Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013)

[Professor Wagstaff]

Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim.

[domino harvey]

Holy shit that looks awful-- Transformers meets Power Rangers?

[The Narrator Returns]

Maybe I'm just a populist at heart (or maybe my reaction was colored by Guillermo del Toro directing, so of course this movie is going to be great), but I think this looks awesome.

Plus, Charlie Day and Idris Elba!

[ianungstad]

Looks pretty bland. The film is going to be in 3D which will make it look even worse.

[Mr Sausage]

Holy shit that looks awful-- Transformers meets Power Rangers?

That is pretty much just Power Rangers. Kind of sad that del Toro had to trade up At the Mountains of Madness for this. At the least it should have more coherent fight scenes than the Transformers films.

[mfunk9786]

Had to? Someone forced him to make this?

[dwk]

Looks pretty bland. The film is going to be in 3D which will make it look even worse.

Even worse, it is post-converted 3D.

[YnEoS]

As someone who was a die-hard power rangers and Godzilla fan as a kid, I have to say I'm quite excited for this film. The trailer doesn't really show enough for me to completely judge it, but given that Guillermo del Toro is also a huge fan of Kaiju films and giant robot anime and how brilliant he is at creature design, I think even a mediocre film from him will be much better than any of the Transformers films.

Looks pretty bland. The film is going to be in 3D which will make it look even worse.

Even worse, it is post-converted 3D.

Though I would've preferred the film be shot in 3D to begin with, most of the elements will be CGI anyways, and they spent 40 weeks on the post-conversion which is much longer than the crappy, botched, post-converted 3D films that get dumped on theaters.

[Mr Sausage]

Had to? Someone forced him to make this?

Someone forced him to stop making At the Mountains of Madness.

[mfunk9786]

But he's still an in-demand director: He wanted to make this. It's not like he was at gunpoint. I don't think the trailer looks good either, but I'm playing the world's smallest violin for Del Toro 'having' to make this.

[Mr Sausage]

But he's still an in-demand director: He wanted to make this. It's not like he was at gunpoint. I don't think the trailer looks good either, but I'm playing the world's smallest violin for Del Toro 'having' to make this.

I didn't mean sad for del Toro, necessarily (tho' I'm sure it sucks to give up his dream project), just that its sad in general for those of us really interested in his take on the Lovecraft book. But then, this movie could turn out to be amazing and maybe del Toro is glad things turned out as they did. Hard to say.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Guillermo del Toro has a solid enough track record that I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. He brings enough love and imagination to his projects that even his films that seem stifled by studio interference or notes (Mimic, the original Hellboy) have enough positives to keep the interest alive.

[colinr0380]

Maybe I'm just a populist at heart (or maybe my reaction was colored by Guillermo del Toro directing, so of course this movie is going to be great), but I think this looks awesome.

Plus, Charlie Day and Idris Elba!

Not to mention Ron Perlman! (Of course!)

It is a shame about At The Mountains of Madness, but if anyone can make the giant monster running amok movie that the 90s Godzilla film promised but only partially delivered, it should be del Toro.

However the most nerdily exciting thing on display in that trailer has to be the voice of Ellen McLain - aka GLaDOS from the Portal series - seemingly playing the voice of another computer.

[Jeff]

Rian Johnson has seen an early cut with unfinished effects and tweeted:

Go into Pacific Rim prepared to be transmogrified into a 12 year old. And then to pee your pants with joy. I love it so much.

[matrixschmatrix]

Wow, this thread hasn't been bumped in five months? Ah, well.

Saw this tonight, and it's pretty great- though it's far more awesome than good. It has beautifully realized designs for both monsters and mecha, and a real sense of weight and scope to the colossal combat. It also has a fair amount of somewhat-dull (though not irritating or off-putting, a la Transformers) character work to get through, and wastes a lot of cool casting. It's easily the best big lumbering beast of a movie I've seen this summer, or last summer, for that matter, but it's also the kind of thing that seems as though Del Toro could get trapped in, as with Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies.

[Adam X]

It also has a fair amount of somewhat-dull (though not irritating or off-putting, a la Transformers) character work to get through, and wastes a lot of cool casting.

It's seems to've been a bit of a problem for a while now for big SPFX filled films out of Hollywood. It's as if they need to get biggish, popular actors into these films (along with some really interesting actors), in order to gather a large enough budget to make these films, but then can't afford the time required on character development. And as always any deleted footage that turns up is almost always character moments - "cut for time and/or pacing" - as, naturally, the producers aren't likely willing to see large sums of cash end up on the cutting room floor.

I'm kinda looking forward to seeing this. While I much prefer Del Toro's more personal Spanish films, he at least makes spectacle with a liitle bit of meat to it.

[Finch]

I was disappointed. If the film had managed to make you care about the human pilots in the robots, there would have been real stakes and something to invest in, but it covers the same old ground and the sacrifices made don't resonate because the characters aren't interesting. On the plus side, it does look quite impressive and it's for the most part staged with enough clarity for you to be able to follow the action (unlike those horrible Transformers movies). The scale is impressive and it does have at times a childlike sense of wonder. It also helps, that unlike Michael Bay's pieces of shit, it's not sexist, misogynist, homophobic and racist. I hope it does well so that Del Toro's more personal projects get studio funding, especially the allegedly Charlie Kaufman-penned Slaughterhouse Five adaptation and Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch. Bring on Crimson Peak, the gothic romance/ghost story that's up next.

[Luke M]

I loved it. I thought it hit all the right notes. There's a lot of comparisons to Transformers and those are valid, but to me I found it to be a 21st century "Independence Day". I don't mean that as an insult either there's something sweet about movies that show the world coming together to defeat a common enemy as opposed to simply 'Murica!

[wigwam]

Even handicapping it as a piece of Whoa Cinema this is an unbelievably stupid movie whose exposition, hollow emotional arcs and attempts at humor are painfully tedious. But it was great to see it in Imax as its scale is really impressive and there's some excellent use of color, especially the Hong Kong and skyscraper fight sequence and any time they're inside something: the command centers or pilot setups, with layers of 3D display layouts, or the alien-centric interiors. Even when it's typical blockbuster orange and teal, it's an electric orange and a neon teal and they look really great, especially against the also-typical grey-blue overall darkness of the exterior nights. I was hoping for cooler monster designs from del Toro but the aliens are big grey Predator-faced bores. Performances are basically shit, altho I was impressed w/ the little girl. Charlie Day's whole subplot is dumb, plus tonally and visually from some other movie, and when del Toro wildcardbitches us with the cameo it's just capital M Movie Moment camp and clashes with the rest, which is played mostly straight. And terrible.

[matrixschmatrix]

It's way less US-centric than Independence Day, really- in that one, the US president is one of the leads, nearly all of the major characters are American, and the scenes around the world felt like a way to cram in a few more landmarks (and ape the cooler ones in Close Encounters.) This felt pretty genuinely international, or more accurately, post-national- it felt like we were in a world in which national barriers were largely irrelevant, or at least reduced to the sort of cultural marker status that states occupy within the US.

I was actually impressed by how much the movie didn't feel orange and teal- there was a broader color palette at work in the cities, and while the underwater scenes did play towards deep blues with a bit of popping orange, it wasn't at all the hard edged clash that was at work in, say, Iron Man 2. I thought the monster designs were pretty awesome, too.

I was fine with the Charlie Day subplot, but it felt like it should have been better integrated with the movie, and we should have spent more time in the drift- the places I really felt my time was being wasted were with the straight-out-of-Top Gun plot with the angry Australian kid, and all the wheel spinning you musn't/I must stuff with Mako Mori wanting to be a pilot. There were a lot of really cool ideas in the fringes (the kaiju worshipping cult, the Jungian universal unconscious accessed in the drift, the culture that had developed in the post-apocalyptic world) but they got elbowed aside for some pretty scriptwriting 101 character arcs and conflicts. I still think it's a pretty great movie, since it does blockbuster stuff really well, but it's anchored to some of the least interesting aspects of blockbuster moviewriting.

[Cold Bishop]

I outright loved this film. Yes, it's shallow and traffics in cliches... but I don't doubt Del Toro knows this. The sincerity and earnestness that he commits to the cliche and the spectacular is infectious, a clear corrective to the focus-group cynicism that infects most other Hollywood product. Despite some common problems - an needlessly bloated running time, the inescapable CGI fatigues - this is the first summer blockbuster in years that actually feels like a summer blockbuster.

[colinr0380]

The more I hear about this the more I'm getting a Neon Genesis Evangelion vibe from it, with the fusing of man and fighting machine together! Is there a very heavily allegorical Judeo-Christian element to the monsters in Pacific Rim (/"Angels" in Evangelion), because that would solidify the connection!

EDIT: Ah, I see the connection hasn't been missed!

SECOND EDIT: Here's a great primer to the original series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I would strongly disagree with the dismissal of the final audacious episodes of the series as purely down to lack of funds! That might play into it (as the later theatrical films that re-do the ending providing the action climax that fans expected might suggest), but you don't get many giant mech animes that finish with a string of episodes that involve the main character dissolving into a primordial mush, leaving behind only his flight suit inside the mech, and which then spends the remaining time on a deconstruction of the medium of animation itself to explore the psychology of the main character and all of the characters surrounding him!

[willoneill]

Fun movie, but apparently the physics are bullshit.

[knives]

Well, duh. There's no way the premise holds any water but looking at a kaiju film for science is like looking for a happy black guy at a klan rally.

[matrixschmatrix]

Del Toro actually had a magic wand for that, as I recall- the extradimensional kaiju come from a place where physics operate differently, and carry that with them, which is why kaiju excreta and so forth are so especially valuable and near-magical. Though that doesn't explain the physics of the jaegers.