So I don't think giant robots really are all that far off, just like the space station from 2001 probably could have been made in 2001, but we just don't have the money. With this dire of a situation, money isn't an issue.Which really makes me wonder where I can buy one of these nifty "no more pulse" plasma guns^^
Same as wondering why bunker breaking bombs would no pierce nicely through a Kaiju's hide^^
Or some form of "Drift"-technology so I'd improve my understanding of the female brain !
Oh wait, fiction ! And yes, I still love this movie !
PS : World War Z = Sleeping pill overdose by theater screen
if you get a jaeger, then I get one, because this planet ain't big enough for the both of us.
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This was a terrific film. Really enjoyed it. No cliche was left uninvoked, no dialogue was too cheesy to be written, but it didn't matter. There was a joyful enthusiasm that carried it through plot holes and plausability issues with more aplomb than any blockbuster of the last few years. I can't remember the last time I saw such a huge effects-fest and genuinely enjoyed it as much as this one. I certainly preferred it to The Avengers (and it totally dumps all over Stid!), but haven't seen Man of Steel so can't weigh in on that comparison.
What I liked:
Idris Elba was also totally awesome and had the best name of any character in any film to date. Stacker Pentecost. Only Elba could pull that off.
We didn't see much of them, but the Russian Jaeger pilots were pretty cool. The way they very casually walked off when Mako freaked out and charged the plasma cannon whilst everyone else shat themselves in terror was quite funny.
Also, the Russian Jaeger Cherno Alpha is designated as the T-90, making it the military descendent of the WWII T-34 tank. I laughed at that.
The international scope of things. The film's mostly set in Hong Kong, only one of the main characters is American, with the others being British (and Elba is always better when he's doing his English accent, with an allowance for his Baltimore one), Japanese and Australian. Chinese and Russian characters are also heavily implied to be totally badass (though we don't see too much of that in the film).
Burn Gorman fulfilling the, "What Game of Thrones actor is going to be in this film/TV series/whatever?" quotient (though he'll be better known from Torchwood).
Mako was a great character, very well-played by Rinko Kikuchi. The flashbacks were very well done. Apparently they got the entire street to vibrate for real when the Kaiju smashed up Tokyo, so the little girl's reactions to the ground rumbling were totally authentic.
Part of the film being set in Sitka, Alaska, kept reminding me of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which was randomly amusing.
The pacing was excellent. The film felt like it was 90 minutes long and I was surprised to see it was well north of two hours long.
I really liked the fact that although romance was implied, it was not actually invoked. Raleigh and Mako seem to be heading that way, but never get there and it wasn't necessary to press the button on that relationship.
A lot of the people in the film do heroic things without being total white-hats.
The alien parasites seemed to be a shout-out to Cloverfield, which was cool.
The ending seems to be a raised middle finger to Independence Day, especially the Jaeger landing in front of the aliens who kind of go, "WTF?" as a nuke goes off in their faces. Only the Jaeger pilots didn't hack the alien mainframe with an Apple Mac, so obviously this was vastly superior.
The dedication to Ishiro Honda and Ray Harryhausen (Honda was sort of the Japanese Harryhausen and did a lot of creature work on the Godzilla movies).
A few things I didn't like:
Mako being called Mako. Every time someone mentioned her name I was plunged into traumatic flashbacks about driving across a flat planetary surface and then bouncing through the air for no discernible reason.
The Kaiju ripping the Jaegers' hulls open like tissue paper in close combat several times (when Gipsy went down in Alaska and then Cherno Alpha going down in Hong Kong) but the Jaegers surviving even rougher combat whilst being several miles underwater and not suffering hull breaches until it was dramatically satisfying to do so.
A lack of an explanation for why the Jaeger programme was running down. I was expecting the Precursors* to have somehow been involved in arranging to shut it down but nope. There was just no real explanation for it.
The Jaeger programme not being started up again when the Sydney Wall collapsed. That was pretty much BS: there's no way Australia would continue to support the wall project given how it blatantly it had failed.
* Apparently the official name for the aliens who made the Jaegers.
The biggest problem and one I've seen quite a few critics raise was the curious gender imbalance in the film. Mako is the only female character of note in the entire film, versus at least seven male characters of note (the Australian pilots, Raleigh, Stacker, the two scientists and Ron Perlman). Of the secondary characters, the Russian Jaeger pilot was cool but had like two lines in the whole film. And that was it. Given the international and multi-ethnic cast, it seemed rather jarring to only have one major female character in the whole film.
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Relevant to this thread.
I enjoyed that read. Thanks for linking it!
make your own jaeger!"OH GOD THERE ARE WORDS BEHIND ME" is my favorite so far, along with the Nation Pun crew. :D
Bust a Move
RoboPopeMacho Man Randy Savage
Relevant to this thread.
awesome. Feminist critique of this movie strikes me as laughable if this article is to be believed-they really need to look At the genre overall. Even then, the article proves them wrong.
Feminist critique of this movie strikes me as laughable if this article is to be believed-they really need to look At the genre overall. Even then, the article proves them wrong.
Not sure what you mean here. That a feminist critique of the film is laughable? I think a feminist perspective is always interesting, though not always the be-all and end-all. I also think it is pretty inarguable that PACIFIC RIM has a very odd gender imbalance to it (7 major male roles to 1 major female, and only 3 speaking female roles in the whole film to more than a dozen male), though that is made up for to some extent by Mako being one of the most interesting characters in it (and, as the article points out, for transmitting so much information visually rather than through exposition dialogue).
Also, I'm not sure what the 'looking at the genre overall' means. That if the entire genre is sexist then entries into that genre shouldn't try to redress the balance? Or the genre isn't so one film having a gender imbalance doesn't matter to much?
Feminist critique of this movie strikes me as laughable if this article is to be believed-they really need to look At the genre overall. Even then, the article proves them wrong.Not sure what you mean here. That a feminist critique of the film is laughable? I think a feminist perspective is always interesting, though not always the be-all and end-all. I also think it is pretty inarguable that PACIFIC RIM has a very odd gender imbalance to it (7 major male roles to 1 major female, and only 3 speaking female roles in the whole film to more than a dozen male), though that is made up for to some extent by Mako being one of the most interesting characters in it (and, as the article points out, for transmitting so much information visually rather than through exposition dialogue).
Also, I'm not sure what the 'looking at the genre overall' means. That if the entire genre is sexist then entries into that genre shouldn't try to redress the balance? Or the genre isn't so one film having a gender imbalance doesn't matter to much?
To counter this, you also only have 3 locations really shown: 2 Military bases, a construction site, and an underworld body parts dealer. All of these are traditionally dominated by men.
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To counter this, you also only have 3 locations really shown: 2 Military bases, a construction site, and an underworld body parts dealer. All of these are traditionally dominated by men.
Are you sure? Did you do research into them? How much does a good spleen go for these days? Out of curiosity.
7 major male roles to 1 major female, and only 3 speaking female roles
I thought all the major roles were the jaegers and therefore neither male nor female lol.
but that being said I took my son and saw it this weekend and it was awesome, everything i wanted it to be and then some. I felt like a 10 year old watching voltron (my first "giant robot show" for the first time) and watching my 10 year old son react the same way with ohhs and awes. I only had two complaints and ones not really a complaint and the other is minor.
1. I wanted more jaeger on kaiju action and by more I mean in addition to the rest of the moviw and when a complaint is that I didn't want the move to end thats not really a complaint at all.
2. If you've got a cool chain sword use it from the get go...there were several other instances of this but ehh rule of cool is a thing..
Feminist critique of this movie strikes me as laughable if this article is to be believed-they really need to look At the genre overall. Even then, the article proves them wrong.Not sure what you mean here. That a feminist critique of the film is laughable? I think a feminist perspective is always interesting, though not always the be-all and end-all. I also think it is pretty inarguable that PACIFIC RIM has a very odd gender imbalance to it (7 major male roles to 1 major female, and only 3 speaking female roles in the whole film to more than a dozen male), though that is made up for to some extent by Mako being one of the most interesting characters in it (and, as the article points out, for transmitting so much information visually rather than through exposition dialogue).
Also, I'm not sure what the 'looking at the genre overall' means. That if the entire genre is sexist then entries into that genre shouldn't try to redress the balance? Or the genre isn't so one film having a gender imbalance doesn't matter to much?
the article speaks moreeloquently than I ever could.re:speaking roles and gender imbalance. Women have played a pivotal role in giant robot stuff since the sixties, although it could be argued that they didn't become pilots until the seventies/eighties. Combattler v and gunbuster are excellent examples.
True. A female Kaiju does actually pull something major off:
To counter this, you also only have 3 locations really shown: 2 Military bases, a construction site, and an underworld body parts dealer. All of these are traditionally dominated by men.
Traditionally, perhaps. But in 2025 with the human race facing extinction and it's all hands on deck? And we only see 4 Jaegers up-close and two of them have female pilots, which suggests a numerical parity not reflected in the rest of the service. There are none (that I recall) in the operations room, none among the mechanics, none amongst the scientists. The only other female characters in the whole movie are I think a couple of newscasters and a few of the people in the shelter with the scientist guy (and I recall one of the world council being female, but not if she had any lines).
I'm also not sold on the traditionally thing. Women have traditionally played a big role in the Russian military; 75,000 women fought at Stalingrad alone, for example, and maybe a million women fought in the Red Army during WWII overall, including as front-line combat troops. The experiences of the American and British armed forces (and women play major roles in both, notwithstanding not serving on the front lines) should not be taken as read for the Jaeger service, which is clearly far more international.
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I didn't buy the idea that this is a clever film.
Sure, it communicates ideas visually but it doesn't communiccate any clever, complex ideas.
I think the blogger is confusing 'well-made' or perhaps 'communicates effectively' with "clever".
This is done by setting up a straw-man of 'intellectuals focus on language therefore they say it is dumb because of the language'.
Actually, it is dumb because of what it does with the ideas and themes it has available to it.
Mind-melds.
Alien-clones-from-another-reality.
Losing-your-brother-while-sharing-his-mind...
I liked the film, I didn't care that it was simple. Not all films have to be complex and thought-provoking.
1. The film's essential message is conveyed at the start: solve problems through violence. If those damn politicians start talking about compromise and alternative solutions then they're idiots. We just need more, better violence.
2. Characters are very thin. Very. You can praise the strong Russian woman for having been shown to us through visual imagery but it is still a 2D image.
3. This is a very American film, despite being made by a Non-American, and all of this praise for international characters is a bit silly. When every nationality is reduced to the US-perspective stereotype then you're not really being internationalist. Has anyone else seen Churchill: The Hollywood Years?
It's not just the nationality of characters though: they all used American phrasing and word choices to speak and the whole style of film, structure, tone... it was all American. My guess would be that, to Americans, this just felt like a 'normal' film.
This didn't feel like a British film, or a Japanese film, or an Australian film, or a Russian film. It was a very American film.
*Mon Mothma (Lt. A. Kaidanovsky) comes in.*
Peter (Raleigh): Hey, check it out! It's another chick! The only other chick in the galaxy!
Lois (Mako): I don't like her.
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I think the blogger is confusing 'well-made' or perhaps 'communicates effectively' with "clever".
I think he was trying to say it's not clever, but it's not dumb. Not all "clever" movies are good anyway. If someone is going to this movie expecting Shakespeare, they are equally dense (in a different way).
Someone else complained that there wasn't enough time with different characters. Someone else complained there weren't enough Jaegger/Kaiju fights fights. The movie was already 2 hours long, you can't have everything and apparently you can't please everyone.
So I watched Atlantic Rim. All the horrible acting and dialogue you'd expect from an Asylum film. Low grade special effects. So basically it was at least as good as most Kaiju moves from 50's and 60's.
I found it actually interesting to imagine it as a prequel to Pacific Rim. Dealing with the first wave of Kaiju and proto-Jaegers.
Like I said, I love bad sci-fi movies.
Yeah, I'll agree that the film was fairly simple.
It was well made and the conveyance of concepts went beyond just using language to tell the story. That said, I'm not feeling a lot of subtext or multiple meanings to the story. All of the layering seems directed at the primary story line, so it's all just reinforcement of that and less obvious than the dialogue.
Mako's story doesn't tell us something wildly different from Raleigh's or Stacker's story. It's all about sacrifice and revenge.
While watching the movie, one thing did strike me as incongruent: character's who had drifted together were expressing sentiments to each other. I recognize the difficulty as a writer, you can't just have characters stare at each other knowingly, you have to explain it to the audience, but having the characters explain to each other what they should clearly already know felt like an obvious oversight.
It would have been more fitting if one of the pair had a problem with someone outside of their team, and the other stepped in to explain how they felt, or reacted in an obvious emotional response, but one that was more appropriate for their character. Like Raleigh going into a fit of anger over an insult he wasn't present for, but one that Mako is too buttoned up to express anger over. Or Mako having a fit of emotion over something that was important to Raleigh, showing how the drift infects the other person.
I enjoyed the movie. It's well shot, a lot of attention to detail. I'm also a huge fan of how they built 4 story tall sets for the jaeger cockpits. Compared to Man of Steel action sequences, I liked how it was depicted as real and dangerous for the characters. Yes it wasn't realistic, and suffered from a lot of Hollywood-emphasis on when things happened, but the fights had damage and difficulty going on through out which kept them interesting. I got bored during the Superman fights, they kept throwing each other through buildings, or hitting each other with trains, but neither side seemed affected.
I'm not a box-office-knowledgealbe person. That total seems like a good sign. Is that a good sign?
Well as someone mentioned earlier, it really needs to double its money because it also has to cover the cost of advertisement as well which isn't figured into the "production budget". It seems to be doing well internationally, even if it was a bit of a flop in the U.S. I also think it has about 12 more countries to open up in, including Japan (looks like that will be Aug. 9th).
In Canada, it's still not doing that well. Only $16 million in it's 2nd week and beaten by "The Conjuring". Ughh.
Movies aren't as well as I thought they would this summer in general.
Coyote Tango looks.a.lot like my favorite mobile suit .
I'm not a box-office-knowledgealbe person. That total seems like a good sign. Is that a good sign?
Breaking even on the production budget with still a week or two to go is certainly a good sign. By comparison, STID! was looking similarly like it was only going to scrape by with a week or two to go and eventually ended up making a tidy profit and getting a sequel greenlit. RIM looks like it's heading down the same path, especially with quite a few more countries still to go.
So at the moment it's looking like it will probably do just enough to get a similarly-budgeted sequel.
I've heard a sequel is in the works, but lack for evidence.
Capcom seems to be getting ready to make a game about it.
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Capcom seems to be getting ready to make a game about it.
Help ! We are now all officially doomed....
Guess it depends what kind of game it is.
If it's just a slugfest game in the vein of "Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters! Melee", it'll probably be great. Make the focus on beating the daylights out of other Jaegers/Kaiju and maybe make some Kaiju playable after unlocking stuff and it'll be fine.
Try to focus too much on the story though and/or limit the play to just Gipsy Danger and yeah it'll probably be meh.
A MechAssault style game would be cool too, borrowing some of the concept from Left4Dead (the asymmetrical play and switching sides/roles). Complete with destructible environments.
Just less than a week to go before it's released! Can barely wait!
XD
Carry on!
-- C.
Just less than a week to go before it's released! Can barely wait!
XD
Carry on!
-- C.
where do you live?
Also, a friend of mine picked up robotech shadow chronicles for me, watching it now. Filling me with rage, but looking at macross, southern cross and mospeada on my dvd case soothes me.
A jaeger vs kaiju fighting game ala mortal kombat would be awesome.
It's Capcom, wouldn't A la' Street Fighter (or Darkstalkers) be more approirate. :D
A jaeger vs kaiju fighting game ala mortal kombat would be awesome.
It's Capcom, wouldn't A la' Street Fighter (or Darkstalkers) be more appropriate. :D
Capcom vs Tatsunoko Pro was neat...Ryo vs Karas...
So the kidlet and I went to see it a fourth time and this time I was more able to focus on things like background details. I really enjoyed all of the ways this film used visual cues to add to the story. I think there are a lot of subtleties there that are easy to miss. I don't think that makes the film complicated. It is refreshingly straightforward throughout. It has a point and it never deviates from it. It extremely effective at communicating that point. Also, I had not realized the previous three times I watched this just how many women there were among the shatterdome crew. It's easy to miss them because they blend in. They're just doing their jobs and can be easily mistaken for men if you're not paying attention. I wouldn't have noticed it this time if I hadn't read some of the feminist critiques of the film, so I was watching to see how spot on they were. Not all that much in my opinion.
So the kidlet and I went to see it a fourth time and this time I was more able to focus on things like background details. I really enjoyed all of the ways this film used visual cues to add to the story. I think there are a lot of subtleties there that are easy to miss. I don't think that makes the film complicated. It is refreshingly straightforward throughout. It has a point and it never deviates from it. It extremely effective at communicating that point. Also, I had not realized the previous three times I watched this just how many women there were among the shatterdome crew. It's easy to miss them because they blend in. They're just doing their jobs and can be easily mistaken for men if you're not paying attention. I wouldn't have noticed it this time if I hadn't read some of the feminist critiques of the film, so I was watching to see how spot on they were. Not all that much in my opinion.
I am so proud....
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I've seen the movie twice now and loved it even more the second time. The second time I took my 10 year old niece to see it and she absolutely loved it, saying Mako was "really cool".
They really need to make more movies like this one. I'm all for morally complex stuff like the Dark Knight, but we just don't get very many "fun" summer movies anymore.
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Saw the movie, in IMAX.
Yes, the cinematography, mise en scene, and costuming were excellently put together, but yes, the dialogue, general plotting, and vague attempts at character development were entirely borrowed from every other story of this sort ever and the story was completely predictable from start to finish. (The only thing I didn't see coming a mile away was the one guy surviving at the end.) ETA: Oh, and yes, the one girl main character was a boring cliched wet blanket, IMO. Actually I didn't like any of the characters except the Marshal.
But I liked the parts where the giant mecha beat up the monsters. Which for me was the point of seeing the movie, so I totally got my money's worth and then some.
Pride.... levels..... rising!
Pride.... levels..... rising!
Why? You don't have anything to do with the movie being a fun watch.
Pride.... levels..... rising!Why? You don't have anything to do with the movie being a fun watch.
I'm just extremely happy people are actually watching the movie instead of waiting until it is on cable or dvd. It means a lot to me that the movie is supported in theatres so I can point to it and feel less alone as am American fan of giant robot genre that is NOT power rangers or a derivative.
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I would like to add since I haven't seen anyone comment on them, I thought the human fight scenese were well done too.
I would like to add since I haven't seen anyone comment on them, I thought the human fight scenese were well done too.
Yes.
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Interestingly, the noise over the long-in-development hell ROBOTECH movie has gone up quite a lot since PACIFIC RIM launched. If RIM does end up being a huge success in the additional markets it still needs to hit, it could open things up for a new range of mecha movies.
where do you live?Just less than a week to go before it's released! Can barely wait!
...
Currently, in South Africa. But previously I had lived for quite some time in Japan. And from what my friends there say, there's quite a bit of hype and anticipation for the movie's release (next week, last I was told...).
^^
Carry on!
--C.
Saw a trailer for a Captain harlock movie that looked cool.
Not quite mecha, but oldschool 'japanimation'.