant walking robots.

That's completely outrageous.

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rjwwg4QWgYQ/TCQAP4pajrI/AAAAAAAAA6U/bB_pV90QiYU/s1600/top+gun.jpg)

See, that's the EXACT movie I had in mind.  Though at least they had the excuse of 1) Top Gun school using F-14s and 2) the F14 being a two seat plane.

One is the plot being driven by the tech, the other is the reuse of a plot to drive the tech.

To be fair, should we ever deploy giant mech robots (heh), I'm sure they'd have a full crew like a tank to operate (and that might have been a better way to go for this movie, frankly).

I will point out not every robot in the movie uses two pilots, some use only one, another uses three.  This doesn't sound like it matters but at least in that world they "could" use one pilot but they found some reason why two would be better for a particular mech, which is fine to me. 

You need two souls to synch to create the AT field, natch.

I hear that emotionally damaged children work the best.

Yea, but where does it end?

5?


25?


 :awesome_for_real:

If this movie is a remake of Top Gun there isn't going to be a :awesome_for_real: symbol large enough.

This could be whole new genre, 80s movies re-imaged as over-the-top Sci Fi CGI-fests.

 OMG.  :drill: :drill:

Let the thread derail begin!

I'm thinking Breakfast Club...on a spaceship, with aliens!

Except the whiny teens are the breakfast for the aliens.

The Lost Boys!

Oh, wait...

Ferris Beuller's Day Off - Ferris is a wiseass can't-lose alien skipping his invasion training to have a last day of partying on Earth before it's destroyed.

16 Candles - Nobody understands poor Molly. Caught in the middle, suffering embarrassment after embarrassment from her out-of-touch family who forget the biggest day of her life: her release from the hellish nightmare all creche-born are forced to endure before joining the swarm.

Star Wars Tales #19.... "The Rebel Club"

(http://www.majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/SWT4.jpg)

Bleh, I watched the breakfast club recently when I saw it on TV.  First time since my childhood (from which I have some fond memories of it), and holy god it was bad. I wanted to kill every single cast member.

I agree as The Breakfast Club certainly hasn't stood the test of time for me, either.

Watched 16 Candles and Pretty in Pink recently and still enjoyed them, though.  Daughter laughed pretty often at 16 Candles, which says all I need to know about it.

I never cared at all for The Breakfast Club, despite the fact that Anthony Michael Hall essentially plays my clone. Most of my friends of the same age are mostly like HOW CAN YOU NOT RELATE TO THAT MOVIE IT IS PERFECT but it never did anything for me.

Now, Office Space... that shit is real.

And with a slight rework, it could also be an "Alien" remake. Justin Timberlake replaces Harry Dean Stanton! Mila Kunis replaces Sigourney Weaver! The cat is pure CGI!

Heh the funny things you learn from random comments. He was my clone too. I didn't like the movie much at the time, but did years later. It's not that awesome or anything, but it is kinda our generation's Grease I guess.

And yes on Office Space.

MOAR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA92Rw6kNWw&feature=youtu.be

ZOMG.  :drill:

I too wish to view oil tankers being used as melee weapons.

I think this is the first time a movie that wasn't porn that's given me wood.  Yes please.  

 :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

Still don't get it... but *shrug. To each their own.

Well, the buzzsaw blades kinda put a hole in the acid blood idea. I don't even remember where I read that.  :uhrr:

Can't wait to see this. It's probably going to make my "See in theater" list, and that list is short.

Yeah, if you are the least bit interested in this it must be watched in the theater.

Oh yes, please!   :inluv:

Jesus Fucking Christ!  Oh and Ron Perlman!

OH yeah, definitely going to see this in 3D.

Am I the only one saying 'They Remade Robot Jox, that's fairly lame ?'


DON'T BE FOOLED.  THEY JUST WANT YOU TO FUCKING BE THERE.  REPENT YOUR SINS NOW.

Robot jox had a distinct lack of monsters or for that matter, robots that actually did cool shit.

If your entire giant robot exposure has been robot jox then I feel sorry for you.

Considering 99.99% of the planet did not watch or even know what Robot Jox is, I don't think there will be any issues.


Also this looks great, will be there opening night IMAX.   :awesome_for_real:

Still can't believe he name dropped Robot Jox.

Can we also give a little credit for making the giant robots feel like they have some actual weight to them? I realize physics and this movie are not compatible but having the robots not flipping out like metal ninjas is refreshing.

Robot Jox was a great movie! I fucking loved that movie when I was a kid.

Yah, not sure where the hate for Jox is coming from.  Definitely was not a bad movie, especially given the time it came out in.
As for P-Rim, love it, but king d-bag is in it so... I'm torn now. 

Seriously, why do producers keep casting this guy in films where the moviegoers really dont want to see him?  At least Gi-Joe2 had the sense to kill him off early.  Hmmm, maybe he dies early in this too.  One can only hope.

Robot Jox was not a good movie. At all. Having said that I also fucking loved it as a kid.

On the first page.   I'm no lame serial Villian, I did it 45 minutes ago.

I see what you did there!

*kneels before Zod*

I am pretty sure you can't swing a tanker like that, because it would break before. And why is puniching in the face better thank a nuclear bomb?

But don't bother replying. I am the kind of person who cares about realism in SF films and immersion MMORPGs. *sigh*

Nah, I had the same issue when I saw the tanker.  Much like how giant robots and monsters get thrown in to buildings that don't topple but stand like they were trees.  I'm pretty good at the whole suspension of disbelief thing for some ideas, but everyone has their line.

Are you confusing Channing Tatum (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1475594/?ref_=sr_1) with Charlie Hunnam (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0402271/?ref_=tt_cl_t1)? Because you shouldn't.

Oh, thank god then. Jeez, the similarity though.


-The tanker is likely a newer double-hull, reinforced keel-spline design and it was likely empty when the robot swung it.
-The aliens come from another dimension where the same laws of strong & weak nuclear forces dont apply, so they're unaffected by nuke attk.   Plus they're in the cities and we'll not nuke our own cities.  The portal is located deep underwater so likewise.

Beings from another dimension are subject to the laws of the dimension they are currently in, unless phase-shifted and therefore unable to affect the current plane of existence.

So that's a terrible explanation.

You are thinking too much about giant robots beating the shit out of Cthulu.

I still don't understand why they don't use tanks instead of mechs.





 :why_so_serious:

with Ron Perlman. nuff said!

This is going to turn into a discussion of Tanks vs Mechs:  the Movie, isn't it?  I just want to see robots punching godzilla and rodan, and it looks like that's what I'm getting.

A robot is superior because it would be a really boring movie if a box rolls up, fires a big gun a few times, then goes home.  Put it on water and you've got Battleship.

Why did they make their giant robots only the same size as the monsters?  Why not make a ginormous spider mech like 5 times larger than the monsters?

Because spiders are icky and not cool.

One of the robots looked like it had 4 arms, so that's a start.

a) The mobs could just step on a tank
b) Tanks cant deal with underwater environments well, which is where these things play much of the time.
c)  A big enough tank would be way too heavy.
d)  It's obvious explosives just dont work on these things.  You need hydraulics, servos, fusion reactors, et. al.


Not if it's a higher dimension! 

Explosions work by concussive force.  Punches work by concussive force.  :headscratch:

By the same token, it doesn't matter if the monsters come from another dimension where the laws of physics work differently (lawls).  How does that affect a human built nuclear device being triggered in our dimension?

I didn't say the movie didn't look awesome. The ship thing just broke my suspension of disbelief. 

The no-nuke thing needs a far better reason than "a wizard did it" in a sci-fi movie.

my ears!  looks great, but I may have to miss the theater option

You guys  :oh_i_see:

(http://cdn.chud.com/8/8d/8dbede28_PacificRimPunch.gif)

Because you need pilot(s) synchronised with the Eva Jaeger to get through the Angel's Kaiju's AT field

Simond, I really am not coming to shit on your parade in every thread, I'm really not. In fact I bet we have similar tastes in anime judging by icon alone.

That said, you could do a lot worse than ripping off eva as far as source goes.

Yep. That one's easy and 'realistic'.

Tanker.. well fuck. It looks coooool!  :drill:

The armor on the monsters requires blunt force, not wavelike concussive force.

You are going to set off a bunch of nukes in the middle of San Francisco? (Or wherever the fuck) Punching a dude in the face has a slightly lower environmental impact.

Plus, it sounds like there's a large number of monsters. If you're planning to set off a few dozen nukes each month, soon you'll be killing humanity more efficiently than the enemy could.

There is, however, an argument for nuking the actual portal they're coming through.

But hey, I'm shocked that people are actually analysing this film.  Just go and watch robots punch monsters.

Murdoc has the right of it with that gif.

If you can't have a 'is it realistic' conversation about giant space monsters and equally giant robots as the big draw... what can you have a serious conversation about?

Polio.

Marco...

I'm sorry, but why is it that we're thinking that any kind of realism applies to an interdimensional portal in the bottom of the ocean that opens onto a realm of impossibly big creatures who keep stepping through it? "Oh, if this was realistic, they'd nuke it and the movie would be over". Right, right, because everyone knows that nuclear weapons work really well on magical interdimensional portals that don't exist in the actual universe. Stephen Hawking studied that at some point, right?

Why stop at complaining about the non-use of nukes to kill a bunch of monsters destroying cities (which is really like deciding to handle a guinea worm infection by amputating the entire leg instead of doing the slow, agonizing work of getting the worm out of the wound)? If we were going to be realistic we might want to talk about how it's basically impossible for anything living to be that big with that kind of structure. Those kaiju are a bit bigger than a blue whale or a diplodocus, you know--and blue whales have to live in water, and diplodocus (and other dinosaurs) lived in a much more oxygen-rich atmosphere, which seems to have been a precondition of widespread gigantism.

Nerd realism is really weird in what it complains about and what it accepts without question. If you're going to complain that the tanker should rip apart, you should complain that the kaiju AND the robots should be structurally impossible.

Everyone has a different line for suspension of disbelief.  Some people can't do it at all and read only non-fiction because of it.  Such is life.

Nukes in Hollywood are still used as a last resort. Popular culture understands these may kill whatever shows up, but we're likely going with them. I though Oblivion did a good job of showing that. Heck, even Independence Day ranted about that option (and it was ineffectual anyway).

As to disbelief, these kind of nerdgasms are half the reason it's fun being a nerd*. If we can't theorycraft what we'd do if we could make decisions in cases like that, then shit, the whole concept of hero's journey as a fictional foundation wouldn't have any market  :grin:

While the oil tanker thing was cool, no matter the ribbing and hulls, torque from the speed of the swing would crack it. Better to just throw the thing.


God, exactly. I always wondered that from the original Justice League cartoons. That one Indian guy who could make himself huge? Why didn't he just go all Unicron, grow until he was 10x the heigh of whatever bad thing showed up, and stomp them?

* Which I assume we've all come to terms with if we're in this thread at all :awesome_for_real:

So we're really just having problems with the boat?  In a movie about giant space monster aliens and the giant robots that fight them.  With that sig?

 :facepalm:

Exactly, a ship is a better javelin than a club, damnit!  :drill:

I always thought Apache Chief (that's his name, you racist! :why_so_serious:)  had limitations on sizing.  I don't recall seeing any size beyond Normal -> 50' giant. No gradation between or anything larger than that.

Well fuck, in that case why not just give Gandalf a call and have him take care of things.  :oh_i_see:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1739972/web-images/Apahce-Chief.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real: Heyooo!

Hey, I did say Indian!  :grin:

And wasn't there that one episode where some bad female version of himself showed up and he kept saying inukchuk over and over until he was as tall?

It was canon I tells ya, CANON!

This thread is best thread.

(http://www.seanbaby.com/superfriends/images/apacheback.jpg)

Hey, another new trailer. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY GODDAMN MONEY.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5guMumPFBag&hd=1

Are you not entertained?!

Ya pretty much this if a giant robot gets the job done the long term impact to cities has simply got to be less using them than nukes.

At most the city gets trashed instead of everything for 100's of miles getting fucked.

This. I WILL see this in 3D just fucking because.

3D here I come!

Jax and Clay!

(http://i.minus.com/iDKPiI3YUbTkR.gif)

YES

Ok, I don't want to hear another word about what's realistic.

Thats not a realistic request.

That last bit looked live-action. 

NICE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7PjQnw_E0U)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcsFMTjgsCM

Has anyone else seen besides me seen the Pacific Rim trailer in full IMAX-3D?  They showed it during Superman and it blew my mind.   Mecha battles right off the screen into your face.  Glorious.

Just saw this with my son, its sublimely ridiculous in every way.  We saw it in 2d and both agreed to see it again in 3d.

I had very little desire to see this movie until I read this interview (http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/director_guillermo_del_toro_too_many_summer_movies_are_about_one_race_one_credo_and_one_country_saving_the_world/) with Guillermo del Toro.



That and the stuff he says about the CGI have piqued my interest. Now all I have to do is wait for the bluray release.  :oh_i_see:

Despite my earlier bitching about things that still bother me, I'm really looking forward to this.

I  :heart: del Toro's whole philosophy about special effects and his approach. Anything I can do to support that vs. the "COOL SHOT BRO" extravaganza that movies currently are I'll do.

So psyched to go see this tomorrow night.

The best monster movie I have ever seen. 

The best big movie of this summer I've seen to this point. I'd put it with avengers, but for different criteria.

The bigger the screen, the better. I saw this in digital IMAX and I realized I was grinning like a madman during this film on multiple occasions.

I do however have a term for a reality distorting, epically "What the fuck did you just say?" Moment. "Gipsy is analog!" Oh... That ... That was bad.

http://comicsbeat.com/hollywood-mystery-who-is-trying-to-kill-pacific-rim/

Interesting story about some industry people trying to trash on Pacific Rim. 

I did see a couple of articles periodically referring to it as going to be a flop, which struck me as odd.  I hadn't heard anything about it until I saw a trailer for it before This Is The End 2 weeks ago.  Seems odd that a potential hit would be trash talked by the industry, but then let's be honest most people in the industry are complete tools and morons to begin with...

I guess it has to do with Legendary breaking apart from their parent studio and the fact that Pacific Rim isn't a remake of some sort.  The fact that it has no big stars and will probably not flop is also a big deal.  Not surprising considered Lone Ranger just came out and it's looking to be a John Carter'ish kinda flop.

You read between the lines of that article, and what even the author of it won't say outright is that WB is laying the groundwork to pull their final marketing dollar push out from under Pacific Rim, as a warning to Legendary not to push to hard on the other negotiations.  Call their bluff, and they'll go limp on promoting Pacific Rim (may have already, I don't watch enough TV with commercials to know).

Actual word of mouth on it is nowhere near as bad as that makes it out to be, the worst reaction I hear is pretty much here in this thread: Why you make Mecha movie, del Toro?

--Dave

Tull already bailed. He moved to Universal two days ago.

I've read a few books on insider hollywood stuff and I wouldn't be surprised if some suits at WB are trying to tank the movie purely out of personal spite.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  It was way better than a movie about giant robots beating up aliens had any right to be.

Cool.

To some degree all media discussion these days is infested with "but will it sell?" talk. It's something I really hate, when a discussion that should be critical in nature is instead faux inside baseball stuff about how well something will perform. It also seem pointless to me - instead of speculating about how well something will do why not just wait a few weeks and find out?

Because there's too much money on the line.  These aren't creative people chasing a passion, it's suits and bags of money chasing a greater investment. That's Hollywood and the creative funding of any popular phenomenon.

It's the same reason we're seeing super hero after super hero movie.  SpiderMan and X-men showed they could work it in 2000, and the studios have been chasing that dragon ever since.  It's a bubble though and at some point it's going to burst and bring things crashing down.

It's cracked and all but this breaks it down pretty well: http://www.cracked.com/article_20406_5-reasons-superhero-movies-are-bubble-that-will-soon-burst.html  His pseduo-prediction at the end of a 13 year cycle was unnecessary, but the high points have held the same for each bubble.  Sci-Fi/ Fantasy now, Action Movies Previously, Epics before that and Detective movies in the 30's.

We're getting in to the 'execs demanding control' phase if we aren't there already. These are endeavors to make money, which means the media is focusing on that because their audience is starting to focus on it vs. the creative side.  Nobody cares how awesome a thing is when it's just a blip on the radar of awesome things.  We're over-saturated and looking for something else to discuss.  So, back to one of the basics.  (Scandal, Money, Sex, Fantastical )

I have AVX tickets for this afternoon and can't wait.

Can those who've seen it try to get schild excited about it so I can take him on a bro-date

I'm sitting here at work and looking out the window at the i-max wondering if I should sneak out at 4 to go see the 4:15 showing.  Then again it is my daughters birthday today so if I sneak out at 4 and do anything other than go home for some sort of birthday festivities then I am probably entering into bad dad territory.  There is always next week...

edit: Okay I read the "who is trying to sink Pacific Rim" conspiracy article and wonder if anyone can draw me a Venn Diagram of people who read Variety and people that are the target audience for Pacific Rim...

Next week?  What's wrong with tomorrow or Sunday morning?

Ok. After reading this thread all I can say is FUCK REALISM ITS GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING MONSTERS AND IT LOOKS LIKE IT DOESN'T SUCK! I'm heading to the cinema next week when I have some money!!  :drill:

Screw that.  I'm taking my geeked-out 6yr. old nephew with me in a few... puttin it on credit.  Why wait?

As for the cinema-vibe I'm seeing so far??  Not great.  Not a single sold out showing at the museum I-Max.  A decidedly niche theatre yes, as they love to show supers/fantasy flicks, but still I expected more.  Here's to hoping word-of-mouth actually works.

Well for one I could hit the i-max with a rock from my desk at work so during the work week I am already there but the most compelling reason is I would rather just take time off of work to go see it.  Chances look to be very good that this movie is better than being at work so it will add to my entertainment value.

A couple of my monkeys caught it last night and loved it. Granted, they're all 20-something nerd bags, but that's the target market. I'll see it on Sunday with a begrudging wife.

Friend of mine is involved in the financing side, wanted to know what the nerds thought. I reported that they seemed to approve.

Seems like a bluff, considering I had 3 commercials for it during the hour of Big Bang Theory reruns I watched last night.  I think there was even one during Hell's Kitchen, which isn't exactly the target demo.

I did the same thing. Just grinning like a damn fool.  

Catch this in IMAX or XD before it gets pushed out.

EDIT: Oh, and Idris Elba is really good in this. He deserves to be a big star.

I don't know if I can praise this movie enough after just seeing it in IMAX 3D, it's so good and such a nice breath of fresh air when a film about giant robots fighting giant monsters opens with giant robots fighting giant monsters. Also felt like it was just the right length unlike the going trend atm which seems to be make to your movie as long as possible.

Best movie of the summer. Absolutely full of fun and awesome without insulting my intelligence except the digital analog thing. Grinned like a damn fool or laughed like a jackal through the whole thing. Idris Elba stole the show and he deserves a hit. This is a nearly flawless movie. If you can't enjoy this movie, you are actively trying to destroy the concept of fun.

Where are my goddamn shoes?

As far as the length I'm in the other boat, I'd love to see a director's cut that adds another hour. But whatever you think about the run time it's really really lean, no real fat around.

My favorite bits:
-Giant robots punching godzilla in the face? Hell yeah!
-The CGI was really really well done. It had a sense of weight and reality that most CGI doesn't have. A lot like the original Star Wars trilogy it had the used feeling that really really worked.
-Left out a lot of standard Hollywood action movie plotting bullshit. Some real paint by numbers subplots that you see in just about any blockbuster of this type just didn't appear at all, that was so damn welcome.
-Michael Bay should be force to spend the next week watching this on a constant loop Clockwork Orange style.

I really liked the choice of how he went through the entire origin in an extended prologue. Lots of directors would have gotten bogged down in that shit.

I cannot believe I'm about to say that a Kaiju movie, and a western-made one at that, is easily my favourite film of the year so far and I have doubts it will be knocked off the top spot in my estimation soon...
...But I did just say that. Because it is.

+1.  I really have nothing more to add.  Even the Mrs. enjoyed it.

This movie was everything I wanted it to be.   :drill:

Thanks, you bastards, now I've got to go see this in theaters instead of waiting.   :uhrr:

--Dave

Edit because why not: Pacific Rim saves Stock Market (http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-stock-market-soars-after-bernankes-reassuring-c,33088/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:1:Default).

Here's the rub. This is totally a Godzilla vs. Giant Robots movie. And yet, it has more pure skill, talent and heart put into it than any of the movies I've seen this year. It's certainly better visually than everything else. I loved Man of Steel but it had its flaws. This one... I can't see any. It is a top to bottom masterpiece about goddamn giant robots vs. monsters. It will also be a better film than any movie nominated for an Oscar this year, or any movie that will make more money this year.

J.J. Abrams should see this movie and hate himself because this is how you do big budget summer action movies. Michael Bay should go on a fucking cocaine bender ending in his suicide (well, he should do that anyway).

Loved every minute.

I kid you not, this movie had not a single flaw.  It was perfection for the genre.  Also has my vote for movie of the year easy and I rank it up there tied with Avengers.  You guys know how I obsess over large IMAX and 3D so check this out... this is easily the BEST "made for 3D movie" EVER MADE.  There I said it.  Seriously, as if I thought they couldn't do any better then the special trailer in "Man of Steel," they went and just blew my mind even more.  I don't really understand what processes Guillermo did in filming, but it really blew the lid off 3D production.  If you have to drive 50+ miles to a full IMAX 3D theatre, do it.  Picture the "wow" factor of the first minutes on Pandora and extend that to the end credits and you have Pacific Rim.

Also, the most visceral robot and/or monster movie I've ever seen aside from old-school live action b-movie stuff.  There was a lot going on, but you could easily follow it.  It felt real.  Alive.  It had my nephew air boxing through half the movie (I had to convince him jaegers werent real - yet, and we havent found any aliens - yet; but he still wants to be an alien-hunting supersoldier when he grows up).  Even the sets had life whether indoors or out, inside a bot or out.  Whatever.  Whole movie had gravitas.

Christ, I cant find a flaw aside from Hunman being a tad newb in a few dialogue scenes, but I can forgive 'cause he kicked so much arse in the stunt scenes.  Even the lead female role; flawless as was her script.  An ingenius hire too btw; she's a real up and comer (didnt realize she was oscar nominated for Babel).  And I'll echo the praises for Idris; the man has sick talent but it was no surprise.  The smaller roles? played perfectly.

I'll probably see this again and go buy some fan shwag.  So yah, Jon Carter this will not be.  I'll be surprised if it doesn't have a Matrix-like 2nd week; then again, I dont have much faith in society these days so I won't hold my breath.  Theatre was mostly empty too btw, as I suspected, on a Friday night during primetime in the Summer no less.  Honestly I've never seen a movie that good be that empty on opening weekend.

Are we that geeky or something?  I dont get it.  Maybe we're broken and everyone else isn't.   :oh_i_see:

I'll be realistic. A lot of the dialogue was corny as hell, and there were significant plot holes.

And zero is the amount of fucks I give, because HA HA HA HA HA! DID YOU SEE THAT? MOTHERFUCKER! EEEEEEEE!

*ahem*

Also, as a comfortable straight guy, I kind of wish I looked like Max Martini (daddy Australia). Can I get an "oh my" Mr. Takei?

Some further thoughts, now that I'm awake and calmed down from post-movie excitement...

This is the movie I would make if I was trying to combine the multi-national themed mechs of G Gundam with the alien attacks of NG: Evangelion.  Alternatively, if they ever made RL movies of those series, they should be at least this good if not better.

Seriously?  DO WANT.  

I'm pretty sure del Toro told Charlie Day "I want you to pretend that you're an obnoxious/hyper J.J. Abrams.  And ACTION!"   :why_so_serious: :drill:

Fixed.   :grin:

Yeah, so I'll agree. Totally amazing.  Saw it in IMAX-3d as suggested and it was fan. fucking. tastic. 

I giggled at a few scenes.  Literally.  Robot punches monster, I giggled.

I'm going to have to force my son to go.  He wasn't excited by the movie but, yeah, he needs to see it.

I really wanted to see more of the team fighting, or at least more of the Russian and Chinese.  But at nearly 2 1/2 hours I'm not sure what you can cut to get some of that in there. 

If there is a director's cut with more of the Chinese and Russian robots, goddamn I am so in. Both of those needed more screen time, damn the consequences!

It's pretty damn good.

I had only two minor complaints.

1) I actually liked the world-building shit as much as the big robot fights. Not the prologue so much (though the quick shots of what the world does once they get used to jaegers beating the shit out of kaiju before things go sour are great) but the Bone Town and criminal trade in kaiju parts and the worshippers who think the kaiju are God's judgment and so on stuff is fantastic. Much like the Goblin Market in Hellboy 2--when Del Toro does that kind of quiet stuff to built great, weird worlds that imagine what's going on away from the main action, he just shines so much and makes you realize how utterly impoverished most blockbuster films really are. I could have done with thirty more minutes of that and some slightly tighter editing on the action, honestly.

2) Idris Elba's "Henry V" speech was pretty weaksauce--about the only time the cheese got a bit too cheesy for me. I would be happy for no more Henry V speeches in these flicks ever again--or for a film that has this much heart otherwise to play against type and give us something other than the rote version.

The worldbuilding part felt a lot like gutterspeak Bladerunner meets Zion APU dock.  And yah, I too wanted more.  It's a potentially fascinating realm he created in a small span of time.

Saw this a few hours ago in IMAX 3D.  It's unbelievably good.  I can't add anything that people haven't said already.  I'm just joining the chorus.  I may see it again next weekend...

The last scene.

Aight. I'm convinced by all the buzz to go see it in the theater. Not because of giant robots punching monsters, but because peoples is saying that 1. It's not pants on head retarted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers:_Dark_of_the_Moon) "Turn your brain off". and 2. It's got some actual suspense and tension instead of just tossing action at the screen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Into_Darkness) until the audience is numb.

Okay, fucking awesome.  I just wanted a good robots vs. monsters, and it was definitely that.  But probably the best sci-fi movie since the original Matrix.

--Dave

The effort that was put into making a world and tech and stuff is reason 1 that it's not just Michael Bay tits and explosions; reason 2 is the Drift as an idea and plot construct; reason 3 is the pacing, which has some very interesting downtime; reason 4 is that the action itself is generally well-choreographed and that there's some work being put into making small and large scales relate visually (the pigeons flapping at the end of the pier, the fistpunch through the office building). Reason 5 is that Del Toro actually bothers to get his civilians out of harm's way in the main portion of the film so that you can enjoy the property destruction without thinking of all the people who just died when Gypsy Danger punched through a building.

Reason 6 is also that there isn't a gratitutious tits character. And for that matter that there isn't an irritating teenage-male surrogate character.

Reason 7; no pointless sex scene.  It would have undercut the idea that the drift made you closer to your partner than anything else.

I forgot to ask if anyone stayed through the 1st part of the credits.  I did only because the background was a series of detailed, un-skinned stills of the models.  It was the first really good look at some of the modeling and pretty fantastic.  To my surprise there was a 'stinger' scene.

For those who missed it:

I guess it tells you how inherently terrible 3D is when I've seen any number of people say this despite the fact that Pacific Rim is a post-conversion job rather than made for 3D, and the director has outright said his preference was for 2D because 3D makes everything smaller.

I will say that the 3D was pretty good. There was only one scene where it "got in the way" and that was such a short, minor thing (actor in foreground covering 1/4 of the screen while actor in background is the main focus). 3D usually bugs the fuck out of me, but this just happened and didn't detract so kudos to it. Beat the pants off the forced perspective and things flying at the screen that was Star Trek Into Darkness.

Only one scene where it got in the way, but unable to think of anything it helped, suggests you are setting a very low bar for "pretty good".

The way you describe it sounds a lot more like "worthless and occasionally irritating".

I accept this counts as "much better than average".

Oddly enough, even though a fridge-logic analysis shows many physical impossibilities, the only one that made me go "WTF?" in the theater was the scene where she's holding an open umbrella as the helicopter lands 50 feet away.

--Dave

Fuck people are dumb.  Grown Ups 2 made more money this past weekend than Pacific Rim.  Hopefully word of mouth can get more people to see it because its the most fun I've had watching a movie in the theater this year.

I just think a lot of people aren't interested in seeing a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters from an IP they have never heard of.  Despite the quality, everything about this - on the surface - has the hallmarks of a bad sci-fi channel movie.  del Toro is a draw (if a niche one), but the cast doesn't have any big names to draw people in either. I suspect that is why people aren't lining up to see it.

Considering I think 3D is a goddamn waste of money and total and utter horseshit, then you have my feelings on 3D encapsulated perfectly.

EDIT: It also seems to have made $38 million, in 3rd place behind Grown Ups 2 and Despicable Me 2. It probably won't make its budget back domestically, but international will probably make it break even.

Saw it. Loved it. It had the best climax in an action movie I've seen in probably a decade. Ramped up the tension very well. The two hours flew by.

My nerd nitpick moment, funny enough, was the comment about the dinosaurs being the first attempt at invasion by Kaiju.
Who the fuck fought off that attack? Why are the dinosaurs so perfectly fitted to our ecology at the time? No dinosaur had 4 eyes or bat wings on a tyrannosaurs?
Why did it fail and why did they wait milliions of years to try again?

But I'll let it slide, like the digital/analog and the tanker used as a club, because the movie is good and little details like that don't bring a good movie down.

Yeah, the umbrella and the digital/analog thing bugged me also, but the tanker was used for awesome, so everything else is forgiven, amirite?

Ok. I had it pointed out to me that the aliens didn't make the dinosaurs. They made contact then and the world wasn't 'ready', which makes a lot more sense.


Totally! I can forgive the little nit picks if the movie is good. If the story is great and the characters are great. When the story is bad and the characters are poor, then I'm gonna get mean with the nitpicking, because goddamnit, I spend money and I want to get something out of it!  :grin:

They explained it right after. Earths atmosphere wasn't suitable for terraforming at the time, too pure or some such, so that as we started to pollute, it became a more hospitable climate for aliens.

This would been 12 year old me's favorite movie EVER. As an adult, I thought it was still pretty awesome and am pretty sure I'll see it in theatres again.

Incredibly disappointing it is showing so poorly at the boxoffice, but I am also not very surprised. No chance we'll see another one and it probably hurts Del Toro's chance at another big budget movie.

I preferred the umbrella doing what it was doing, because of artistic license.  It really wouldn't have been that great a scene (and I thought it was very well shot) with a fluttery awkward umbrella ruining the moment.  Definitely wouldn't have matched Mako's stoic ninjanerd character.

As for the digital/analog thing, I let it go because they explained the default powersystems... which were diesel-electric (in all of the other mechs).  An EMP would wreak havoc on those.  A nuclear-vortex turbine-reactor though??  Notsomuch.  Granted, all of the subsidiary components would be at risk, but let us assume those were adequately ray shielded.

I'm truly astounded he was able to get the kind of money for this movie that he did. He hasn't ever really delivered a blockbuster hit. His movies have been GOOD but they haven't been profit centers. Supposedly it made $60 million overseas, so it will make its money back in the international market. That was enough for Battleship to not be a complete flop, it should be fine for this movie too.

Now, if he'd done the Hobbit, he'd have been able to write his own ticket in Hollywood like Peter Jackson after the LotR series.

Part of the reason it lost to DM2 and GU2 is they're more family-friendly.  You may not like fart jokes, etc but you know your kids won't wake-up having nightmares because of them.  Even though the movie has a PG-13 rating, few parents are going to take their kids below the age of 11 or 12 to it because of that.  Therefore, those two movies will win-out. 

Now it's pathetic that GU2 will do better domestically simply because Gu1 wasn't all that funny but that's the breaks.  The public wants predictability and consistency, we've known this for decades so don't be shocked by it now.

I was more surprised it got this budget without an a list star.

This movie could have flopped. Add Colin fucking Farrell and it could not.

Spoiler was not in my showing. Terribly annoyed to have sat through it all.

Crazy, I figured it'd be in all of them. There's the model montage credits, then the stinger, then the traditional roll credits.

This was so damn good.   :drill:

One reason it's not doing so well is that Warner is apparently deliberately ass-fucking the picture to teach Legendary a lesson. Hopefully everyone will remember that the next time there's a chance to hire Del Toro.

Just got back from it.  Agree with what everybody said here, it was a really fun movie.  Well done over all.

Let me go against the grain then.  I thought this film was significantly enhanced by its 3D to the point I'd almost say not to bother seeing it in theaters if you can't get it in 3D.

YOU know, I've been seeing the trailers in TV and the vibe I got was "yet another Transformers crapola" they had the black guy with his "I am CANCELLING THIS APOCALYPSE" which was a pretty dumb line. I would believe conspiracies about Warner bros deliberately screwing this movie over. And yed in my local supermarket there's Monsters university merchandise. Urgh.

Monsters U. isn't Warner, so, um, OK?

Yeah, to counterbalance what I said previously about ads for PR.  I haven't seen a single one since Friday evening.  I haven't changed my viewing habits, they just aren't on anymore.

I haven't seen any ads either, now that you mention it.


Just contrasting it with another movie's promotion gimics.

Well, that's Disney for you.

So now, how do we get Del Toro to do Dark Tower, instead of Ron Howard.  Can we like, start a petition or something?

Rather upset he wasn't retained for the Hobbit now.

How are they deliberately doing this? What measures did they take it set it up to fail?

Its a dudebro film without a recognisable star.

That is the only reason it is running below the apparent expectations of some people in this thread.

The man is not keeping anyone down.

How this is a dudebro film is beyond me. It's nerdporn at it's finest.

If its nerdporn without a recognisable star that is even more if a reason it doesn't have people queing around the block.

What I am saying is the man is not oppressing Luther and co.

Its for the same reason everything is remake or from a big name, the movie costs and ticket prices are so high, movie goers need something familiar to latch on to to get them out. Nearly everything about this movie was unfamiliar.  Most of us who want out to see this, went out to see Robot Jocks with kick-ass sfx. Most aren't going to do that. The fact that the kick-ass sfx are wrapped in a good story with a strong emotional core is pretty surprising. This thing is going do amazing on DVD but its budget is way too big for DVDs to save it.

Honestly I wish the marketing had been less honest and made to seem more familiar like Transformers.

I'd be happy if there were any marketing past last Thursday.   It's just gone, poof.

I saw a commercial for it last night.

What were you watching?  They were pretty regular on Fox, CBS and CN in the week running-up but I haven't seen one on any of those since Thursday.

The international market is going to "save" this. It will make a profit.

Turning a small profit doesn't get more GDT big budget movies made.

BTW I had Voltron flash backs. We are so ready for this.

del Toro's better films are the mid-budget ones anyway.

When the budget becomes too big and the movie aims too mainstream the script really suffers. Maybe this is partly a language issue, but it feels to me like Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labryinth are both about something in the way his other films are not. The Hellboy movies especially feel inappropriately slight. I don't know that there's any way to make Blade 2 more than a fun romp, but the Hellboy films felt like they could have been more but just weren't.

Nerds vastly overestimate the appeal of nerd movies. Serenity, Scott Pilgim, Snakes on a Plane, etc. The net's most active posters are nerds, they don't represent the general public. Pacific Rim has no stars, no recognizable IP, and according to reviews a fairly slight story and characters. (I would point out that Godzilla is actually about something, at least the first film and some other stray ones) At a high level it's just a rock'em sock'em summer popcorn movie without any selling point that appeals to like one-half of the four quadrants. I mean, I'm sure it's a million times better than a turd like Transformers, but on paper there are a lot of reasons to see Transformers.

I'll admit I looked at this preview, wondered why it got made, and moved on with my day without a second thought.

I fail to see how Perlman, Elba, and "Mako," Rinko Kikuchi constitutes having no stars.  Those 3 actors right there have a helluva pedigree.  Idris is pretty much considered the heir apparent to Denzel (shit he's won BET best actor a million times). Perlman?  nuff said.  Both of em have golden globes.  Mako is oscar nominated and one of Japan's best.  No, I believe viewers are just really dumb.

BladeRunner failed at the box office too remember?  That has a similar neo noir feel to this movie.  Both introduce new movie tropes w/o gettin excessively arsty (like Pan's); so in many ways it's a tough pill for pop culture to swallow.  I anticipate kudos given down the road, but by then most folk will not have been able to see it in IMAX3D, which further worsens ratings.

Or it's possible this kind of thing, even if done exceptionally well, has absolutely no appeal to a large swath of the public. You could tell me this movie was the absolute best movie done of all time on monsters, robots, or both. I'm still not dropping $12 on it.

My main concern was my friend on the financing side, and whether or not the thing would make back the budget.

Just say it and I cried tears of joy. I went to downtown chinatown and it was only a half a dozen people in the 2D version and only 2 showings for the 3D version. It wad an amazing movie that no one is watching.

Now I'm confused, Mako died years ago. Did they CGI him up or something? I guess I can look it up.

EDIT: Oh, Rinko Kikuchi. Yeah she's pretty good. Don't confuse the old people!

What did Avatar have that this movie doesn't? Other than that Cameron is a bigger name than del Toro.

Sigourney Weaver in a movie by the guy who made Aliens comes to mind.

Michelle Rodriguez is no slouch either.

Yeah but she only eats "tacos".   :awesome_for_real:

Sexy aliens, gimmcky 3D, crap love story, environmental message thicker then a soup kitchen. Oh and did I mention a big pretty world full of sexy aliens?

Great movie. Did not understand why they built giant robots instead of giant tank. Much more efficient per pound.

You can't really brawl in a tank. 

If it was properly made the aliens would have crushed the tanks with their tits.

On the how WB is making the point to Legendary, it's not just that they're not running standard ads, they apparently cut off all sorts of secondary promotions that were planned six months ago and are normal for a 'big' summer film. A lot of that stuff is so background noise that we don't notice it, and most of the people here don't make their decisions to see films on that basis anyway, but it is one of the ways you build a big opening for a film that isn't a sequel or doesn't have a well-known star.

Longmire

Tanks cant walk underwater, which was necessary to deal with the rift.  Stop.

The whole tanks vs mechs thing is just a government coverup for the wall boondoggle.  What they really should have done is taken all that concrete from the wall and poured it into the breach.

I almost want to go see this again next weekend.

Great movie. Still don't like 3D, IMAX or no. A couple cool shots/sequences don't make up for making 95% of the movie worse.

I want to see it again, but in IMAX 2D. Sans stupid glasses.

More Rinko Kikuchi (or other Japanese actresses) in American movies please.  That was my only thought after seeing this.

It's probably worth considering at this point that cultivating buzz as a nerd movie may be counter-productive. The messaging there may be coming across as "this movie is only for nerds." Kind of like how gay/lesbian movies tend to exist in a ghetto.

Yeah I'm amazed at the lack of enthusiasm from movie goers. A few of the complaints are petty as fuck - basically 'It's not as awesome as that drill anime I saw last year'
Fucking weaboos.

This doesn't gel with the fact that the Transformer's movies are very successfull (also horrible).  Those movies are exactly nothing but giant nerd robots punching each other with explosions (even using an existing nerd-IP), yet they were all highly profitable.  Hell, most people I've talked to said the trailer for this made it look like another transformers movie.

Transformers had dumb nostalgia and Shia LeBoeuf.

This film has no bankable assets. This thread appears to dramatically underestimate how much box office is driven by the name of the IP and the name of the star.

I'd agree the trailers were awful. They were putting me off before the reviews came in.

Transformers checks a lot of boxes. That's sort of the formula for a successful blockbuster these days, a long movie that includes stuff that appeals to every audience.

Transformers has action, military porn, an IP, racial comedy, Megan Fox leaning over a motorcycle, wacky hijinks...it has shitty characters, a shitty plot and a shitty script but it has a lot of stuff designed to appeal to a lot of different people.

On a movie like that you know there are people sitting at a table saying things like "maybe we should include a scene where such and such happens - that will really play with 14-18 year old females!"

Shia LeBoeuf wasn't a big name, or a name before transformers.

Transformers had; crappy target audience point of view character, slutty size zero with big boobs, extensive scenes with average soldiers shouting incoherently into the air, more slutty-size-zero-with-big-boobs jingling-bending over-posing like a WWE diva in the foreground, more chase the crappy audience point of view character through half the city, more explaining how important the crappy audience point of view character is to the central plot and how everyone gives a shit about is nerdy-awkward-off brand blandness including the resident slutty-size-zero-with-big-boobs.

Its a formula, you can sell anything with those key points. The fact that they sold millions of giant robots kicking other giant robot tickets, is coincidental. Everybody saw it to see Megan Fox come out of a mud wrestling competition, to see Merica troops fight for Merica, and to see themselves flail around as you get the girl, the respect of people with 10 times your importance, and oh yeah you saved the world.

Pacific Rim proves that nerd culture isn't mainstream, just the pretty up doll versions of our favorite franchises.


You beat me to it bastard.

Transformers isn't a nerd IP. It's a reference point for most people growing up in the 80s.

Don't say that...we may get a He-Man movie...

Too late.

http://screenrant.com/he-man-masters-universe-movie-jon-chu-gi-joe-2-3d/
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/film-tv/news/chu-heman-film-in-early-stages-29172517.html

Chu's going to do to He-Man what he did to GI-Joe. Enjoy!

Dolph is crying.

I will agree that the marketing has been stale.  I mean, if you're of teh nerd culture then yah, just watching an 80m Jaeger punch with a rocket-fist is enough.  But for most, it would've helped to have seen a bit more of the setpieces that make the movie stand out.  I applaud Del Toro for not giving up the ghost in the marketing and maintaining surprise, but that's a risky ploy.

Also, this is the worst movie ever for translation onto a TV, if you're going to focus on the bots and monsters.

Have they tried a live action Thundercats yet?

Hum.  I don't watch A&E much I'll see what comes up.  Still nothing on network or CN over the last day.  Adult Swim is all about RIPD right now.

No, but they redid it for animation and actually it was ok.

Yeah, and then they canned that too  :angryfist:

Anthropomorphic animals aren't as rare as they were when we were kids, so no novelty to get them watching.  My son showed a vague interest in it, then flipped back over to Adventure Time and Lego Ninjago.

They did ?  The bastards, I was enjoying that with the Gurl.

Also, new Cheetara had great jugs.

It was another high-quality but high-priced animation.  Like the Boondocks.  Unfortunately, in the wake of the dozen or so Ben 10 series' they have, it'd couldn't bring in the money.

Surprisingly whiny teenage cats are just as annoying whiny teenage humans.

I just saw this.

It was kind of shitty. It was note-for-note Independence Day with fights that were about the same level of rad but with no actors nearly as fun to watch.

Hollywood might be trying to kill it for bucking the trend, but there's also no reason to keep it alive.

ALSO:

Fuckin' furries...

Ya, but you knew going in that realism isn't what a giant-fighting-robot-movie was about.

In terms of novelty, they need to make a Quantum Leap movie happen before Bakula gets too damned old to do it.

Correct, but I didn't know the premise through which the monsters/notmonsters came to Earth.

I can't believe this is the sort of shit we get instead of Into the Mouth of Madness.

Also, there was a preview for uhhh, some bullshit Clooney/Bullock vehicle. Gravity, I think it was called. Looks like crap.

Now we get heart of the matter.  :grin:

John Carpenter's got your six, buddy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113409/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)

Also, Gravity is by Alfonso Cuarón; guy that did Children of Men. Chances are the film could be a lot better than the premise or trailer shows.

I meant At the Mountains of Madness, which is relevant because it was canceled (the Del Toro movie). Yea, I know who Cuaron is. But I also knew who Danny Boyle was and Sunshine was unwatchably bad.

Maybe if Pacific Rim hadn't been 2+ hours long and they hadn't like, gone out of their way to explain everything, I would've enjoyed it.

I want my summer movies to be more like Shoot 'Em Up and less like The Alternate Earth History Channel.

I actually thought they'd done a good job with less of the hand-holding in Pacific Rim. Concept is introduced, we see how the Jaegers are manned, 'The Drift' is left satisfyingly unexplained as a mcguffin. Film gets on with it. I've heard ID4 comparisons before but they don't stand up, really. This is not a MURRICUUHHH movie.

As for Sunshine, that movie broke my heart. I was loving it up til the 3rd act. Then... jesus titty fucking christ did it jump the shark. At least there will always be the soundtrack. Oh wait. They never properly released that thanks to publsher fuckery.


I like Shoot 'Em Up a lot but I have to acknowledge it's a terrible movie. But it has the good grace to know it's a terrible movie. I like to double-bill it with Equilibrium, which is also a terrible movie, but has no idea. Yin/Yang.

Mountains of Madness died because of Prometheus not Pacific Rim.

I'm aware, but I can stick my head in the sand and blame whatever I want.

Shoot'em Up is not a terrible movie. It's a fucking masterpiece of brainless action that clocked in at precisely 90 minutes. It is precisely what goddamn Jason Statham has been trying to do with Crank. Equilibrium is actual shit. Shoot'em Up is WAY too self-aware of what it was trying to be to be called "terrible."

Edit: OBVIOUSLY I'm not talking about the "YAY America" portions of Independence Day. Structurally, however, the movie is the same. Seriously, go watch ID4. Then watch it again (because it's better than Pacific Rim). Fuck, even the "win" condition for the movie is the exact same. Pacific Rim was bad and somehow became overrated by nerds. Giant Monsters are still pretty awesome though and these were the ehhhh, third best on Film yet - so it gets some measure of credit for that.

I think I mentioned before that you hate everything that is good on screen, and also seem to love all that is bad.  I'm going to say that again.   :awesome_for_real:

I loved ID4 when it came out and I was in Jr. High.  The movie is almost totally un-watchable for me now in every aspect (dialog, action, characters, ect).  Pacific Rim was a great action movie.  Equilibrium was also good fun.  Why don't you go just kick a puppy or something now while you're at it?!!!!1!

Prometheus is getting a sequel and people want to shit on logical consistency in a kaiju movie.  This world is psycho.

I think pouring an endless stream of some hardening material (Brofellos said Cornstarch would work, i lolled) down a hole to stop Kaiju would've been a fine solution. They certainly didn't need to spend 8 years figuring out how to stop them. It's one of the most reactive civilizations I've ever seen on film.

Alas, I don't believe I am the one with bad taste here. I have a very short list of "things I hate" in film, it just tends to be, for whatever reason, a list of things neckbeards really fucking enjoy in film and I can't figure out why. Equilibrium was not "good fun." Pacific Rim barely qualified as an action movie. It took them nearly the entire war and a somehow racist portrayal on how Japanese people would fight to figure out that swords cut fleshy bits.

It should be noted that The Host is the only Gojira-inspired monster movie I've actually enjoyed. Though I liked both Cloverfield (which I think was Blair Witch done right) and Super 8.

I know you play the f13 contrarian for shits and giggles, but really, fuck me.  :uhrr:

Cloverfield was fun, you people are just being obtuse if you don't like it.

The fact that all these slight summer movies are so long is going a long way towards killing my interest in these types of movies as a whole. Once you get past 2 hours a fun romp is no longer a fun romp.

This thread underestimates that because there's a bunch of flicks that have made big money without named stars in the last decade. IP name is maybe more important but there are plenty of named IPs that have bombed. I think you are underestimating how much underpromotion matters. But whatever. Since the movie itself doesn't suck and since it's material that folks have demonstrably have come out to see in other summers, name your theory.

The promotion is shit. They've had ads on TV here a bit and I had no desire to watch it at all until I bothered to click this thread.

Also maybe it's just not as good as some of you think.

No, it was utter drivel and managed to make Godzilla 1999 look good. Hooray, a movie where I spend 95% of the time following around a group of literally the most unlikable fuckwits in recent cinema history (the twats in the flats of Skyline came close) as they slowly stupid themselves to death while holding mobile phones and handycam presented in the form of found footage (so therefore 2 hours of migraine inducing intollerable shakeycam) with 5% screen presence of the actual monster which turns out to be not only fucking stupid looking but also incapable of maintaining any semblance of consistant size or mass. This is a creature that supposedly smashes the Statue of Liberty, destroys half of Manhatten but somehow sneaks up on two morons hiding under a bridge in Central Park? No. Shitty movie is shitty. I would rather hammer nails into my knees than watch it again.

I didn't like cloverfield because of the use of shacky cam. It was an "ok" movie to watch for free. Otherwise I would be pissed I paid for "omg, omg!!" and "quick snap to the left, now quick snap to the right, what was that in the middle again? now quick snap to the left"

....well if they do a macross movie...

If WoW has taught me anything, it is that fucking giant ass monsters can actually tiptoe around quite easily.  Goddamned Fel-reavers.

Dang, I really liked cloverfield.  One of my favorite movies actually.  Lots of strong opinions in this thread!

There's nothing wrong with Cloverfield. It just wasn't what people wanted. Apparently they wanted ID4 remade. Who knew?

This movie was a ton of fun.  Saw it tonight with a bunch of friends in a packed theater.  Enjoyed the whole thing.  It was just gloriously fun.

I think Teleku is right and schild is just broken.  I do agree that it's shit that we got screwed out of a Del Toro Mountains of Madness movie, but I'm not going to take it out on Pacific Rim.

Bonus, a couple neat featurettes on some of the practical set work for Pacific Rim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSneLGWNOwQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8U16zCxCFM

I was pretty underwhelmed by ID4.  I loved this.

I saw it in a theater with about 14 other people and Brofellos. People tend to like things more when they're part of a large group of people that loved a thing. It's the only explanation I have for straight (or, honestly, even gay) guys that like musicals or period pieces. ANYWAY. I'm sure there's some sort of 30 page paper that could be written about people who loved this but didn't like ID4 or found it just mediocre.

Fact of the matter is this:

I liked Rinko Kikuchi more in Brothers Bloom and Survive Style 5+ (man, that movie is super awesome). Charlie Day was, I guess, the best possible replacement for Jeff Goldblum. Everyone else was terrible. Short of putting 2 Will Smith's in an EVA suit, I suppose they did what they could with a budget blown on special effects and Ron Perlman's sweet fucking shoes.

I think my problem with Pacific Rim is that motherfuckers are hailing it as some sort of brilliant piece of summer cinematography. It's not. It's an alright action movie that was too long and had too much talking and totally shitty flashbacks during drifts. I can let that last part go because when you're making an action movie you really have to bludgeon it the fuck into the average viewers brain that "THIS IS HOW SHIT WORKS, ALRIGHT." Anyway, if everyone had just said "This was a pretty cool movie with a lot of eva units punching monsters in the face while there isn't enough sunlight and it's always fucking raining" I'd have been like "Sweet, eva units punching rad  monsters, including one designed by Wayne Barlowe. Will watch on blu-ray."

Instead i had to hear about how Hollywood was PUTTING IT DOWN. How the machine was AFRAID of this, the same way it was afraid of Inception.

Instead I had to hear people say "omgomgomgomgomgsoawesome #yolo see it in imax 3D."

Instead I had to hear that this was like, a real movie that was worth real dollars and a real 2+ hours of my time.

So, instead of blu-ray (code for Pacific.Rim.720p.bluray.blahblah), I saw it in the theater.

Which was a waste of my fucking money.

Most of Pacific Rim's nonsense can be excused under the Rule of Cool, the results are so damned awesome you don't mind turning off the analytic part of your mind and just enjoying the ride.  I had one in-theater 'WTF?' moment with PR, ID4 had one every ten minutes (how is the dog outrunning an explosion, why don't the alien fighters just stop dead in mid-air and act like turrets, how the fuck is Jeff Goldblum driving out of NYC right now, why are people obeying traffic laws and leaving DC's inbound lanes clear....) so that by the time we get to the bullshit of a Macbook infecting an alien computer with a virus my suspension of disbelief is completely gone.

Comparing the two is not only unfair to PR, it's giving ID4 too much credit.  Much as Sucker Punch can be excused a lot for the sheer awesome of live-action Schoolgirl vs. Demon Samurai, rocket punching Cthulu is worth ignoring physics and logic for a couple of hours.

--Dave

Edit: Really, what did ID4 have for cool moments?  Blowing up the White House and an alien using Brent Spiner for a sock puppet?

(By the way, there's nothing wrong with remaking ID4 as a kaiju movie. So, let's not latch onto the wrong point here. Nor am I saying ID4 is the, ahem *wheeeeeeeeeeeeeze* Citizen Kane of action movies.)

(P.S. I pretty much love del Toro, but he's certainly no master story teller) (also, again, Gravity looks like shit. Goddamnit Cuarón.)

I'm going to give you a "bitch, please" here. I don't know why I'm putting spoilers in a thread about a fucking Action Movie, so I'll stop doing that.

1. Took them 8 years to figure out swords. That part fucking KILLED ME. I wanted to flip the fucking table.
2. They know precisely where the breach is. Do something about it.
3. The wall? Was this some sort of shitass commentary on the inevitability of NOLA getting destroyed again? Why? Why would anyone think that was a good idea? The movie started with the first Kaiju ripping through 35 miles and multiple cities. Fuck.

I could keep going, but don't pretend this movie didn't have 50 wtf moments, especially after you said you would rather turn off your brain for this type of movie (but didn't seem to for a goddamn Will Smith action feature).

It's really, really not. I am 100% sure this movie could not exist without ID4, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Gojira. I'm sorry you're not a fan of at least one leg of that mediocre tripod. Much like Star Wars couldn't exist without Kurosawa.

I don't even know how to respond to the Suckerpunch bit. That's like, just insanely goofy.

I don't see what possible connection you can draw from ID4 to PR.  There's about a dozen movies that make a more direct thematic parallel, and the CGI has a lot more progenitors that did it earlier and/or better.

Oh, gee, I don't know. Only the entire fucking storyline (and structure) down to the cast and archetypes among said cast.

Once again, I'm not saying that's even a crime. I'm not even saying Pacific Rim is necessarily an actual bad movie. It's a summer blockbuster. Crimes against good taste are an MO for the genre. I'm cool with ALL of that.

It was, however, (literal) SHIT compared to how nerds talked it up. It's just not the movie people are making it out to be.

Also, watch ID4 again.

Did you see some wierd cut of ID4 where Randy Quaid played the primary character?  Because that's the only way that statement makes any sense at all.  They had a three-act 'fight movie' structure, but it's not like ID4 was even the first sci-fi action movie to do that.

--Dave

Edit: I guess the big difference is that del Toro knows how to hurry past the immersion breaking bullshit to another awesome image, while ID4 actually seemed to be *trying* to make sure they came at moments where you would have plenty of time to think "How fucking dumb was that?"

More cool please.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/02/946.gif)

brb logging into my Straw Man gimmick account to discuss the originality of ID4

Why am I the only one that thinks this shit is goofy as fuck? Is there some gene that I'm missing that makes me not automatically like manned giant robot-suits? Also, why do they all look human anyway? Isn't having 4 limbs just the worst idea against things that can bite through metal? Wouldn't they have been better off with 50 million of these:

(http://roboti.cs.siue.edu/kids/Pictures/battlebot.jpg)

The Chinese guys used that strategy.  AND LOOK AT WHERE IT GOT THEM.

I wish they'd used that strategy. With each giant buzzsaw being manned by 1 Chinese person. Instead, they used 3 buzzsaws attached to three arms.

I'd like you to imagine a gun. A big fucking gun. With like a thousand barrels. And out of each barrel a small robotic highly maneuverable manned ship is fired. On the front of each ship is a Titanium or whatever buzzsaw. Or shit, apparently a steel knife works. Anyway, all those Chinese people fly their tiny fucking ship at a Kaiju. The gun is called The Cuisinart.

THAT would have been awesome.

Cause drift synch between people aren't always 100%?
I dunno, Pacific Rim could've been great if they didn't go 'chosen few' route of story telling. I would've preferred seeing how the whole 'Jaeger programme decline' unfold. Watching Gipsy Danger gets taken down and still makes it back in slightly bad shape convinces me, 'Hell, they should've sent them out in pairs.' Instead, the world thinks 'It doesn't work.'

It needs to tell the declining fortunes better than a sudden 'superstar hotshot pilot turns into construction worker, gets a final shot and takes it' script.
But OK, it's a super-robot movie, too many robots may not make it 'Super' anymore.

Yet some weaboo fans still complain it's not 'Super Enough'
Not enough manly tears were shed, and no drills pierced the heavan.
Diu ley lo mos.

Oh I agree, I'd love to have seen a lot more world building and explination of the changes to society, but I guess that would be to hard to do in a single movie time frame.  But it would have been really neat to show how society was changed by all the events (stuff they hinted at but didn't go into detail on).  Such as how all the worlds resources being put into fighting the monsters and building walls causes great economic pain on most of society.  Mass rationing of goods and desperation for jobs.  Negative impacts to the flow of goods and world GDP decline due to cities being destroyed.  They created a really interesting world, would be neat to seem more of it.

Guess that leaves plenty of room open for a prequal or TV series covering the fall of the Jaeger program over that last 5 year period.   :awesome_for_real:

This thread got a little silly.

Mostly due to Schild, but for the first time someone used the phrase 'switch off your brain' and that's always a warning flag.

That said, Fucking Be There.  

The last point is key, sounds like what you actually want is a novel or a TV series.

the flaming hobo bit always cracks me up.

Or a 237 episode anime series that goes on for 15 years!

I am missing that gene as well. That is why I am lurking, rather than commenting on this movie... no need to jump in the shark tank.

Reading a schild post in the Movie forum often has the same effect on me as reading the Politics forum.

Ouch.

I also roll my eyes when people talk about robots or robot suits or mechs.

Also why didn't Gandalf just fly the ring to mount doom with an eagle?

I must QFT again. Holy fuck, schild, did you really say that ID4 is a better movie than PacRim?

In 1996, ID4 was *way* better than Pacific Rim is in 2013. Anyone who says otherwise is a big, fat liar (with pants that happen to be on fire).

But again, that wasn't even remotely near the point I was making. I'm merely saying that nerds are getting way to overhyped about this fairly mediocre pile of shit. There was cool robot/monster action but it was 45 minutes too long, the acting was dreadful, and they explained too much.

In fairness, having read the entire plot on Wiki, Schild looks to be entirely correct that the story at least is lifted wholesale from ID4.

No shit. I don't actually know why anyone was arguing with me on that point.

The proper argument was "it's a silly movie, just let it be silly" which I'm fine with, but like, PUNCH NOT STRONG ENOUGH ROCKET PUNCH HARDER is kind of just, too silly when a steak knife will work.

I forget was "O Brother, Where Art Thou" a musical or a period peice?  Am I gay?  Damn I get so confused in my old age.

There's an exception to every rule. Cannibal, the Musical is another one. As is The Book of Mormon.

Or were already out of college. :-P

I'm not arguing with that there aren't comparisons to be made to ID4. The big "cancel the apocalypse" speech felt very similar to Paxton's speech in ID4. And I enjoyed ID4 in the theaters - even went to see it twice (the 2nd time because of this chick I was dating wanted to see it). But shit... PR was better executed in every possible fucking way, especially acting and writing.

It's not just "comparisons." It's the whole movie. The speech is but tiny miniscule part of it.

I don't actually see how the execution was any different (for better or worse). The standards for writing and acting in the early 90s and now are completely different. PR certainly thought the content was worth being more serious in both the acting and writing department. I would argue that ID4 was far more self-aware of how silly it was (outside of Perlman's shoes/outfit and Charlile Day who seemed to have been literally teleported from the set of It's Always Sunny to Pacific Rim). But again, the ID4 comparison was mostly because of the entire structure of the movie and pacing of the plot. It wasn't meant to be a qualitative analysis of the movies on a line for line comparison of the script or how actors played their roles.

Goodfellas was also a lot like Casino.

I like to make things. With my hands.

I've never had much love for ID4. And I would argue very strongly against the suggestion that ID4 was a more self-aware movie than Pacific Rim - after all, Mars Attacks exists primarily to throw shoes at ID4's Jingoistic inanity. What Pacific Rim manages to do so beautifully is incorporate a lot of incredibly knowing, very tongue in cheek characters and set-pieces into a big budget Smash'em Up that brews its own brand of genre-specific drama pefectly. That apocalypse speech is meant to be cheesy. The method for saving the world is a well worn trope, hell, The Avengers got away with it last year ffs. We know Stacker Pentacost is going to sacrifice himself almost from the get-go (though who would have guessed it would be Shaun Slater stood next to him?) but Idris Elba never makes you dismiss the role. Part of me thinks Charlie Day's portrayal of Geizler is a direct send-up of JJ Abrams as a cheeky tip of the hat to Movie Nerddom's current Genre King.

For me, everything blends together beautifully, and it never once felt over 2 hours long. The only thing that tired me out at all was trying to take all of Del Toro's signature detail in. The DVD extra Making of Hellboy 2 documentary remains a high-point of the format (and for me, as a front seat viewing of Del Toro's creativity and creative team is actually better than the movie itself); I can't wait to see what the PR DVD/Blu-ray comes with.

 :awesome_for_real:

"Shitty piece of shit movie was ok but neckbeards made me angry so bargle."

Never would've been said if people hadn't implied otherwise.

Edit: Also, I conceded early on I had no problem with the concept of giant manned robots being up monsters. Like, no problem at all. But the implication that it was more than that, or that shit about Hollywood keeping it down, or that it was somehow superior to other brainless summer blockbusters is absurd to me. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at.

I mean this movie was basically Evangelion only two people have to mind-meld with a robot and the smartass hotshot is from Australia instead of Germany.  They even aped the 'increasing monster difficulty' bit as well as the 'tons of scenes of a robot sliding backwards through a town' thing. 

It was good and I enjoyed myself but whichever one of you called it 'a perfect summer movie' or whateverthefuck must have been huffing whippets.

You motherfuckers officially hate fun.

I hate getting overly excited for a thing.  I had fun, just not as much as I was expecting to have.

There is no such thing as overly excited.  There is simply "You had got more enjoyment out of this thing than I think you should have."

Try reading. It is entirely possible to hype yourself up too much and end up disappointed. Which is what he said.

The worst goddamn part was that Brofellos hyped me up also! Then someone else did by linking to goddamn Wayne Barlowe (a true master) as one of the monster designers. And then you all were like "this is THE SHIT."

Everyone was wrong.

This is probably why I thought the movie was amazing. They even have dual-pilot Evas in 3.0.

You call it shit in one post, "not a bad movie" in another. It's just amusing.

Sure, but much like video games, movies can be enjoyable or watchable while still being total shit.

Independence Day has always been a stupid film, I am not sure why some here think otherwise.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? :wink:

Because they were 12 when they saw it.

Wow, the plot similarities between this and "Casablanca" are just stunning

The Citizen Kane of Robot Movies. :awesome_for_real:

Except I'd rather be defended by adults who called their giant robots jaegers than teenagers with daddy issues that call their robots evas. So I took another soul to see it, my adopted little sister loved it and wanted more exposition as far as the fall of the jaegar program. A lot of the "we need more of" belongs in an ongoing series, as she told me "well I'd love more character depth but it'll be a five hour movie." I think I''m up to see this 3 more times while I only saw the avengers once.

I was 25. It's still fun when you're drunk on July 4th.

They're both good awesome movies.
I don't care what people say.
There's bad and good of course, but I enjoyed both movies for what it is.
Welcome to Urf and Elbow Rockets.

I think the term stupid gets chucked around with little thought.
ID4 and PR aren't terribly deep movies, but I wouldn't call them stupid.
We can argue if they were effective movies, and get into all kinds of subjectivity!  :grin:

And I liked ID4 when I saw it in my 20's, and if it pops up while I'm surfing the cable, I'll stop and watch it.

Every time I spot Independence Day on TV it just makes me realise I'd rather be watching Mars Attacks.

And Mars Attacks was pretty disappointing.

My views on ID4 are a matter of public record.  It's a shit film.


To me, that is.  I understand the merits.

Some of you guys are breaking the Goldblum rule.  You're not allowed to say a movie is bad that he's in.   Moderator?

Oh, people knocking ID4 have been logged in the Blumbook. Don't you worry about that.

(http://heebmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jeff_Goldblum-290x290.jpg)

Oh yeah? Even this one? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABKy-Pqu-HQ)  :grin:

How can you hate a movie that brought us the wisdom, "Welcome to Earf"

You know, a week ago I would have agreed with this, but a week ago I watched some of Mars Attacks and it's so fucking awful. I'll take ID4 thanks.

Death Wish was my favorite!

"Aliens attack because they are dicks and humans rally to send them packing" is a staple of the genre that goes well beyond ID4.  What matters is the execution and it was outstanding.

The most miscast Geena Davis has ever been.

Just saw it. Schild was right.

In the robots punching aliens genre this film is probably stand-out. Otherwise though I didn't find it to be all that great.

Also, don't see this film in 3D, it has the most obnoxious pseudo-3D of any film I have ever had to watch.

Saw it again. Still awesome.

The russian and chinese robots, sorry "jaegers", were way fucking cooler and went down like bitches after about a minute of screen time.  Damn you.

Just saw it.   I agree with this word for word.  Not very good.  Enjoyable, but not very good.

It didn't help that lines were lifted wholesale from other movies.  Ah well.

Oh gee, look who has two thumbs and isn't crazy.

<-- This guy.

There is ALWAYS going to be a better way of doing something besides giant robots, that is the first thing you have to get over if you ever want to watch any movie about giant robots.

Not sure if I agree. Gundam and Zone of the Enders Robots seemed like pretty good ways of dealing with the problem.

Pacific Rim's problem was on the painful end of "easy to solve." Robots never have to be the best solution but they certainly don't need to be used if they are the most contrived solution.

Ah, the Sword Button !!

 :uhrr:

Yup, not at all painfully dreadful.

Look I love me some gundam but if you are gonna start picking apart pacific rim for shit, gundam is the LAST place you go to for better examples.

I don't disagree with that, but once again, fuck, focus on the very tiny tiny portion of what I said, not the entirety of that godawful anime series.

When the only other guy sharing your corner of dissent is Ironwood, it's safe to say you're still certifiable.

Except he's not.

So...

It's going to make money due to the international markets. So they'll probably make another one. Still, it's not going to blow the doors off any records in the US markets.

http://youtu.be/1CBC5s5qmLY

Japanese dub needs english subtitles.  :drill:

Fuck the US market. It's only good for Adam Sandler "comedies".

Ironman 3 did $400M this summer. The US Market isn't the problem in this case.

Huh.. IM3 only about the same internationally as Avengers, (800mil and 888mil respectively)  but IM3 did 200mil less in the US.

Estimates have Pacific Rim's 2nd week beating out RIPD in its opening weekend.  That doesn't bode well for RIPD.


It's not that we're the problem, it's that we're on the decline and mattering less and less.  1/3 of the market gross is strong, but it's far less than where we use to be.  We've been declining around 1% a year since 2007.
http://www.mpaa.org/resources/5bec4ac9-a95e-443b-987b-bff6fb5455a9.pdf

Plus international markets seem less discerning that the US.  That abomination of a movie, Battleship did far too well overseas.

International markets like movies where the script doesn't matter. Makes some sense when you think about it.

Brought the kids yesterday to Imax 3D.  This movie is totally just an excuse to have giant robots fight rubber suit monsters.  I loved it, nobody hated it.  Robot fights were plenty awesome enough to forgive the movie's weak ass plot, drama and mush.  At least they had a japanese chick.  Also really appreciated all the light moments.

They did say they attacked the breach and everything just bounced off.  Maybe because lava or because giant robots have nothing to fight if they seal the breach.

Rather than take umbrage at you being wrong (because there's others who agree), I'm going to point out that Schild and I rarely agree on ANYTHING.

This is telling in of itself.

How does something 'bounce off' a breach/rift. It's a big hole, you can't shoot a thing into a hole and have it bounce off.

Unless it is an Acme co hole placed by Wile E Coyote and which a road runner has just passed through.

They had those energy vagina portal things, remember ?  It was like fucking V'ger in there.

Oh I haven't even seen it. Just someone above made me think of road runner and I decided to share.

After the IM3 and Star Trek fiascos I don't really feel compelled to attend another dubious nerd film just yet.

Wise.  Very Wise.

The only really outstanding thing was GlaDos being hilarious.

Something that we haven't talked about yet that bothered the SHIT out of me was (not using spoilers because this doesn't actually matter) that the main character appeared to have been shoved out of the military after his first jaeger was decommissioned with no pension or other special dispensation even though he was one of their most elite and successful fighters and a national celebrity.  There's no way he's clawing for a living doing construction five years after being trusted with a billion-dollar machine and not breaking any rules.

ETA: and if someone justifies this with 'it's an action movie they can do what they want' I'll climb through the tubes in the internet and scratch you.

Um, I got the feeling that was self-inflicted.  After his bro was rent from his mind, he lost it and went wandering, calling no place home and no man friend, weary, yet weary, as he strode the world as an outcast and...

Sorry.  Not sure what happened there.

It's a difficult one. I thought IM3 was pretty decent; the script was back up to the first film's standard with added Shane Blackisms and it tied in very nicely to the Post-Avengers universe and how a relatively ordinary guy like Stark deals with it. Star Trek, on the other hand, was mildly enjoyable but easily the fucking stupidest movie I've seen at the cinema in years, outdoing both its predecesor and Prometheus (though I will argue the science in Prometheus is fairly watertight, it's just the protagonists that fuck everything up) by a country mile. It was literally an insult to science fiction and the pedigree of Star Trek in general.

On the other hand, while science and logic are clearly not high on the agenda in Pacific Rim, it doesn't insult you with stupidity like Abram's ST, but rather asks that you go along with it for the ride. You have to accept that physics has taken a back seat because KAIJU. They simply aren't possible in any fashion. Nothing can be that big in Earth's gravity. So once you're over that, all you need to contend with is some cheesy dialogue which is par for the course with Kaiju movies and some typical character tropes, some of which get nicely subverted. I absolutely loved Pacific Rim. I may have mentioned that. I certainly don't demand that everyone else does, just that they give it a chance.

Which character tropes got subverted ?

Genuinely interested...

A rare moment of character comprehension and/or empathy?  :why_so_serious:

Chuck Hansen is the principle example in that regard. It's the Top Gun anti-buddy relationship - the mutual respect/hatred between Chuck and Raleigh is never reconciled because of Chuck's sacrifice, and the sacrifice comes from out of left field because you would have expected his father to be the one to do so. We know instinctively that Stacker Pentacost is going to do something terminal but when it's Chuck and not Herc along with him you feel a genuine sense of anguish and empathy for Herc as he watches, powerless to help.

Another example is the scientist duo of Gottlieb and Geiszler; it's a typical trope to have one nutty professor in a big silly blockbuster but PR has two as they're not only great comic relief bouncing off each other as a lighter motif on Raleigh and Herc, but because they also get to do what Raleigh and Herc never can - cooperate (the theme of the movie). Their reconciliation is the one we expect from the lead Jaeger pilots but don't get.

Nope, I disagree.  The bumfuck scientist chuckle brothers were so tragically acted that they could have sodomised each other on set and you wouldn't have cared.  They were there to be the exposition delivery vehicle and were laughably lame at being so.

Also, the Australian Son you knew would end up like that.  You just KNEW it.  The only slight surprise was the genre Savvy pentecost who pretty much hung a massive fucking lampshade on it after he'd suited up.

I really think this is one of those 'We watched Different movies' type things.  Glad you enjoyed your version.

PR had two silly professors because they didn't have anyone as good as Goldblum on cast. I already talked about how they needed multiple people to replace single characters in ID4.

No, it's because they had to drift....

 :uhrr:

Yeah, it was totally self-inflicted. Survivors guilt to the nth degree.

Which is also retarded.  You don't get survivors guilt if you've been inside the other chaps mind.

 :grin:

wut?

 :facepalm:

This has been surprisingly entertaining. Schild is always good value when he gets a head of steam up.

I dunno about subversion but the scene where Pentecost tells Herc Hansen "Nope, you're a punk with daddy issues. I had you pegged on day one." got a huge grin out of me, as I'm terribly tired of the daddy issue punk trope.

Yes.  That's what I meant by "The only slight surprise was the genre Savvy pentecost who pretty much hung a massive fucking lampshade on it after he'd suited up."

It was pretty much saying 'You're a cardboard cutout character and you annoy me.'  Which was what I was thinking.  It was surprising.

Yes, though honestly he should then have turned around and looked in a mirror and said, "And by the way I'm a by-the-numbers hardass military commander with a soft heart and a terminal illness". Characterization was not in any way at all this film's strength and it really should have been better given that they were messing around with a concept like the Drift, which begs for a bit more psychological density. (How could you keep having unresolved Daddy issues if Daddy is in your fucking brain every couple of days where you can see that he thinks you're acting like a spoiled punk?)

Yeah, that's why you can't have survivors guilt too.

 :why_so_serious:

The thing that pissed me off: Every review I read praised the storytelling and complex character development.  I wasn't expecting a miracle, but I was expecting to see a character journey on par with Avatar. 

When I walked into the movie, I was really disappointed.  None of the emotion was earned.  Not a single relationship was fleshed out.  We were told, "Hey, this is a father/son team" and we were supposed to care about their relationship, although we never saw them give a %@$# about each other before their heartfelt moment.  In the final moments, when things look darkest for our hero, but the world as a whole just won a major victory, we're supposed to believe that everybody is going to hold off their celebration for to see if the guy makes it out alive?  And the romantic relationship between two characters that spend maybe an hour or two together?  Ugh.

This is a movie that should have been two movies.   The first movie should have begun with the brothers in SF when the first Kaiju attacked.  A Cloverdale type adventure for about an hour that ends when the monster is finally taking down by conventional weapons.  Then we see the brothers join up for the Jaeger program and we see their first battle.  Then they lose one brother in the Climax when he faces off against the first Class 3 Kaiju ever seen.  The second movie picks up with established charactersand relationships in place.  You can then basically do this Pacific Rim as the sequel and not worry too much about the establishment of the characters.

Yeah, again, wut?

Whatever you're thinking of, that's NOT survivor's guilt.

Made WORSE because you know just how panicked, alone and terrified the person was as they died, while you lived.

Nah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

So you want two piles of shite instead of one ?

Nah.  Let's not do that either.

 :uhrr:

Nerds are extremely generous to nerd movies.

While I don't doubt that this movie is better than Transformers both the praise and excuses made are identical. It's just that this tickles the nerd fancy in a way Transformers doesn't. The positive reviews are putting me off of seeing this as they are basically "it wasn't good but I liked it anyway because someone made a movie for me."

It's very similar to what you see out of gay and lesbian films - gay people mostly agree that they typically aren't good but they (sometimes) like them anyway just due to the subject matter. I make this comparison very purposely because a lot of nerd/geek stuff these days is bizarrely centered around identity politics.

A lot of the praise for PR is worded like "if you're a true geek you'll love this movie" or "del Toro has made a movie for us geeks to enjoy."  Geeks seem very concerned about who is a true geek and who is faking, need their own websites and entertainment options, are specifically marketed to, etc. A lot of the stuff around this movie is in-group / out-group centric. Do you like this movie? You're one of us! Do you not like it? Probably a jock!

If you can't tell I find the whole geek culture thing really annoying.

Hey, I'm not claiming Avatar was a masterpiece of character driven storytelling, but it is when compared to Pacific Rim.  I said I was expectiong something on par with Avatar - I didn't say I was expecting something great.  Passable would have been fine in a spectacle pic like PR.

The Kaiju is getting it's ass kicked and all of the sudden goes "oh yeah, well i have wings i should've been using from the start!" and the robot responds with "oh yeah? well i got a sword i should've been using from the start" is so perfectly and blatantly straight out of anime that it baffles me people didn't get it.  Did they need someone to actually say "this isn't even my final form"? You were watching a live action cartoon.  The russians? the scientists? Ron fucking Pearlman's character? not sure how much more obvious they could have made it we were watching anime.

While that's probably true in anime, it doesn't mean you should continue the absurd plotholes for inside joke value.

What Threash said. This is not a movie for geeks, its a movie for weeaboos.

WEABOOS DON'T GET NICE THINGS

THIS WAS ESTABLISHED YEARS AGO

NICE AS DEFINED BY DOLLAR AMOUNT TO MAKE, NOT QUALITY

I beg to differ - the movie is for the target audience, and this movie's target audience was geekdom.  

Go back and read thee reviews on AICN and similar sites.  Go look at the posters.  Go watch the trailers.  This movie was pointed at geeks - and it failed that audience with cliches, poor character development, and lazy story-telling.  Nothing was earned.  

Whatever, you guys are just have to live the fact that you guys are the kind of wack-a-dos that goes to a movie about giant fighting robots and leave disappointed because, although it greatest giant fighting robots movie ever created by every measure but boxoffice, it has plotholes and its unrealistic. Of course it does. Of course it isn't. Knit-picking Ninnies.

Yeah, seriously, I know of nobody personally who didn't enjoy this movie.  You people are broken.  I haven't heard anybody telling people to go see it as a 'true geek' movie.  They've been telling people to go see it because it was fun/awesome.  And it's way the fuck better than anything that's come out of Japan in this vein for a long time (though maybe that's damning with faintest praise.   :why_so_serious:).

That's the thing, it's not an inside joke, it is not a "nod", it is exactly what it looks like.

Just coming in to say AICN is the worst collection of reviewers for any medium on the internet.

Also, their site Jesus Christ my eyes.

Harry Knowles is the only person on Earth who I will openly make fun of for being a fat bastard.

Hell, made fun of him in person at Fry's once when I bumped into his fat ass wheelchair carrying around his fat ass.

Edit: As a former fatter dude and current overweight dude, I feel for the fatties. Really. But I don't feel for Knowles. Fucking gremlin.

Calling them reviewers is pretty generous. They're pretty much P.R. for the studios at this point. Harry in particular has about one negative review for every ten positive ones, and the bad ones (I see the most recent are RIPD and After Earth) are about as safe as you get.

AICN reviews are generous, but if you know that, you generally get the truth in the meat of the review.

It is just in the situations in which you end up saying, "What the %#$@ were you smoking?" that piss me off.  And this was one of those. 

The ads and previews promised characters and story.  They made a huge deal of the drift and how it was an essential character driven aspect of the movie - and it was essentially meaningless.  No story points really triggered off it.  No characters really changed because of it.  They could have written it out of the script with relative ease and the movie would essentially have been the same.

And, to be honest, the monster/mecha fights were kind of disappointing, too.  They were so dark and stormy (or underwater) that you couldn't see the details.

Details would've make it cost $300M.

ahahahahahahahahahahahhaa

what previews were you watching?

Oh man, seriously, this thread.

Sh, sh.. let them keep talking, it's amusing.

I finally saw this last night. In IMAX 3D because I figured that'd be the best way to see it.

This was the dumbest movie I've ever liked.

I struggle not to overthink it. Shit, "overthink" is too generous. So I'll get this off my chest first.

This was the most fuckstupid premise I've ever seen.  PR makes Iron Man 3 look like Memento. I don't know nearly enough about anime to say this is like/not-like it. But if it is liek anime, there's probably a good damned reason I don't know nearly enough about anime.

Giant robots and linked brains in an age of normal cars and boats where the second best plan the planet can come up with is a wall that doesn't even have defenses on it, and long after they could just manufacture torpedos so frequently they could gattlin-gun that rift like someone sprays water at a cat until they get the fucking hint, and then the master plan is to walk to the rift instead of just carrying the mech via helicopter and dropping it straight in?

And the storytelling was equally insulting. No mere coincidence I see this movie on the same day I read this Slate article (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html). I want to rip the whole movie to disk and replace any scene with people with the equivalent scene whatever Top Gun through Armageddon scene they used. Worse, I felt less like they were knocking off characters as much as they were knocking off actors, from Steve Buscemi through Dwayne Johnson.

But...

Once I put that aside, I rather enjoyed it. The fight scenes were fun, if themselves underutilizing the established premise of unique fighting styles and even more indvidual mechs. And the resolution of the film was fantastic on IMAX, surprisingly so for 3D. Sound was equally good. I can see this winning some type of technical award, though it is up against some pretty good stuff this year.

And once I re-turn my brain off, I am happy I saw it. Because if it was just anime, I never would have.

Engels, Wayabvpar, my son and I went to see it today. 3d and Imax. Wish there was a none 3d Imax. Sound was deafening. My son liked the movie.  I thought it was a bit too similar to NGE.

For those who came here because they actually enjoyed the movie and haven't hilariously had their time and/or money wasted by it, you might be interested in the accompanying art book, which is excellent. Really well put together, stuffed with character notes, stats (not joking!) actual inserts of blueprints and Del Toro's notes and the like. Everything is SO FUCKING PRETTY!

Oh god Save the Cat.


This stuff sounds more interesting than the movie. I love the idea of well-considered different monster designs, mech designs that reflect regional differences, etc.

Wayne Barlowe (the guy who designer the hammerhead monster) is the man. That has no relevance on the movie.

 :oh_i_see:

The geeky part of me was riding high, but I found the rest of the movie was palatable as well. I liked the characters, and I liked the story. I would think it'd appeal to a much broader audience. You don't have to know Evangelion or Godzilla to "get" this flick.

I hate to be THAT GUY but....


Can we stop comparing this to Neon Genesis Evangelion because you know, they are nothing alike.  There are giant robots, there are monsters, end of similarity.  Whether you like the movie or not, comparing this to NGE just sounds like parents complaining about "the rock and roll" all sounding the same.

If anything it's more like the super robot shows of old, mazinger, getter, dangaioh and a dozen more giant robot anime that were all about robots punching monsters.

I enjoyed this waaaaaaaay better than Star Treck, a good extra two showings than Man of Steel. Iron man 3 is a close call, I liked 9/10ths of it, while I liked 11/10 of this, despite iron man having waay better actors, characters, and dialogue. For example in Iron Man 3-
- war machine flies away to never get seen again after saving the president, despite the large battle with terrorist super soldiers still going on
- pepper pots pulls of ninja kungfu panda shit out of her sweaty titts
- tony stark invented skynet
- you can hijack warmachines armor, get someone unauthorized to pilot it, have them fly it effectively, and push the president inside the armor, pre-program it to fly directly to the bad guys base, and render it completely inert once in your custody
-bad guy goes through the trouble of shooting is very valuable subordinate instead of killing tony, only to try to kill him anyway 60 minutes later. Also murderous psychopath doesn't kill rhodes either....

Totally...if you ignore that both are about giant mechs fighting monsters and that the drift is a lot like the pilot/Eva interface...oh wait...they are a lot alike.

Oh yea..take it to politics if it is that big of an issue to you.

Spider Man? (http://youtu.be/C-gRYl45zl0)

I can't even remember a single character's name except for Mako.
But I do remember the robots names.  :grin:

Hannibal Chow, motherfucker!

But I just thought of the main character as "Jax" throughout the movie.

Where's my god damned shoe?

--Dave

Can't we all just get along and wait with anticipation for Elysium and World's End?

Hannibal Chau (Perlman),... OOOH THAT GUY.
I really don't remember, 2 week after the movie my mind is wiped ^_^

Come to think of it, I can't remember the name of anybody in all of Evangelion except for Shinji, either.  Maybe it's endemic to the genre.   :awesome_for_real:

Interesting article, thanks.

y u no fap to rei / asuka :(

Probably because even to horny teenage guys, both Rei and Asuka are so fucked up mentally you just dont want to go there.

Did you even watch the show? Evangelion pilots are inserted into a tube which acts like an artificial womb and are inserted into the spinal column of the eva's. Eva's by the way are not giant robots, they are organics beings artificially created using the cells of the angels(monsters) and put in armor. At least in the original series there was ONE episode where two pilots had to fight in tandem as in two robots side by side, there is no dual piloting at ALL.

There is dual piloting in the new Eva movie, with more coming in 4.0.

I can't remember any of the characters names; I was thinking of them as Jax, Stringer, Rei, and Ron Perlman.

Wasn't there some twisted mother-child thing in NGE that really fucked with your psyche?  I can't recall as it's been 13 years since I saw any of it.

The main character has his EVA grown from his dead mothers brain/tissue/whatever so it's as though he was inside his mothers brain.

It'd be more interesting if the guy had actually read Syd Field who, years before Blake Snyder, described not only a three act structure but the points within the three act structure where certain events should occur, what those events were and what page/minute they should occur in - exactly the same crimes that this guy is accusing Snyder of. For example, Syd Field's three act break down:

(http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Syd-Field-Paradigm.jpg)

Note the page numbers. This if from Fields book that was first published in 1979!

At the dawn of the 21st century, man was reading articles on the internet that read exactly the same but about a different Screenwriting Guru and using different film examples. Like, say, The Matrix: its script is 128 pages long and the end of Act 1 - the commitment to act (when Morpheus offers Neo the pills) takes place exactly on page 30 (the first turning point according to Field) while the midpoint happens on page 63 when they go to see the Oracle. Summer blockbusters have been screenplay by numbers for decades and nothing has particularly changed since 2005.

But anyway, Pacific Rim: I'm with Schild, Ironwood and K9. It's pretty much ID4 - with the only difference being that this film didn't piss me off like ID4 did.

Those comparisons to 2005 are only going to get worse.

Behold, the screenplay analyzer algorithm. (Forbes says "Computer" but you know what it is.)

http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/03/hollywood-dvd-writers-guild-ent-sales-cx_kw_1201wharton.html

Because in the future all the best art will by by mathematical formula, not human creativity. It's more fiscally sound that way.

Finally watched this movie last weekend. When we walked out of it the first thing out of my buddies mouth was man that was good but it reminds me of ID4. Overall I enjoyed it for what it was but then again I like monster movies like the old Godzilla movies.

I arrived minutes too late to prevent the purchase of 3D tickets  :heartbreak:

I enjoyed this more than I expected to (since I expected to hate it), but it had a lot of problems. As jgsomeone said earlier, this would have been a great sequel. I would have loved to see the story of the first kaiju...from 'we detected some sort of anomaly' to 'holy shit, a giant monster is ruining SF' to 'wow, we finally killed it...hey, what is that glowy thing under the ocean?' with a final scene of the second kaiju coming out of the Breach. Maybe some mention of Drift/jaeger tech experiments. Then you can basically pick up from there. The kaijus were goddamned terrifying, and watching them wreck cities was the best part of the movie, so I really wanted more of that.

IMAX 3D is just giant waste of time and money. The screen gets blurry if you turn you head more than 20 degrees, the glasses are cumbersome and annoying, the 3D effects are dull and uninspired, and it is TOO. FUCKING. LOUD. I am in my 40s and half deaf, and it was jarringly painfully loud. I felt sorry for Furiously's poor kid who hasn't been deafened by years of aural abuse yet. Also, I am so very tired of super fast action scenes that prevent the viewer from keeping track of what the fuck is going on. Seriously, they might as well just put up static for 5 minutes and then run text down the screen explaining who won.

I don't get the Ron Perlman love. Maybe because he is the Beast to me, and not the guy from SOA (since I don't watch that), but both him and his character were terrible. I usually love me some Charlie Day, but he was totally wasted. I also love me some Idris Elba, and he did the best he could with what he was given.

This could have been a FANTASTIC movie. Or pair of movies. Wasted opportunity here. It was watchable, with some fun moments, but overall very meh. Pity.

If you only think of Pearlman as Vincent from Beauty and The Beast and SOA you need to review his IMDB a bit.  At the *very* least you should recognize him as Hellboy.

Counting only his screen appearances (not video game or cartoon voice work) I have seen less than 5 of his movies/shows (Pac Rim, Enemy At The Gates, Blade II...and not much else. Never saw Hellboy). He is the guy who comes in to do the low budget sequel (or TV show) after the big star fucks off for greener pastures.

he first hellboy was great and you do yourself a disservice not having watched it.

The idea that formal organization somehow makes art necessarily worse is a silly one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonata_form

Did you let your thoughts drift?

Formal organization is not what the program does.


 :oh_i_see: :mob:

You're dead to me, mang!

Sonata is one (extremely unpopular) structure out of a possible dozens. The Save the Cat formula is a dominant form out of very few mainstream choices.

Save the Cat is more a formula than a structure. The title itself refers to an extremely specific type of character moment  - it's not something like "after 30 minutes the characters should be established and the main conflict introduced" it's "in your movie your hero should rescue a cat from a tree."

It's true that there's often nothing wrong with playing within an established structure, but that's very different from almost every work using the same specific formula.

No, the Eva was grown from the legs of the local analogue of God. It only had the deliberately trapped soul of his mother, who sacrificed herself so that when her husband triggered the end of the world she'd hand the reigns of the apocalypse to her widdle boy while she rode out the destruction as an immortal monster.

I thought it was the dead mom of each kid inside each eva they piloted?

Wasn't Rei a clone of somebody or other?  Or there were like a whole bunch of Rei clones?

Can we talk about the REAL travesty in this movie?

The god-fucking-awful Australian accents.

Finally a movie has actual Australian characters with meaningful parts and in a town littered with Oz actors they go with an American and a Brit.

FUCK YOU Del Toro.   Everytime those two started talking I wanted to fucking rip my ears off. Bloody awful.


Outside of that I enjoyed the rest of the movie, the robot fights were excellent (what transformers should of been, instead of the epilepsy inducing shite they were), my 12 year old thought it was kinda crap.  :oh_i_see:

Read a nice article (http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-visual-intelligence-of-pacific-rim.html?m=1) on the visual language of the movie that underscores how I feel about the characterisation (and others' negative perception of it). It's not going to change anyone's mind that is happily determined to dislike the movie, and if you do feel that way, feel free to skip the article. Either way the writer is capable of putting forth some pro-PR arguments that have critical merit especially given the extreme detail and world building Del Toro is reknowned for. Some good stuff in the comments, too - an interesting observation about shoes/feet being a significant metaphor/leitmotif throughout the movie and have 'heart' symbolism to two specific characters.

Yes.

Also:


Few people? Which few people are this? Seriously? What a brain-dead comment to make. The whole article is inane and shallow.


Yeah, never happened in movies - or drama, or fiction, or whatever, before.

Quick, someone go back in time and kill Joseph Campbell... and the entire history of storytelling.

Arguing about the formula used to narrate a Hero's Journey is as old as stories about a hero's journey. So what? The reason this shit comes up repeatedly is because a new generation of people need to be taught it. Otherwise they go about assuming two guys in a Gremlin are singing a brand new pop opera song. Knowledge is not automatic.


Which is funny because I had a similar reaction with the opposite impression.

My only real problem wth ID4 was hacking the alien code. Meanwhiile the government and the people didn't act completely unbelievably. Armaggedon was similar for me. I'm ok with all of it except the idea of digging 800 feet into Texas to blow a whole asteroid (woulda been slightly less hand waving if it was just a deflection move). But there too the government and people didn't act completely unbelievably, and the tech wasn't complete sci-fi. I don't need accuracy in my movies. I just need them to be consistent within themself.

PR had everyone acting stupidly from the start, with the totally wrong and most wasteful solution to a rather easy problem, and with really stupid backup options and no real logic to how the world worked, along with a whole bunch of completely wasted stuff they introduced but then never really used. Which is a shame, because a better reason for giant robots coulda made for a movie that was good beyond just the fight scenes.

You are vastly underestimating the level of specificity and rigidness of "Save the Cat."

Yes, it's true that a lot of fiction follows a rough Hero's Journey. That's very different from a script that includes the exactly specified story beats, in the specified order, on the specified page number.

The Hero's Journey is not a formula, it's an observed pattern. It arose from the observation that heroic stories shared cross-cultural similarities. It's not "this is how you write good fiction." "Save the Cat" is just a faddish approach from a terrible screenwriter that caught on, no different from a fad diet or fad business method.

I mean, the guy has multiple rules on what the logline of a movie pitch should always include. That's a far cry from the observation that many Hero's Journey stories include feminine temptations.


If anything the whole idea of the monomyth is that across culture and time people will reproduce stories in similar fashion without needing to be taught, because that sort of story is somehow hardwired into humanity.

People being taught the Hero's Journey as a formula to consciously follow is a recent phenomenon.

As soon as Campbell wrote it down and storytellers started using it as a checklist, it became just another formula.  Especially since none of the myths he analyzed to derive it followed it nearly as closely as the works based on it have.

--Dave

FakeEdit: Yeah, I mentioned Campbell because I just thought solely associating Sydney with the Hero's Journey movies was a limited discussion for an article that pretends to give a better background than that. I don't deny that Campbell's observations-come-formula were less specific (and raises many other discussion points).


True, but that doesn't mean the writing wasn't poor. If anyone is perceptive enough to think something is formulaic - ie they can understand the concept of a formula - then it's implicit that it is following a formula. I don't believe there is that large audience that is aware enough to recognize formula but also stupid enough to not think it is deliberate.

Also it's pointless hyperbole to assert that an 'overreliance on Snyder’s story formula' is 'killing movies'... and if you're going to write an article that is meant to inform the ignorant then do it with some expertise: solely discussing Snyder for too many Hero's Journey movies is extremely shallow discussion.

Unless the whole thing is meant to be ironic - the article is shit because it followed a formula? But then, of course it's shit, it followed a formula for writing a screenplay, not an article... and a formula can't save bad writing anyway.

Anyhow, I'm probably in a bad mood because I'm bored and wouldn't mind something that is actually interesting to read... apologies.

I don't think you can argue that "Save the Cat" is killing movies unless you know how many people consciously follow the formula and how many of them produce bad movies.

It is however safe to argue that the author of "Save the Cat" was not a good screenwriter, that many great movies don't follow his formula, that many lousy movies do, and that the book is the worst of the faddish "how to write a screenplay" books out there. At least the McKee stuff is presented as suggestions and observations you may find useful and not a rigid formula.

Personally from what I gather these screenwriting books tend to bought mostly by hopefuls, I'm not sure how much of an effect they have on industry professionals other than maybe altering their mindsets before they get in the door.

Australia has an accent?  :why_so_serious:

Armageddon? Jesus christ, we've hit the bottom of the barrel. Magical space shuttles that can fly around the moon (unpossible for a shuttle), a magical asteriod that aims it's fragments at famous monuments. A cast of derpy NASA doodz, and salt of the earth oil rig workers who save the day because more magic. Showed those stuck up NASA dudes, you betcha! Every character in that damn movie was so 2 dimensional they could have fallen between the floorboards by turning sideways. Every character was like watching an actor cash a paycheck.

We really need a thread where folks set out what their individual rules are for realism and fantasy. Because I cannot figure out why any single person here  (including me, I guess) draws the lines where they do. Say, with ID4, why draw the line at a virus and not at spaceships of that size that are doing something as grubby and incoherent as blowing up cities, which really makes no sense? The cheese/thoughtful border and where your pleasures lie on either or both sides is a kind of interesting puzzle.

An Accounting for taste?

Surely you jest.

Khaldun - already responded in the other thread, but...

Jeff Goldblum is entertaining, and to a far lesser degree Will Smith is as well. Once again, didn't actually say ID4 was amazing or anything. It was simply more watchable to me than ID4. Will Smith + Jeff Goldblum is more interesting to me than the minor parts Charlie Day and Ron Perlman played in PR. At NO point did I say anything in ID4 was reasonable. Quit putting words into peoples mouths. I don't think anyone argued that it was some piece of reasonable sci-fi.

Sorry, wasn't responding to anything said specifically here, just remembering everybody at the time making fun of the virus plot but ignoring all the other things that make no sense about the film. That's what got me going--what elements of films get slagged as unreal or ridiculous by most viewers while other elements get a pass? Because often there are very common reactions to disparate plot elements in a film.

Present.

I think you missed the point of it.  But that's ok, because I suspect you wouldn't want to anyway.

Rei was a partial-clone of Shinji's mother with a bunch of Lillith DNA. And yes, there was more than one.

Dock it at a station, brim the tanks, and plot in a Hohman transfer followed by a Oberth flyby of the moon to slingshot around. Not impossible, just very difficult.

Shinji's and Asuka's mothers' souls are inside their Evas. Unit 0 doesn't have a soul and Rei doesn't have a mom.

So we're still on this, huh?

So do you have to go see a rom-com with schild or something to make up for this?  :grin:

 :heart:

Gonna need more than a rom com.

A snuff film with schild?

Common theory is that Rei (I)'s soul is inside Unit 00 but it doesn't really matter as Rei (I through III) has Super Lillith Powers anyway (also Rei contains Lillith's soul in the same way as Kaworu is sort-of-Adam so it's Lilliths all the way down!)

And bringing this back to PR, Del Toro is talking about possibly adding Jaeger-Kaiju hybrids for PR2 so we could still end up with pilots synching with giant biomechanoids.

Big thing on the cross was Lilith, everyone thought it was Eve but the big reveal was that Eve was actually inside Rei.

Nah, it was supposed to be Adam who was actually in Gendo's hand physically and Kaworu spiritually. There really isn't an Eve in the Eva universe.

I never really liked that theory since Unit 00 should have been completed before Unit 01 and thus before Rei existed since Gendo probably wasn't cloning Yui while she was alive.

Soo glad I didn't watch those serieses. :uhrr:

Anyways, saw this today in IMAX 3D. IMAX was a joke, really the same size as the typical screen + a little extra. Going to a real IMAX next time. Still not convinced I like 3D, but it was mostly OK. It did make a few scenes look like they had little plastic models (helicopters, escape pods, etc), which probably wouldn't have been noticed in 2D.

Thought the movie was great though. Well executed entertainment.

The smaller sized "lie-max" screens, as some people still like to refer to them, are still Imax.   The only real difference is that they are not full UBER SIZED Imax screens.  The projector technology they use is still the same regardless of which size the image is shown on (and they are actually larger then a standard movie screen, though not as big as the full thing obviously).   The thing Imax pushes on these is that while the screen may be smaller, the picture quality and sound quality is still there, and (at least picture wise) should be vastly superior to most normal Digital projection.

I wanted to hug them and tell them it was going to be okay. I have a long-standing weakness (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrokenBird) (warning, tvtropes link).

I'm not entirely sure that's true. I was under the impression that "true" IMAX uses 70mm film, whereas a lot of the "lie-max" screens use digital projectors, and that next year IMAX is supposed to be pushing out some new sort of new digital projector and likely phasing out film entirely.

Not 100% sure.  While yes, "true" IMAX, in the classic sense would still use 70 mm film, I think you would be very hard pressed to find many of those around any more.   The vast majority of IMAX screens out there now are Digital.  And as far as digital content goes, only the dimensions of the source file would matter.   If it is recorded using an IMAX digital camera, or converted from 70 mm to digital format, it should still preserve the IMAX aspect ratio, and then it is just a matter of projecting it on screen.    If the screen size changes, but the aspect ratio does not, then it "technically" is still an IMAX presentation.  The smaller screens just wouldnt be the traditional "Full Sized" IMAX dimensions.

If I manage to catch one of the IMAX technicians in at my theatre next time they come in for an upgrade, I will pick his brain about Digital VS 70mm film sites.  I do know that when we get IMAX branded harddrives shipped to us for our digital content, they all have a "70mm DCP" logo branded on them.  (For a bit of background, the theatre i work at is loosely considered a "test" facility for IMAX digital 3D Stuff, and for about the last 2 years now we have had IMAX techs in on a fairly regular basis messing with our projectors with upgrades / tests and the like).

The chain I work for doesn't have many IMAX screens, but I try to pay attention to the technology at least. I'm not arguing that one version of IMAX is superior to another on a technical level as that goes beyond my knowledge. I'm just saying that there are some variances in projection and it's not all the same technology. My limited understanding is that digital IMAX essentially uses two 2k projectors, and that the ones they're supposed to be rolling out at some point have been described as dual 4k, although I don't know if that's still two projectors or if they're someone doing it with one.

At the moment the technological competition in theaters seems to be on sound, with Dolby Atmos going against Auro 3D. There's a theater relatively nearby to me that does Atmos, but I haven't checked it out yet. The conversion to digital projection was a big deal to me simply on the level of not having to deal with film getting scratched, but aside from that the movies themselves are still a much bigger factor than the technology they're played on.

Around here we have both 70mm imax and digital "imax" cinemas. They aren't remotely comparable.

The 15 perf 70mm film version delivers visibly better contrast, colour and detail wheras I can't tell the difference between the digital version and any other unbranded 2k.

I can't see any reason digital couldn't be as good. So I rather suspect the issue is that standards set for using the imax brand on digital projection aren't stiff enough.

The problem I am having with the 1570 screens, is that (presumably because of cost of a second set of film) they don't tend to show a 2d print alongside the goddamn abomination that is 3D.

There aren't a ton of 70mm IMAX locations, but they're worth seeking out.  The 35 mm digital ones are not really comparable unless they're dual projection that new 4k thing supposedly.

Yeah, chances are, if your local screen is an IMAX Digital, it is probably still running on the old Christie 2k projectors.   My site was transitioned to the newer Barco 4ks about 8 months back as part of their live environemnt test sites, and there is a fairly noticeable difference in Image quality over the Christies.  For one, our IMAX screen is MUCH brighter then any of our other digital screens, which results in a much clearer, crisper image.

The 15/70 screens have a major advantage over Digital screens currently due to the fact that they use bulbs somewhere in the 15kw range, whereas nearly all Digital units currently out there for "normal" sized screens use bulbs that range from 1.5 to 4kw.    The Barco projectors we have for our Dual-projector imax setup currently run 6kw bulbs.

And yeah, while the current battle in movie tech seems to be audio, I believe there is some nifty stuff coming down the pipe for Projection with talk of Lazer light powered units, essentially eliminating the standard Xenon short-arc bulb all together, meaning you should theoretically never need to change bulbs ever again, but I am not really sure how that is going to work.

On a scale of preposterous where one side is Giant Mechs to fight Giant Monsters coming from a single hole in the ground and the other side is impenetrable hull doing a Star Trek IV around the moon to catch the conveniently close asteroid, I'll take the slingshot around the moon any day. At least they described that as a plan, had models, full minutes dedicated to it, and related footage of the process at a summer-flick appropriate pacing.

All Pacific Rim was say "we made monsters too"/cut to game show/cut to buddy flick sadness in Alaska.

I'm not saying I accepted that what Armaggedon established was real. All I'm saying is that the premise was believable enough to not need Myth Busters, with my break point being the goal of drilling 800 feet into something with 298k square miles of area.

And I only dredged up last page's debate becasue of Khaldun's awesome idea:


Yes please.

And I'm ok with the blowing up of cities.

Um...

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23473.0

edit: Actually I'll just put this post over there.

This is doing well enough internationally that they are close to greenlighting a sequel.

ATLANTIC RIM

I look forward to the British and French stereotype robots and pilots.

Yeah, 227 mil worldwide for the 190mil budget.  87 mil of that is domestic. 

It's blown the Lone Ranger away (85 domestic/ 164 worldwide.)

It just opened in China with the highest opening that Universal has ever had there. Hasn't even opened in Japan.

I love this movie but I don't necessarily want a sequel.  I just want GDT to be free to make his next wet-dream movie whatever that maybe.  Hellboy 3, Mountains of Madness, or Pacific Rim 2 all fine choices.

Also Voltron could be a fine sequel Pacific Rim.

It should be this. x1000

It is apparently getting a sequel - which disappoints me.  I'd rather see them learn from the mistakes (lacking story or characterer development) and try again.  The genre deserves a chance to have a real story told in it rather than rushing to stormy monster battles with superficial and nonsensical storytelling.

In what world does making a sequel mean the exact same movie?

Michael Bay world?  :why_so_serious:

That's apparently the title of the Asylum/SyFy version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVpQmZmKNmo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVpQmZmKNmo)

Why do you think that a "real story" is any more likely or unlikely with a fresh movie? Why does the genre of "giant robots battle giant monsters" deserve the chance to have a REAL STORY?

I liked this flick, readily acknowledge that aspects of it were weaksauce, but let's cut the geek pretension here a bit, yes? If "real story" is the issue, stick to genres and themes and moods that are more likely to generate "real stories" than giant robots punching giant monsters.

Worst Star Trek ep EVAR.

Spock Vulcan neck pinched a tribble because it peed on his boot and it exploded right next to a scantily clad Uhura leaning against a shuttle. 

x1000! but only if GDT is given enough license to not include a love story.  In general, people wanting a romance are not going to see this.  Just tell the story.

The heartwarming story of a man and a shoggoth finding each other in the coldest place on earth, only to have their hearts keep each other warm.

Maybe they'll take the opportunity to make a sequel and making a better story and character development. Not like they can they can do worse in both categories  :awesome_for_real:

I'm glad it's done well. This has stroked a nerdrage in me but only if I allow myself to think about it for a second. And we now have TWO (count 'em TWO) threads for that outlet.

In the end, they could make franchise out of this that are just IMAX 3D showcase pieces. I'd pay for that. I go to the movies like three times a year because whatever isn't worth an iTunes rental on a flight I can see in on my 7.1/projector setup. But I ain't gettin' no IMAX (way big) nor 3D (mostly stupid) in my house anytime soon. So more mechs and monsters? Bring it on!

To be fair I don't think the nerdrage is primarily aimed at the movie.

Before the movie launched the advertising told us it was a just an exercise in big CGI. Then some nerds went along and told everyone it was more than that, the nerdrage seems primarily aimed at those claiming this is a good film. Which is not something the filmmakers or trailers ever claimed.

Oh fuck right off, it's a perfectly fine film.  YOU don't like it, that is fine, I'm not going to argue your taste but again....

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pacific_rim_2013/

By any metric it's a good movie, it's doing well, not great but it's making money and people who watch it mostly enjoy it.  So stop with all the movie forum trolling with wild exagerrations and presumptions of quality pulled from your asses.

Do you deny that nerds all over the Internet were saying 'it is one of us!'?

Not at all, there was a ton of hype and it did fall short of most expectations BUT to call it objectively a bad movie is some egregious fucking hyperbole.  Many were expecting robot jesus but got a flawed but fun action movie instead.

Were people expecting robot jesus before it hit cinemas? The trailers made it look like transformers.

Opinion around this thing has been on an unusally wild ride even for the f13 movie forum.

More that I was all like 'Geez, that looks cheesy and kinda lame' and then everyone was like 'Wow, it's not cheesy and lame, it's deep and awesome and moving and whatnot'.

And then I went and it was cheesy and lame.  No-one fooled me, except those I usually listen to.

BASTARDS.

I'll just speak for myself, I've been a fan of anime and giant robots punching things since voltron.  I was in no way expecting anything but cheesy acting and robots punching giant monsters. I got what I came for and I had fun.  I like to think I'm in the majority, now whether the majority has good taste or not is up for debate(Hint: it usually doesn't) but even most critics seem to think it was a decent flick caveat: for a summer blockbuster.

I think much of the vitriol around this movie is because of people on the internet and not really an accurate reading on the film itself.

Who the hell was calling it deep? Did I miss some other conversation?  It was cheesy with robots punching monsters, but that's all I wanted out of it.  It appeased the 12 year old in me.

I went to see it yesterday mostly because of the glowing reviews in this thread.  But I interpreted the reviews as "it's really good for a robot versus monster movie" so that's all I expected and it's what I got.  It is far and away the best robot versus monster movie I've ever seen, that doesn't actually mean it ranks as a good movie when compared to all others.

It was also the first movie where the 3D actually added to the movie, made it better instead of worse.  Every other 3D movie I've ever seen the effects were not worth the price of having to wear and deal with the annoying glasses.  I include Avatar in that.  Speaking of, this movie was still better than the essentially robot versus monster Avatar (which I also liked).

And I still can't understand for the life of me why you wouldn't enjoy the fuck out of this film. I thought it was fantastic... but you know, people's opinions differ.

Giant robots fighting giant monsters doesn't actually require a lot of effort to be good, and it likely won't ever ascend above cheesy because as we've all discussed ad nauseum, giant robots are a really dumb idea. But if you buy the premise that giant robots work, the level of craft of this movie is transcendent compared to 1) normal giant robot vs. giant monster movies, 2) most of the action movies I've seen this summer,  and 3) most of the movies I've seen this year.

Maybe I set the bar too low because let's face it, Hollywood has been setting the bar pretty goddamn low and going lower every year. But I honestly can't understand why people who buy the premise of giant robots hitting giant monsters wouldn't like this movie.

The Giant Robots hitting hte Giant Monsters bits were fine.

It was the rest that sucked fetid cock.

He did, by his own admission, he's just being a cranky Scot about it.


 :why_so_serious:

I still stand by that.  It was the Robots Hitting The Monsters that made it enjoyable.

The rest of it didn't even register in my head and was forgotten five minutes out the theatre.  I challenge anyone to remember any actual dialogue beyond the King Richard Speech.    The Characters were pish.  Especially Hannibal Chau.  Jesus Wept.

I don't remember the exact dialoge from a lot of good movies, unless I watch it over and over and over again.

Really, everyone thinks that some movie SUCKS FETID STANK GREASY NERD COCK! It's practically required to take a fucking massive dump on movies if people seem to be enjoying them.

I liked the robot punching, and I also thoroughly enjoyed the world and the characters. A lot more than most recent movies. If you didn't, well, too bad for you, boyo.

ID4 with Transformers/Battleship special effects.

Leaving it there.

King Henry was the one with the speech. Richard is the one with the hunchback.

That's doing a pretty severe disservice to Pacific Rim's visuals IMO.  The fact that I could actually tell what the fuck was happening on the screen puts it in an entirely different category from Transformers, despite both of them having giant robots.

Yeah, ditto, but in pretty much every way than just visuals.  I loved Pacific Rim.  All of the transforms movies are unwatchable to me.  I cannot watch them in one go, and can literally only stand a short a amount of time before I get up, go away, then eventually come back later in the day to try again.  They hurt me to watch.

The acting and character development was just fine and is what helped to make the whole movie a nice fun experience.  Yes, nothing deep, but it worked great and was fun to watch.  It wasn't the abomination of acting transformers and the like were.

Richard has a good speech too. It's generally not one you give to rouse the troops for the final battle, though.

Nah. Live-action shonen mecha, right down to Gipsy Danger being Mazinger Z with the serial numbers filed off and a coat of blue paint and the closest thing to romance being a hug at the end.

You know one of the reasons I dug it so much is that all the shit that Transformers and Battleship and most of the other shitty summer action blockbuster movies had it completely ignored.

Romance subplot with gratuitous shots of some tart? The romantic subplot was almost entirely fucking subtext, displayed only through the actors reactions to each other. Idiotic banter and forced comedy? Pretty much relegated to the comic relief scientist characters and their interactions with guys like Chau. Over the top nationalistic rah rah military wankfest? Not even hinted at and certainly not focused on the US military. Ok, it had a "rousing ID4 speech" but even that wasn't too bad. All the beats we expect to see in summer action movies thanks to that cockgobbler Michael Bay were absent or turned on their head.

Not being able to tell wtf is going on in Transformers is not an effects problem, it's a director problem.

No its an effects problem when your "robots" look like trash cans glued together by homeless people.

Actually even with a skilled director, there's a really challenging visual problem with relating different scales of action--having a person and a giant robot in the same frame of action is hard, because you either are looking at the person closely (and hence just a small piece of the robot) or at the robot closely (and hence the person's expressions are not very visible). If you're doing CGI, you also have to be mindful--if there were giant robots and giant monsters, if the camera is imitating a close-up human perspective, their texture would look really different than it would from far away, as would the look or pacing of any motion.

Del Toro mostly dealt with this pretty well, save a few murky or dark scenes. Bay deals with it horribly throughout all of the Transformers movies.

This thread has AVATAR being used as an example of good character development.  :ye_gods:

I think there's some good objective things to critique movies on, but I think a ton of it is personal preference and mood.
Get up on the right side of the bed? Avatar is ok. Had a rough week? Avatar is shitty mcshit.

Saw it in 70mm IMAX 3d and yeah the dialogue and characters were pretty weak but its still one of the best movie tickets I've ever bought even at $20. Quite a spectacle and seeing it on a small screen would probably be a complete waste of time.

Can we discuss why giant submersible tanks would have been way more effective?

Seriously Hollywood or even some anime studio, make a fucking BOLO movie already.

You do realize that will spark the discussion on why Bolo's were totally unrealistic and would not have worked.

What? I'll concede the AI, but we could have built one half a century ago. They're certainly more viable than an anthropomorphic robot with joints that are impossible to protect.

No it doesn't. Remedial thread reading for you, please stay after class.

Ok, yes on a BOLO movie.

But no on the submersible tanks in this movie. Missiles for the air, torpedos for the hole. Schild's cement dome if you need to add some time.

I appreciate people who aren't annoyed by the plot. But 5here's no reason this movie couldn't have had a coherent rationale for the mechs. Really. It's like they pursposely avoided bothering, just so they could say "it's just anime"!!

Other than mechs are a terrible delivery vehicle for weaponry in general and are militarily useful only because they look cool?

What haemy said, giant robots aren't viable. Same tech on 3 really big tanks would have done the same thing a lot faster. In fact you could have done the korean style of 3 man teams. 1 tank distracts, a second tank deals utility damage, and a third tank charges the finisher.

One man couldn't take down a whole terrorist cell either.

More realism in movies!

 :oh_i_see:

The Kaiju were faster and more manuverable in the water. Your submersible tanks would have gotten thrashed.

Guillermo Del Toro goes to Japan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5va1sepKKo)

From that vid: Cherno Alpha is a Zaku!  Coyote Tango is a Guncannon! :drill:

e: Looks like WB/Variety's attempted screw-job failed - http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=pacificrim.htm
$200,000,000 box office take outside of the US (and it only opens in Japan tomorrow)

Japan will have a field day with this movie.

If they could work out a way to make the 3D glasses out of worn schoolgirl panties it might bring the entire economy down.

Ahh poor fool, you have forgotten... this thread

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15275.210

One of my only "wtf" moments after I had some time to think about it (and watch that particular scene like 12 times at work while doing theatre checks) was pondering the question:

Why the fuck would you design a gigantic weapon of mass destruction so that it could potentially shut down in the middle of combat because some intern tripped over the power cord.........

Are you talking about when they were testing it inside the lab? Cause I'm pretty sure you would definitely want several emergency shutdown measures like that in a testing environment. Other than that I don't recall any power cords.

Well I didn't see any giant cables snaking back to the base during the actual fight scenes so I think it's safe to assume that's the equivalent of a docking station and the robots aren't plugged in when they leave.  Or are you talking about the EMP weapon monster, that would be more difficult to defend against.

There were a lot more wtf momements if you actually wanted to bring reality into it.  Like how a few helicpoters can lift these things and fly them around.

Well, I dont know that I would call that "testing".  It was the scene where he does his first drift with Mako, and shit goes bad.  I mean, sure, they were doing a drift dry-run, but I cant realistically see them slaving the machine to the base operations console in such a way that "pulling the plug" like they did would shut it down the way it did.   Will have to try to catch the scene again, but when the gun was charging up, it sure looked like Gypsy Danger was pretty much free standing in the docking bay and not plugged in anywhere.  Just seemed to me like the way it was set up, having someone pull the plug on that console during a field op would result in the thing shutting down the same way.

If you're being critical, the very idea of drifting for the first time with a new partner in a mech with live weapons is clownshoes.  Completely ignoring the mental stability issues Idris was concerned about in the first place.

Yeah they would have a training area where you drift for the first time, you wouldn't just stick someone in a fully powered killer robot and see what happens.  At the very least they would do it before they attach the freaking head.

I can't believe I'm being sucked into a reality problems discussion about a robot versus monster movie.

I imagine it's already been discussed and that we're beyond the point of needing spoilers but since it involves the ending:

(http://i.minus.com/iwy7IFt7V5swQ.jpg)


(http://i.minus.com/iwy7IFt7V5swQ.jpg)

And once again:

(http://i.minus.com/iwy7IFt7V5swQ.jpg)


(Also: Mazinger Z, Gundam, Ideon, and so on).

Took the eldest boy to see this yesterday.  Giant robots punching the shit out of giant monsters, and it was awesome.  By far the coolest giant monster/robot movie I have ever seen, and a generally really fun and exciting film from start to finish.  The neckbearding in this thread though, oh my god.  You couldn't string 20 seconds of plausible stuff together from this entire movie, so it blows my mind how you people can try to deconstruct it anyway.

I brought Avatar into the discussion, and it was in the context of, 'I was disappointed in PR because I'd been told the character development was about on par with Avatar and it was far worse...'

Character development grades for Avatar: C-
Character development grades for PR: F+

lol monster movie?

Monster movies always have extensive character development, don't they?

They need to have decently believable and sympathetic characters. Compare Alien and Prometheus.

I don't think PR had any problem with sympathetic or believable, YMMV.

Cocky Australian isn't development...it's stereotyping.

Meh, third string character at best. Honestly can anyone name the characters in aliens beyond ripley,newt and the dude that say "game over man"? Aliens has a lot of rose colored glasses with it when it comes to anything beyond "shooting aliens with guns"

You mean Hicks, Bishop, Vasquez, Gorman and uh...Paul Riser?

It's an action film, so there's a limit on how much character development there is, but given that and how many characters there are you get a pretty good feel for a lot of them.

The black drill sergeant guy isn't much beyond a stereotype - he's just the sort of cigar chomping commander you'd see a million similar films. But he's one of the only guys that comes off that way. 

The bulk of Aliens also takes place over a few hours.

Also he had an English (London) accent and a British bulldog for a pet. And he was called Chuck, a North American name that generally isn't used in Australia or the UK. Only his dad even attempted a vaguely Australian accent (via South Africa.. and New York). It was weird and assumed ignorance.

As an Aussie (via Scotland), I put up with it because it was a global effort to defeat the kaiju and who's to say they haven't spent time in those places. But the dog for that type of character would be a blue heeler or (for a real jerk) a pitbull, not a slobbery English one.

Unless the son wasn't Australian at all, they never said he was.

I saw this a few weeks ago with some semi-nerdy friends, and the general consensus was "it's a good thing she's pretty".
The one line that continues to bug me though, is when one of the techs is explaining the mech and says "She's all steel, no alloys!"    :uhrr:

Oh also, what is the fucking purpose of having it smash its fist into its other hand?  Can you imagine what kind of fucking damage that would do to the thing?

I'm stopping now, because if I get into the drift or the pilot controls I'm gonna lose it

If the jaegers can't vary the strength they touch, move or hit things with, they would make even less sense than they do now. A jaeger that couldn't smack its own palm without blowing its hand off would be a jaeger that wasn't responsive at all to variable inputs in the first place. Do you cripple your own hand when you smack your fist into your palm?

Good, we wouldn't you to go full Nerf...

The line was "solid iron hull, no alloys," which is every bit as stupid since pure iron would be completely useless.

If you want to pick apart the engineering, this guy has already been there (http://madartlab.com/2013/07/26/pacific-rim-science-review/).

--Dave

Going by that list there has not been nearly as much bitching here as I would expect.

Trying to pick this movie apart on the basis of engineering is beyond stupid. GIANT ROBOTS HITTING MONSTERS. Fuck, how hard a concept is that to get behind?

Apparently very.

It's nice to see the tanker thing on the list after I took such a beating for it prior to release.   :awesome_for_real:

I call BS.

They had the choice to make it a cage match or a movie with a story.  They decided to give it a story, so they took it upon themselves to treat the story and characters appropriately.  They failed to do so.

This is the same BS that pisses me off about cartoons based on comics, about horror movies, and about a few thousand other 'genre' entertainment pieces.  The people making it say, "It is just a bunch of geeks/kids/other group watching it.  They'll watch it regardless of what we do.  Why bother with quality?"

Then, someone comes along and puts the effort into giving us characters that are more than skin deep, science fiction that seems 'realistic'*, and a story that has real depth - and suddenly we see recognition across the board - not just with the geeks... and we see the geeks go truly apeshit crazy.

There is no reason - whatsoever - that you can't do a monster versus robot story with real characters, 'realistic' science, and a story that drives the movie.   I was pissed because the reviews were making it sound like PR was that film - and it most decidedly was not.

* Realistic science, by the way, is not necessarily science that would work in real life.  It is science that doesn't take you out of the movie by being ludicrously unrealistic.  Realistic science is any science that doesn't distrct you during the film.

So you were pissed because movie reviewers take payola (direct or indirect via advertising).  ... that said, I can't really blame reviewers for not going with, "not nearly as cartoonish as I assumed a movie about GIANT ROBOTS and even more GIANT monsters could have been", because I don't imagine that tag line would have appeared in any promo, which would have resulted in no additional page views.

I'm constantly amazed at how little lack of context posters in the f13 Movies seem to have.

Still, now I'm chuckling.

Lead Character: but soft, what light through yon giant robot eye breaks?
Target Audience Dude 1: SHUT UP!!!!1!!
Target Audience Dude 2: MOAR MONSTER PUNCHING!!!!1!!
You: SHHHH!! Character development!!!
Merusk: There's NO WAY that robot could have picked up that tanker and swung it like a sword.  Let's discuss briefly Euler-Bernoulli bending theory to explain why...
Target Audience Dude 1: SHUT UP!!!!1!!
Target Audience Dude 2: MOAR MONSTER PUNCHING!!!!1!!

(later)

Merusk: What the hell?!  NOW they pull out a sword?!  Why even waste your time with tanker when you can use...
Target Audience Dude 1: SHUT UP!!!!1!!
Target Audience Dude 2: TANKER SWORD IS KOOOL!!!!1!!
You: Suck it Mr Science, you get no logic if I can't have pathos!

Define whats well done SciFi to you?

Good luck getting another $100m+ movie funded by excluding as many potential audience groups as possible. Pure vision is for indies. If you want to charge $15-$25 for an IMAX ticket, you had better be casting a wide net.

Lone Ranger got a couple hundred million and that movie appeals to um, 70 year olds?

I thought we decided the target market for this is nerds?

If the target is nerds, it is reasonable to expect some effort to not say stupid shit about a cast iron hull and an 'analog' robot. That shit is just lazy.

If its a dudebro film then maybe its less insulting to the viewer's brain.

Again anyone want to spring up examples of a well done scifi that does its math and isn't sprinkled with type characters?

I don't need maths but appreciate it when they make the effort to do it.

I do need them to avoid bonejarringly dumb statements that a high school science student would find ridiculous, especially in the context of technobabble.

So an example would be?

Is an analog robot that crazy?

The robots are machines piloted by people, not independent. Assuming the motors and hydraulics and such are in the right place if the human brains can control everything what's the problem? Being analog would probably also make them less prone to disruption of various kinds.

Moon springs to mind first.

If you want to go big-budget, films that didn't have "wtf" moments for me include Robocop & Terminator, but nothing within the last 20 years immediately springs to mind.  Hell even T2 didn't have immediate WTFs and it broke most, if not all, of the rules the first movie established.

I decided the target market was, "anyone who grew up watching giant robot cartoons or Ultraman and enjoys escapist fantasy", which seems like a larger demographic then "nerds".

As a gross generalization I wouldn't make anything for nerds because they don't seem to like anything made for them.  They're happiest when nitpicking.  It's kind of like dogs ass-sniffing.

The article's main point is that if it is strictly 'analog' then it couldn't use computers or chips.  It would have to be like an all steam punk type contraption.  At the very least you couldn't drift.

No, it's cool. That drift system was all vacuum tubes and gears.

Eh? For what they do surely they would have to be biological or digital.

Robocop maybe but....Terminator?

Consistency is key.  Terminator is out there sci-fi that doesn't break its own rules.  It's not High Science but it's sci-fi/ horror that doesn't make you stop and go, "wait.. wtf? No." in the middle of the experience.  Which was the question.

You'll never find a movie without tropes/ cardboard cutouts because that's how you TELL a story.  By bringing all the cultural relevance of that trope to the table without a shitton of exposition.

The most advanced computer on earth is analog. (This computer also controls an extremely complicated machine)

Also drifting is done with spinal taps and goo and stuff no?

I don't get analog = steam punk. Until recently cars were analog (except maybe the radio/cd player). A lawnmower is analog. There actually are analog robots that do simple tasks, and the reason they don't do more is that it's hard to make analog decision-making logic - but if the thing is not autonomous that's not a factor.

If you had a robot you piloted with a couple levers presumably you'd need a lot of logic to translate that into movement, correctly balance, etc. But if you control it with your brain your brain should be able to handle all that stuff without a computer helping. And analog computers are a thing anyway, though I presume by analog they probably mean to imply "doesn't use computers."

It definitely doesn't seem completely crazy to me. The brain sends impulses to the various parts to do the right stuff - there are replacement limbs today that work similarly. It's basically just a human body but the muscle is hydraulics and the nerves are wires.

Edit: Poor characterization, bad lines of dialogue etc take me out of a movie sure, but maybe I have a high tolerance for this sort of technical stuff. But I think that the science won't make perfect sense is implicit in the premise, whereas bad acting is not. If you walk into a robots vs monsters movie on some level you know the science is going to be off, but while you might suspect the acting and script will be bad that's not a requirement. I could say the same about a vampire movie. Nothing about a vampire movie requires cheesy acting (though that's what you're likely to get) but it does require some silly science.

If you want the definition of analog computer to be so broad as to include the human brain and biological systems then yeah it would be possible, that's what the kaigu are.

Non-biological analog computers are a thing. But my point is more that you don't need a computer in a giant robot if the human brain is doing the work that a computer would otherwise do.

The concept doesn't strike me as much more crazy than people piloting giant robots to begin with.

Is the human brain analog?

Would imply nerves don't communicate as definitive on/off signals but rely on amplitudes.

I have no idea.