Pacific Rim. Giant monsters, Robots, and GLaDOS.

Soooo in this universe repurposed anti-ship missiles won't work but using a freighter as a baseball bat to beat the monster up side the face will?

Who am I kidding. This is probably the only movie I am excited for this year.
 
Soooo in this universe repurposed anti-ship missiles won't work but using a freighter as a baseball bat to beat the monster up side the face will?

Who am I kidding. This is probably the only movie I am excited for this year.

Any universe where crazy mechs are required to win is a universe I want to live in.
 
My inner child has such a raging hard-on for this movie.
 
Soooo in this universe repurposed anti-ship missiles won't work but using a freighter as a baseball bat to beat the monster up side the face will?

Who am I kidding. This is probably the only movie I am excited for this year.

Crazy portal monsters can knock down anti-ship missiles with their crazy green EMP stuff?

Who the fuck cares oil tanker baseball bat FTW.

God july 12th man that is a long way off.
 
A little more on the backstory leading up to the film

How did these giant monsters get on Earth?

Through a portal. The whole backstory (which is lightly touched upon in the trailers) centers on a mysterious portal that opens up in the Pacific Ocean in the year 2013. Pacific Rim is set 12 years in the future, after most of humanity has banded together to try and figure out a way to fight the swarms of monsters that are popping out of this portal. Thus creating the 250-foot to 280-foot-tall Jaegar robots.

So why set the film 12 years after the monsters arrive?

Guillermo del Toro explains:

GDT: "The part that I was interested in was the part where things are hard. I cannot tell you how much I didn't want to make it a war movie. I wanted to make an adventure movie. I wanted to contrast the moment when it was going well but you were deep into it. If you start with the origin [of the problem], then you have to go with investigative characters, which are hard for me to relate to. Like a reporter, or military forensics. If it doesn't come from a point of view that I can relate to. For me it has to be a character that has something against him or her, from the get-go. A character that starts already oppressed or down on his/her luck, for me to be interested in them."

Will this be the typical Guillermo del Toro "sympathetic monster" movie?

NO! Guillermo GETS Kaiju. There won't be a small boy cuddling the fallen giant face of a monster ? Kaijus are Kaijus, and they **** **** up. Just take it from del Toro himself:

GDT: "I have used monsters in a identifiable, sympathetic ways, and the Kaiju are like an earthquake, or a tornado, or a hurricane...a force of nature. They are essentially blind to any moral or ethical circumstances, their path is their path. If there's a city or a highway, they just move. That is a big difference."


How many Kaijus are we going to see stomping around our cities?

The audience will witness about eight to 10 monsters in battle. But they will also see Kaiju carcasses, and a closer look at Kaiju brains and intestines and skulls. There are A LOT of monsters, and when the Jaegers win, the body of the Kaiju falls where it died. Leaving a giant rotting carcass. The future humans have found away to make these dead things work. We even saw a bit of concept art where the skeletal remains of a Kaiju had been turned into a church, worshiping the monsters. No clue if that art made it into the movie, but it stuck with us.

Why is Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny in this movie?

We were shocked (but also stoked) that Charlie Day was cast as Newt, the obligatory monster science guy. Why was he cast? Because GDT is a HUGE It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan.

GDT: "I'm a huge fan of Philadelphia, and I'm a huge fan of Charlie without thinking of anything. One day in one of the episodes of Philadelphia, he has a monologue about rats. He comes out with a stick, and he has a monologue about what it is to hunt a rat in the basement, and he was very funny, but coming from character. He was really mourning and lamenting job, how inhuman it is, and I thought this guy is really great at shading, and is great at comedy, and there are moments in the movie where he delivers them both. I'm extremely happy with that. I didn't know any movies he had done, I had only followed Philadelphia from the beginning until now. I'm addicted to that show."
 
But they will also see Kaiju carcasses, and a closer look at Kaiju brains and intestines and skulls. There are A LOT of monsters, and when the Jaegers win, the body of the Kaiju falls where it died. Leaving a giant rotting carcass.

I say bust out the chainsaws and light some fires, BIG ASS FUCKING ALIEN BBQ TIME BABY!
 
I was going to go to the midnight screening tonight, but they sold out, so I'll be going in the morning. I feel like it's xmas eve and I can't wait to get my presents come sunrise.
 
I just got back from seeing it, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT DID I HAVE A GOOD TIME! It's full of cliches and a few moments that make you go "wait, what?", but it's FAR superior to the mindless drivel of shit like Transformers, I was smiling ear to ear for almost 2 straight hours. This movie deserves to make a billion dollars, but I'm sure it won't and we'll never see another one as a result, so go see it now while you can.

Also, when the credits start to roll, just sit tight for a few minutes, trust me.
 
I completely agree, I loved it too.
What sets it apart from similar movies to me is how it isn't made with a hint of an attitude of cynicism, instead it's clear everyone involved truly loves Mecha and Kaiju and just wants to make a cool movie with them both. Even the more overacted, sterotypical characters worked perfectly to me because it felt like a cartoon only in the best way possible. The designs of both the Jaegers and Kaiju are all superb and the fights are just incredible.

Honestly, it did take me back more to memories of wonder watching old Star Wars or Jurassic Park far more than anything like Evangelion, Patlabor or even Godzilla like I was perhaps expecting. I think that's a great thing to have back in todays cinema.

Also, when the credits start to roll, just sit tight for a few minutes, trust me.

:mrgreen:
 
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Just returned from seeing it. Yes it was fun and for the most part it rocked.

Idris Elba is the man, pure man.

Rest of the characters were just archetypes that filled their role fine, and this wasn't the type of story that needed deep character development.

Del Toro's love of mecha anime, kaiju movies really shines in ways that hardcore fans will recognize. Big elements screamed Gunbuster and Evangelion along and fans of both shows will know what I'm talking about.


Midway thru the movie, I think I figured out why Del Toro created the whole 'Two Pilot' concept for operating the Jaegers, and I'm not talking about the technical 'in-universe' explanation but why GDT wrote it that way.

If you think about it, it's clear he wants Mako (the Japanese girl) to be the main character of this story and root more of the setting in her past and her rise to growing up as a young woman, she's basically Noriko from Gunbuster (who had a similar tragic past and raised by a substitute father figure type, Coach). And I can tell if GDT had full carte blanche with no Hollywood interference, she would be the main character and be piloting the hero mecha solo.

But obviously there is no way an Asian female is going to be the main hero in a Hollywood production of this story, hence 'Chris Hemsworth' lite was cast as the more familiar audience indentifier for American audiences, but to give her enough spotlight, she's made as 'co-hero' and thus the 'two pilot' concept was born. Then insert in-story technobabble to explain the need for this.
 
The "two pilot" thing was for drama reasons, the writers admit as much in the "Year Zero" comics. Also Del Toro has admitted to have never seeing Evangelion (neither have I, well I saw one episode and had no interest, but then I could care less about Anime).
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I just saw it, and it lived up to my expectations. I grew up with my mom showing me old Godzilla and Gamera movies and this movie did them right. :) Before the movie I was humming the theme of Megas XLR through all the trailers.
My only complaint was that the theater I saw it in was not even half full.
 
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The "two pilot" thing was for drama reasons, the writers admit as much in the "Year Zero" comics. Also Del Toro has admitted to have never seeing Evangelion (neither have I, well I saw one episode and had no interest, but then I could care less about Anime).

It's not an problem not having seen Evangelion. That show came out in the early-mid 90s and itself was heavily influenced by earlier real robot shows like Gundam and earlier Super Robot shows like Mazinger, shows which GDT has seen. Also Eva did a lot of direct homages to the old Kaiju films themselves in story material and cinematic style, so the resemblance to Eva was inevitable.
 
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