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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Because that's what the film does? As does SMG anyway, for whom the Kaiju are the exploited poor and the aliens are ... uh ... "liberal mole-men."
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Aug 9, 2013 19:29
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Bonaventure posted:As does SMG anyway, for whom the Kaiju are the exploited poor and the aliens are ... uh ... "liberal mole-men." Exactly, yes. People are not paying attention to the analogy made between the human and alien technology and social structure. The jaegers are connected to their pilots, and the pilots are connected to the base via radio. Likewise, the kaiju's bodies are controlled by their brains, and the brains are connected to the base via psychic transmissions. These lines are blurred, but exist. The kaiju need brains for the exact same reason the jaegers need pilots: latency. If the precursors had a perfect connection, the kaiju wouldn't need brains at all.
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Aug 9, 2013 19:46
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What about the imagery where the kaiju are basically bullets on an ammunition belt, waiting to be fired at Earth? "Gypsy Danger sighs as it draws it's Hanzo Steel..." and Otachi was basically a bullet that fires bullets.
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Aug 9, 2013 20:07
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The Kaiju doomsday cultists are more important than an initial reading would suggest. As soon as humanity starts making progress, they claim victory and slam the brakes on revolutionary change as much as possible to ensure personal and dynastic success. In doing so humans lost the reverence and respect for the creatures that initially allowed them so much success. That lurch of collective action did the otherwise impossible to fight the Kaiju, but absolutely nothing to address the root causes of the invasion. Newt is a toy collector that mind melds briefly with the manufacturers of his cultural icons and is shaken to the very core of his being. In order to confront that horrible vision though, it takes help from a friend with a very different way of analyzing the problem. Don't act like del Toro is subtle. He's screaming at you with bright primary colors and rocket punches. Not unlike the milieu of kaiju and mecha media that so heavily inspire the film. The cultists have reverence for the creatures and try to understand them as myth and legend. Chau doesn't tell Newton that he hid in a public shelter before, although that is being communicated too. Chau drifted with the precursors too, but he did it without help. Thus being an unabashed criminal scumbag who's been denying the world defense force or whatever the chance to learn about the Kaiju. He doesn't see a way to cancel the apocalypse, so he decides to live like a king and party till the end. Maarak fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 20:20
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Wade Wilson posted:What about the imagery where the kaiju are basically bullets on an ammunition belt, waiting to be fired at Earth? That's an indirect reference to Giger's 'Birth Machine' images - which feature human infants as the bullet-monsters. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 20:41
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Verloc posted:Yeah, Stacker drove Coyote Tango, which was a Mk1. I think he was referring to Raleigh as the other pilot who sucessfully soloed in a jaeger though, not Max.  I got my film-protagonist-names mixed up since its been a while. Thanks for catching that!
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Aug 9, 2013 20:43
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Maarak posted:The cultists have reverence for the creatures and try to understand them as myth and legend. Chau doesn't tell Newton that he hid in a public shelter before, although that is being communicated too. Chau drifted with the precursors too, but he did it without help. Thus being an unabashed criminal scumbag who's been denying the world defense force or whatever the chance to learn about the Kaiju. He doesn't see a way to cancel the apocalypse, so he decides to live like a king and party till the end. Where do people keep getting this 'Chau drifted with a Kaiju' from?. His eye's clearly hosed up because someone went for him with a knife, hence the scar that directly goes across his eye. His dialogue about it is (roughly), 'I'm going to ride [the Kaiju attack] out in my private bunker. You're going to a public shelter. I tried that once. (shows eye) once'. The conversation has clearly moved on from the whole 'drifting with a Kaiju' topic at that point. Hell, he specifically said nobody had ever been dumb enough to drift with one before. He figured it out because he clearly knows *something* about how the drift works, since I guess that would be fairly public knowledge due to the Jaeger program's celebrity, and we saw in the prologue that a hosed up eye is something of a common byproduct of that. When Newt mentions the hive mentality, he just puts two and two together.
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Aug 9, 2013 20:46
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Yvonmukluk posted:Where do people keep getting this 'Chau drifted with a Kaiju' from?. His eye's clearly hosed up because someone went for him with a knife, hence the scar that directly goes across his eye. You're right. There is, however, an eye violence theme that connects Hannibal to Newton. People have confused this for a plot point ("maybe he drifted too?!"), when it's actually just symbolism. As you know, Hannibal got his eye injury while stuck underground in a public shelter, forced to mingle with the (literally) lower classes. Day received his the ruptured blood vessels in his eye, meanwhile, in his attempt to communicate with the lower-class kaiju. Anyone who's seen Valhalla Rising knows that being blind in one eye is symbolic - not of blindness but of wisdom. A one-eyed character straddles two worlds: the everyday world, and the world from Event Horizon where 'we don't need eyes to see.' The sacrifice of an eye allows a character to gaze into the void. (Similar eye violence imagery is found throughout The Avengers, along with related imagery of prosthetic eye augmentation). Odin cut out his eye and tossed it into Mimir's well in order to drink its knowledge. The well, obviously, has similar connotations to the undersea/subterranean underworld of the aliens. In other words, Hannibal experienced total destitution and couldn't handle it, which led to his ruthless exploitation of the kaiju so that he could create a private safehouse for himself. Oh and hey: what happens when Leatherback curiously pokes the disabled jaeger? Yep, she gets shot in the eye with a flare. Flare imagery is common in kaiju films, like Varan The Unbelievable and Gamera, Guardian of the Universe. In those films, there's a poetic moment where the monster is entranced by the lights and distracted long enough to be injured or killed. In Pacific Rim, the kaiju is bluntly shot in the face. The flare is almost-directly shoved into her eye. Leatherback isn't just half-blind though, but has a symbolic, glowing 'third eye' on her forehead. We've established that the blue glow represents a tender part, usually a sensory organ. She clearly already has some kind of extravisual (spiritual?) perception. Speaking of losing an eye and seeing into the underworld, Gipsy Danger gets half its visor ripped off when Hero Guy's brother is killed, and Hero Guy spends the rest of the film knowing how it feels to die. This all ties back to my previous post(s) on enhanced vision, politics, and the Real. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 21:39
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Leatherback isn't just half-blind though, but has a symbolic, glowing 'third eye' on her forehead. We've established that the blue glow represents a tender part, usually a sensory organ. She clearly already has some kind of extravisual (spiritual?) perception. Given Leatherback's other niche-filling platform augmentation, I figure it's for sensing EMF like a shark's Ampullae of Lorenzini.
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Aug 9, 2013 21:58
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Fight Club Sandwich posted:What's the deal with the shoes Something about holding her heart in her hand.
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Aug 9, 2013 22:27
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Dr Tran posted:Something about holding her heart in her hand. Also, pairs of things and the gain or loss of part of that pair are a recurrent motif. Mako and Hannibal Chau's shoes, but also obviously Raleigh and Yancy, Raleigh and Mako, Newt and Gottlieb. Completing a set, and the existential toll of not having a completed set, are a real "thing" in this movie.
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Aug 9, 2013 22:33
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 I didn't realize until now, Cherno does have a head, it's just placed where its sternum is
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Aug 9, 2013 23:47
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Steve Yun posted:
The "head" is a tank for its flame thrower and a target distraction for the kaiju.
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Aug 9, 2013 23:51
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euphronius posted:Responding positively to fascist themes does not mean you politically support the Third Reich. The cultural aspects of fascism (and also the political ones) are hugely popular with humans. It is not a big deal. The problem is that the "cultural aspects of fascism" existed well before fascism itself did- it co-opted popular cultural aspects in order to sell itself. When we talk about narratives with heroic individuals and battles against unambiguously-bad evil forces as "fascist", we're permitting fascism to continue its co-option of valid story elements.
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Aug 10, 2013 00:38
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Maxwell Lord posted:The problem is that the "cultural aspects of fascism" existed well before fascism itself did- it co-opted popular cultural aspects in order to sell itself. When we talk about narratives with heroic individuals and battles against unambiguously-bad evil forces as "fascist", we're permitting fascism to continue its co-option of valid story elements. The problem is not that the badguys are unambiguously bad. The problem is the choice of badguys and the nature of the response,
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Aug 10, 2013 01:05
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 But how does it tweet with such giant claws?!
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Aug 10, 2013 01:34
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The problem is not that the badguys are unambiguously bad. The problem is the choice of badguys and the nature of the response, But this is why I can't sign on with political criticism- it's not about the craft of filmmaking (or other storytelling) at all, but "are the bad guys bourgeois? ()Yes ()No". It's so limiting, as much as when Randian Objectivists insist the only good story is when upstanding venture capitalists triumph against poor people and government workers.
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Aug 10, 2013 01:35
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Maxwell Lord posted:But this is why I can't sign on with political criticism- it's not about the craft of filmmaking (or other storytelling) at all, but "are the bad guys bourgeois? ()Yes ()No". It's so limiting, as much as when Randian Objectivists insist the only good story is when upstanding venture capitalists triumph against poor people and government workers. Determining what a film means is related to, but not the same thing as, making a value judgement. If there's a film made by Karl Marx himself called 'Communism Is Rad!' and it's incoherent for whatever reason, the result is an implicitly anti-communist film. In other words, a Marxist film is not necessarily good, but a good film is inherently Marxist. 300 is an example of a film with a fascist aesthetic and fascist heroes, and yet has good politics just because it expresses this stuff clearly, coherently, and with nuance. It has a texture I can hold on to. It's conducive to being read as satire. Pacific Rim is a film about empathy in which I don't care about anyone, and a film about the apocalypse where we do not actually see any apocalyptic destruction. In fact, the heroes are working to prevent the citywide/worldwide destruction we paid to see! The action scenes are dark and murky, and the bulk of it is over-edited - except for banal relationship things that aren't nearly edited enough. Bad exposition crudely paves over the gaps, as in the opening montage. It's not a very good superhero movie compared to Man Of Steel. And despite the presence of Godzillas, a superhero movie is exactly what it is. Could Gipsy Danger beat Batman in fight? Of course not. Gipsy Danger is not a good superhero.
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Aug 10, 2013 02:15
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Jefferoo posted:
Is it out in Japan finally?
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Aug 10, 2013 02:45
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Gipsy Danger is not Batman- it's the Megazord. This is sentai/tokusatsu which focuses on teamwork (and if you don't care about anyone, well, I did) and cooperation between diverse peoples. It's also a cry against the apocalyptic despair of modern genre cinema- the most quoted line is about cancelling the apocalypse. The monsters aren't immigrants, they're the personification of our pessimism and nihilism as a culture. And it's odd that you praise Man of Steel, which is a much more dour and joyless film which gives even less reason to care about any of the characters since all they seem to do is stare distrustfully at each other.
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Aug 10, 2013 05:04
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Maxwell Lord posted:Gipsy Danger is not Batman- it's the Megazord. This is sentai/tokusatsu which focuses on teamwork (and if you don't care about anyone, well, I did) and cooperation between diverse peoples. It's also a cry against the apocalyptic despair of modern genre cinema- the most quoted line is about cancelling the apocalypse. The monsters aren't immigrants, they're the personification of our pessimism and nihilism as a culture. You get this line a lot, where a film is sincere and positive - and therefore is a 'refreshing' alternative to dour, grim movies like the loving megapopular blockbuster Superman film in which Russel Crowe flies around on a dinosaur. It's total bullshit, and I'm sure you know it. Which despair-centric films are you even referring to? Superman was tossing nihilism back into space back in Superman Returns. And of course the Power Rangers are superheros.
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Aug 10, 2013 05:35
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Jefferoo posted:
Voice control.
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Aug 10, 2013 09:24
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Jefferoo posted:
A neural interface, obviously.
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Aug 10, 2013 09:36
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You get this line a lot, where a film is sincere and positive - and therefore is a 'refreshing' alternative to dour, grim movies like the loving megapopular blockbuster Superman film in which Russel Crowe flies around on a dinosaur. It's total bullshit, and I'm sure you know it. You've noticed how common apocalypse themes are in media right? Both apocalypse in progress scenarios (This Is The End, World's End, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World, the various zombie apocalypses) and post-apocalypse (Hunger Games, Revolution, etc.)- it's not new but it's reached a fever pitch. Yeah, Russel Crowe flies around on a dinosaur in Man of Steel, but the tone of that entire sequence is basically out of Lynch's Dune (but without the spiritualism that earns the sense of the majestic). With the exception of a couple of scenes, the film is downright humorless. You've got Amy Adams, an actress equally gifted in comedy and drama, as Lois Lane, tenacious and oft-snarky reporter, and she spends most of the film looking concerned and delivering exposition. The Daily Planet is primarily a place where people scowl at each other. Perry White's first couple of scenes are him telling Lois NOT to report on things. Lois and Superman's first meeting is him field-dressing her wounds. And the movie is, to an extent, about Superman failing- he's ultimately forced to violate his classic moral code and take a life. Zod says "This only ends when one of us dies" and he's proven right. Superman Returns actually managed a decent balance between darkness and light, but since it didn't make a lot of money Warner Bros. reflexively said the next movie should be "Darker and grittier!" because The Dark Knight was a hit, so we get the Superman movie where the focus is on Metropolitans buried under rubble. And now they're bringing Frank Miller in on the sequel. You only need to stop over to the D&D board to see that the major tenor of political conversation is "We are loving doomed". It's not without cause- a lot of bad poo poo is happening and there are no obvious solutions. But there needs to be someone saying "No, we're going to make it through this." Pacific Rim is partly about monsters destroying poo poo and robots fighting them, but it's also about the world that's sprung up, life going on in the meantime, and people developing new social bonds with each other. There's a reason the fans in the thread love things like the Russian couple and their house music, or that damned bulldog- in the midst of war and turmoil del Toro reminds us of the little things.
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Aug 10, 2013 15:23
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With regards to the political aspects of the movie and the apocalypse, to me it still seems that the problem is again in the nature of the response as talked about. The Jaeger program and celebrity status pilots etc actually actively contributed to the impending apocalypse, it's not enough to say "No, we're going to make it through this." without exploring the hows and whys and this sort of comes back to Starship Troopers. quote:No. Something given has no basis in value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived. e:To explore something at least a little more with regards to Newt, granted some of this is pure speculation as the creative process is very chaotic and can change day to day until finalised. Someone posted a while back an interview where GDT talked about Newt being a possible villain in a sequel(could be wrong on this and its likely subject to change anyway) but to me Newt is already a villain, his arc may not be complete because he simply hasn't learned how the masters subjugate the Kaiju which to me seems to be the natural conclusion of his research based upon his character. Again more Starship Troopers but he just seems very simliar to Carl. brawleh fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 16:57
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Didn't see these posted, so I'm gonna go ahead and crosspost them from another forum I visit:        
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Aug 10, 2013 17:41
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Xenomrph posted:Didn't see these posted, so I'm gonna go ahead and crosspost them from another forum I visit: These are absolutely amazing. I might need to start drinking again.
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Aug 10, 2013 17:59
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Maxwell Lord posted:Superman Returns actually managed a decent balance between darkness and light, but since it didn't make a lot of money Warner Bros. reflexively said the next movie should be "Darker and grittier!" because The Dark Knight was a hit, so we get the Superman movie where the focus is on Metropolitans buried under rubble. And now they're bringing Frank Miller in on the sequel. As George Lucas teaches us, "bringing balance to the force" is not in finding harmony, but in violently restructuring society. Superman in Man Of Steel achieves this, while the jaegers achieve only harmony. They're a candy-coloured failure - and how light is that?
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Aug 10, 2013 18:00
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:As George Lucas teaches us, "bringing balance to the force" is not in finding harmony, but in violently restructuring society. Pretty sure that all George Lucas taught us with those films is he needs people around to tell him "No, George. That's a bad idea". Xenomrph posted:Didn't see these posted, so I'm gonna go ahead and crosspost them from another forum I visit: Man, I might have to make that Coyote Tango punch one of these days, that sounds really good.
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Aug 10, 2013 18:24
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Pretty sure that all George Lucas taught us with those films is he needs people around to tell him "No, George. That's a bad idea". What kind of people? Fans? You?
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Aug 10, 2013 18:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:As George Lucas teaches us, "bringing balance to the force" is not in finding harmony, but in violently restructuring society. Ah, but to quote Lucas, that's true from a certain point of view. No restructuring can work without compassion. Otherwise the new lot are just another set of oppressors. (See: human history)
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Aug 10, 2013 18:32
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The compassion of the jaegers is inadequate. They love only their families.
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Aug 10, 2013 18:34
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:What kind of people? Anyone. Unrestricted creative freedom can often go awry. If you don't have anyone to honestly tell you what doesn't work, and just CGI your way through everything, you can get a lot of bloated, awful crap. Lucas had a lot of editors back in the day, who changed a lot of things from his original vision. You take that away, you get things like the prequels.
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Aug 10, 2013 18:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:Ah, but to quote Lucas, that's true from a certain point of view. "Recall how Che Guevara conceived revolutionary violence as a "work of love": "Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality." Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ's scandalous words from Luke ("if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes even his own life - he cannot be my disciple"(Luke 14:26)) which point in exactly the same direction as another Che's famous quote? "You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring." This Christian stance is the very opposite of the Oriental attitude of non-violence which - as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors - can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence "really" aims at establishing a non-violent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence - it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates. Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance." Link
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Aug 10, 2013 19:13
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Xenomrph posted:Didn't see these posted, so I'm gonna go ahead and crosspost them from another forum I visit: Right click -> save as -> GET CRUNK Seriously, great mixes and they all fit theier (fascist patriarchal capitalistic) themes perfectly.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:27
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Anyone. Unrestricted creative freedom can often go awry. If you don't have anyone to honestly tell you what doesn't work, and just CGI your way through everything, you can get a lot of bloated, awful crap. Lucas had a lot of editors back in the day, who changed a lot of things from his original vision. You take that away, you get things like the prequels. We can't really speak to the nature of the project with regards to Lucas, the prequels and unrestricted creative freedom. This was sort of touched on earlier when people were dismissing elements/scenes in the movie because it didn't fit the 'tone' as they saw it, I'm guessing this is in line with the RedLetterMedia reviews and that line of reasoning etc, the problem with that is you're no longer trying to engage with the movie in a sense but the idea of what the movie should have been. One of the criticisms that stuck out as really off to me with regards those movies and RLMs videos was the idea that the seat of galactic power should have had signs of ongoing war, buildings in ruin, less than idealise looking futuristic planet and so on(I could be misremembering their point) it should have evoked in their opinion images of a ruined Europe from WWII. This criticism just seems way off base when considering these movies, again to me, distance between both sets of films and the time they were made etc. In the second and third prequel we have an opening that is a terrorist attack on this planet, the second much larger than the first, the image of the rest of the planet untouched when thought about in a more modern political context(can also work with WWII) means that they are America to me, yes sometimes the war spills over into their world but the fighting always happens far far away. This distance is shown, the effects of the conflict doesn't ever really destroy the pristine surface of this planet, that also seems to have a Blade Runner-esq slums, it's what allows the Empire to come about and why it gains more traction as a desired political course of action. brawleh fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 19:28
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McSpanky posted:Seriously, great mixes and they all fit theier (fascist patriarchal capitalistic) themes perfectly. This response is totally alien to me. What it conveys is "how can I be anti-feminist? I don't believe in anything."
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Aug 10, 2013 19:39
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Danger posted:Very true, however unconditional love and compassion are the very basis of authentic revolutionary violence: Guevara is probably not the one you want to cite on this.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:42
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brawleh posted:We can't really speak to the nature of the project with regards to Lucas, the prequels and unrestricted creative freedom. This was sort of touched on earlier when people were dismissing elements/scenes in the movie because it didn't fit the 'tone' as they saw it, I'm guessing this is in line with the RedLetterMedia reviews and that line of reasoning etc, the problem with that is you're no longer trying to engage with the movie in a sense but the idea of what the movie should have been. One of the criticisms that stuck out as really off to me with regards those movies and RLMs videos was the idea that the seat of galactic power should have had signs of ongoing war, buildings in ruin, less than idealise looking futuristic planet and so on(I could be misremembering their point) it should have evoked in their opinion images of a ruined Europe from WWII. I mean in the sense of some very basic decisions, like filming basically the entire thing on a greenscreen, the stilted dialogue, the way the actors were directed, the whole thing just came off like there was no one to take a step back and evaluate what they were doing and most of all how they were doing it.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:50
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Maxwell Lord posted:Guevara is probably not the one you want to cite on this. What do you mean? Guevera wrote extensively on the integral power of love and compassion. My post (and provided source) were agreeing with you.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:55
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