PriorMarcus posted:

How do they judge what category a Kaiju is? The moment when the end game boss comes out of the portal and before it's even show the announcer declares it a Level V boss was ridiculous.

Pacific Rim Wiki posted:

Each Kaiju is classified under five different categories. Categories 1 through 2 represent the weakest of the Kaiju, while Categories 3 through 5 are the strongest. The Serizawa Scale measures water displacement, toxicity and ambient radiation levels given off by their bodies when they pass through the breach.

dreffen posted:

Something about how the portal opens in diameter or something?

PaganGoatPants posted:

They have sensors around the portal, explained it in the book.

Captain Invictus posted:

Also, the final Kaiju, Slattern, measured 600 feet in length. That's over twice the size of the jaegers.

Captain Invictus posted:

Well, the databook says Slattern is 600 feet in height, so if that's true, then in length it would easily surpass the size of an aircraft carrier.

I seem to recall it towering over Striker Eureka in the final battle, too, so that's probably right.

TheWorldIsSquare posted:

Also I don't get why they focused on all those foreign jaegers in the advertising when they literally did nothing in the actual movie. Should have just had Gypsy Danger, and then had more added on in a sequel (albeit I'm starting to doubt this movie is actually going to get a sequel. I've seen no one as quick to call "bomb" as with movies like the Lone Ranger but the numbers don't look promising. Guess it hasn't come out in Japan yet?)

teagone posted:

Cherno Alpha (a Mark I jaeger mind you) and Crimson Typhoon were pitted against Category IV kaijus that were built specifically to destroy cities and fight jaegers (Leatherback's organic EMP and Otachi's metal melting vomit weren't seen from any kajuis that predated them). The film takes place in medias res, during the waning days of piloting giant robots; it makes sense that both Cherno and Crimson got their asses kicked.

teagone posted:

Also, this film is doing just fine. We'll get our sequel.

Scyantific posted:

I doubt GDT gives a gently caress about the domestic market. It's going to hit big in Japan, and that's where the money is going to roll in.

Any word on the Russian front?

Milky Moor posted:

Out of all the foreign markets, it seems to have made the most in Russia. As of BOM 7/28/13 it's made $19,350,611 from Russia. That's three times what it made in Australia.

TheWorldIsSquare posted:

I mean okay but they still didn't do anything. It's justified story wise but c'mon.

Jet Jaguar posted:

I was at a party tonight and talked to three or four people who wanted to see the movie but haven't been able to yet.

Was starting to worry that repeat viewing audience wouldn't be enough, but I think there's a huge market that is untapped at the moment. Could be a sleeper hit on DVD, maybe? I know I've debated about buying a 3D TV just to watch it on 3D Blu-Ray.

RBX posted:

They already took it out most theaters around me, I'm thinking the DVD will be huge. I still feel like a lot of this is being mishandled.

Captain Invictus posted:

You're right. They shouldn't focus on advertising the Chinese and Russian Jaegers, two ridiculously huge markets they are hoping to make a large portion of their income from. They should just give up on advertising. Why bother?

Supposedly there was more for both groups but it got cut.

I said come in! posted:

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

If you want a pucture of the future, imagine a fist punching an inhuman face - forever.

Milky Moor posted:

Out of all the foreign markets, it seems to have made the most in Russia. As of BOM 7/28/13 it's made $19,350,611 from Russia. That's three times what it made in Australia.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

If you want a pucture of the future, imagine a fist punching an inhuman face - forever.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Acid Spit:

"While the Real, by definition, cannot be directly represented, it can nonetheless be alluded to in certain figurative embodiments of horror-excess. In Zizek's famous example, it is alluded to in the monster from Scott's film, Alien, whose blood literally dissolves the fabric of reality. And just as the unity of the protagonists in this film is constituted against the threat of the Alien, so reality itself is always constructed as an attempt to establish a basic consistency against the disintegrative effects of the Real. Just as being may be understood as being-towards-madness, reality is always reality-towards-the-Real. Every form of (symbolic-imaginary) reality exists as an impossible attempt to escape the various manifestations of the Real that threatens disintegration of one kind or another: trauma, loss, anxiety and so on."(link)

The specific image of the skyscraper being melted with acid spit, exposing the girders, is the same image of 'the city unborn' in "X": The Man With The X-Ray Eyes: "I see the city as if it were unborn … Limbs without flesh, girders without stone, signs hanging without supports, wires dipping and swaying without poles … flesh dissolved in an acid of light: a city of the dead"

Now, unless Del Toro is impossibly oblivious for a film director, he knows that the hyperreal CGI aesthetic of the film is not opposed to the imagery of monstrous abjection. These are different representations of the same Real - the 'imaginary Real' of pulsating ick, and the 'symbolic Real' of pure mathematical formula. This is obviously deliberately represented by the two competing scientists: Newton with his piles of organs and Gottlieb with his holograms. And the precursors are again a mirror: their genetic manipulations represent the endgame of these scientists' research.

"Instruments of “literal transparency” are the main components in the search to produce a ghostlike (or computer-game like) military fantasy-world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean." (link)

It's this fantasy-world that is seen in the tactics of Otachi, invisible from the air as she wades through skyscrapers - as in Aliens: "they're coming out of the god drat walls!" Del Toro lingers on the moment where she bursts through the mirrored surface. Far from being a uniquely monstrous quality, the jaeger-pilot-pilot amalgam also perceives the world (and its selves) as a ghostlike hologram of gamespace. Everything in the film is literally CGI. Again, the aliens (with their sensors) represent the Skynet future of humanity.

"Connor describes how the very idea of X-ray vision has historically induced anxiety and terror because ‘the problem with X-rays is that, for the most part, what they like best is to go through things, and to go on going through things unless or until they meet something, like lead, that absorbs or scatters them’. To demonstrate, he identifies X as a ‘dystopia’ in which ‘every last pocket of opacity has been seared away, leaving a vitreous desert of universal transparency’, and he aligns the film with Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, with its preoccupation with depthlessness and the fatal blurring of private and public realms: ‘In a world in which everything must be made visible, and in which “value radiates in all directions”, the transparency of evil is indistinguishable from the evil of transparency’.

In this account, seeing everything, a process to which we willingly succumb via commodity fetishism, is the tool of an oppressive, autonomous system that exposes us to its inner workings: the truth that is revealed may not be a truth we are ontologically equipped to handle, with its inescapable highlighting of the fact that our free will has been stripped to the bone, and that this outcome has been smuggled in via our own collusion." (link)

This is a vision of the whole totalizing system, the total objectification of a person so that you don't see a face but the mass of tissue underneath. And it's theoretically against this outcome that Stacker forms his resistance. But:

"The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left" (link)

Again, it's the observation that Stacker merely seeks to kill Bin Laden, as it were. He is not prepared to fight the system that produces Bin Ladens. His resistance is the creation of a little island, off to the side, from which they can pretend that they are free of the 'suits' - forgetting that the powerful still control both universes.

Yvonmukluk posted:

Yes, yes, you're so much smarter than me (and anyone else who likes the robots punching Kaijus) for overthinking this movie, whatever. I respect your opinion, but I don't think you're actually going to convince anyone by being all with Orwell quotes.

boxofficemojo posted:

Pacific Rim was always expected to do great business in Asia, but few expected it to do this well: the movie opened to an incredible $45.2 million in its first five days in China, which is Warner Bros. biggest opening ever. Overall, the movie took in $53 million this weekend, and its overseas total is now just over $200 million. With Spain, Brazil and (most notably) Japan opening Friday, Pacific Rim should have no problem getting to $300 million by the end of its run.

El Chingon posted:

I guess this is great news and a sequel is more likely now

Maxwell Lord posted:

Did this movie's opening weekend in China bring in more than its opening weekend in America?

Sign of the times maybe, but also whoever was in charge of the US release REALLY dropped the ball.

Raserys posted:

Pacific Rim - There Will Be Nazi Penis

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Pacific Rim's fascism is its most amusing quality - way funnier than any mere fist movement. Enjoy it!

George Orwell posted:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.