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You know what would have been the simplest possible fix for the Hong Kong fight? Move Hannibal and Newt's conversation on the balcony to the middle of the fight, where Cherno and Crimson start going down, then splice in a clip of Tendo or Stacker yelling "How the hell do they know the Jaeger's weaknesses?" after Hannibal calls Newt a moron. Boom, there you go. "Oh poo poo, Cherno, Crimson and Striker are loving awesome, but the Kaiju know exactly how to take them down because of Newt drifting with them."
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Nov 22, 2013 03:23
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You seem to be confusing issues of clarity with alleged 'plot holes.' I think we're done here.
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Nov 22, 2013 03:30
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DStecks posted:You know what would have been the simplest possible fix for the Hong Kong fight? Move Hannibal and Newt's conversation on the balcony to the middle of the fight, where Cherno and Crimson start going down, then splice in a clip of Tendo or Stacker yelling "How the hell do they know the Jaeger's weaknesses?" after Hannibal calls Newt a moron. What is with people recommending the dumbest most eye-rolling 'fixes' for things that don't need fixing?
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Nov 22, 2013 03:34
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Habibi posted:I think we're done here. I hope not, I think SMG's posts have been pretty good and the conversation's been interesting to follow.  He's had this running interest in the presentation of interfaces in science fiction films that I think is pretty cool.
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Nov 22, 2013 04:05
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Milky Moor posted:What is with people recommending the dumbest most eye-rolling 'fixes' for things that don't need fixing? Pacific Rim is a movie about Robots fighting Kaiju. In any movie that glorifies combat in some way - shoot-em up western, martial arts flick, action-oriented spy thriller - is to establish the relative prowess of the combatants. There are formulas to follow because it's ingrained in the audience's experience like a second language. One option is to use a secondary protagonist (like Cherno Alpha or Crimson Typhoon) to establish the threat of an antagonist by losing the fight. That's what Del Toro did, and I don't think anyone on this board has ever debated the propriety of this other than "aw shucks, those were cool robots and/or pilots - too bad they had to die." HOWEVER - Del Toro ignored the corollary that goes with this (and he's done it before). If you're going to use a secondary protagonist to establish the threat of an antagonist, you have to establish that secondary protagonist's prowess first, so that the audience can comprehend the escalation of power. You can do this in one of three ways (either in an earlier scene or in the same scene):
(See Kung Fu Hustle for a fun example of continuous scaling up between antagonist and protagonist. See Game of Death for examples of see-saw battles and the nifty literal scaling up device of the multi-storied tower.) Del Toro skips this step with Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon. We haven't seen them defeat any antagonists, so we expect at least a see-saw battle. But neither acquits itself well in their fight with Otachi and Leatherback, and they are quickly and unceremoniously dispatched. Sure, the audience may have pieced together that the drift gave the kaiju weapons and tactics to decide the battle, and intellectually it may make sense when the scene is broken down, but it simply FEELS wrong to an audience who has learned the rhythm of stylized film combat. Our guts can't quite tell, are Otachi and Leatherback that tough, or are Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha that weak? Now you could argue Del Toro did it to emphasize the quick and brutal nature of real combat - how things can go terribly deadly in an instant. That's certainly emphasized in the death of the pilots, and it's certainly effective and thematically appropriate in Pan's Labyrinth, but it doesn't match the tone otherwise established in Pacific Rim. I mean, the combat between Otachi and Gipsy goes on and on and we're clearly meant to enjoy it in all it's operatic excess. So yeah, it needs fixing. Wizchine fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Nov 22, 2013 |
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Nov 22, 2013 04:31
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Milky Moor posted:What is with people recommending the dumbest most eye-rolling 'fixes' for things that don't need fixing? Until I read the thread it didn't occur to me that Cherno and Crimson went down easily because of Newt's shenanigans. I just assumed that it was a combination of several things: a) it was the first "double event" (i think) b) the kaiju were getting stronger with each wave c) both Cherno and Crimson had too much pride which caused them to underestimate their opponents Then again the movie is apparently based on a book, which I didn't read. So I probably missed out on a lot of the context until I read the comments here.
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Nov 22, 2013 04:41
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Wizchine posted:Pacific Rim is a movie about Robots fighting Kaiju. I agree. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 22, 2013 05:28
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Neon Genesis Evangelion: the live version.
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Nov 22, 2013 05:36
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incredibly strong robot thighs
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Nov 22, 2013 05:39
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James Hardon posted:I agree. It was me - I posted all 250-pages worth 
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Nov 22, 2013 05:43
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Nov 22, 2013 05:52
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SuppressdPuberty93 posted:Neon Genesis Evangelion: the live version. The first time this post has ever been made, anywhere on the internet. The first man to ever voice this thought. What fearsome engines of intellect must have driven it.
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Nov 22, 2013 06:13
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On the note of Evangelion, what the hell was the orange poo poo in Raleigh and Yancy's helmets at the start of the movie? It's there for less than a second and is never seen again. It's pretty obviously an allusion to LCL, but what is it actually in the world of Pacific Rim?
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Nov 22, 2013 06:32
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Milky Moor posted:I don't know why you're seriously arguing with someone who claimed that the scenes of Cherno's destruction didn't feature the feeling of drowning. The basic plot of the Cherno fight scene is that Cherno's power-hat gets melted, which slightly weakens it. The one monster then bites it on the arm, while the other one knocks it over and squishes it. Simple stuff. The presentation is what matters. The main thing in the fight scene is the intercutting between different locations. You have the extremely wide exterior shots intercut with three different interiors (the home base, the cockpit of the Australian robot, and Cherno's cockpit). This is in the span of less than two minutes, keep in mind. A large chunk of the fight scene consists of outside observers watching what happens to Cherno, to the point that 'watching impotently' is a bigger part of the action than 'punching'. Now, when you have an extremely wide exterior shot of a 'building', where you then cut to the characters inside, that's are called an establishing shot. It's designed just to give just a basic impression of the setting before moving in closer for the remainder of the scene. Extremely wide shots serve pretty much that same purpose. They give you a general impression of the setting. Imagine you're watching a version of Die Hard where half of each action scene consists of exterior shots of the Nakatomi building, shot from miles away. Like, you repeatedly cut from Bruce Willis pulling the trigger, to a little poof of breaking glass on the side of the massive building. That's what Pacific Rim does in every fight scene. Folks object that 'Cherno Alpha is a character too!' But, by repeatedly cutting 'inside his head', exterior shots of Cherno function as establishing shots. This is true even in films like Innerspace and Osmosis Jones, that involve smaller characters moving around inside a larger human character. The large character is undermined to at least some degree - reduced to a setting. Those two films use the distance from the character as an opportunity for body humor and broad metaphors about 'the body' (society is like a body, the universe is like a body, etc.). Bill Murray is not a protagonist in Osmosis Jones. His scenes practically just serve as a frame story. For Cherno (or any robot) to be read as his own character, you would need to remove the bulk of the interior shots. Or, do a lot more to link them visually (e.g. not having vastly different lighting schemes between exterior and interior shots, placing much more focus on the workings of the man-machine interface...) I've suggested having the wireframes be used extensively in every interior shot, for the simple reason that cutting from Cherno standing in water to the protagonists standing in 'water' would be more effective at connecting the two settings than relying almost-exclusively on similarities in posture. Make the robot read as a prosthesis rather than as a setting. There is a very big difference between being inside a character and being the same character. Pacific Rim doesn't convey the latter effectively. But anyways, the point of the scene is that Cherno is crippled early, rendered pathetic and then swiftly executed. However, the segment of Cherno stumbling around with less power, like he's got brain damage, is edited extremely swiftly. As noted before, you're cutting between like three different settings. Editing creates motion. Why not have a longer take of Cherno slooowly stumbling around, so that you feel genuinely bad for him? Not only that, but a longer take would also do more to show why getting acid on the hat is bad. In the actual film, there is very little indication of why the hat being melted is bad, outside the basic symbolism. You do not see Cherno acting exaggeratedly weakened in a way that conveys the point clearly to the audience. There's like one shot where his arm gets bit, and that's pretty much it. Also, Leatherback attacking Cherno is oddly prolonged. Del Toro's stated intention is for the scene to be brutal, but it actually makes Leatherback seem less effective. The 'stumbling around pathetically' segment is shot and edited in pretty much exactly the same way as the 'brutal execution' segment. If the idea is that the villains now know their weaknesses, why not have Leatherback take out the already-crippled opponent in one swift motion? The film doesn't even go in the opposite direction, and have Leatherback dish out ridiculous overkill. The scene is in some weird middle-ground where it's neither a fight scene nor a horrific execution scene. It's just really easy to consider alternatives. What if, instead of cutting back to the base and the Australian robot, that runtime were spent on more shots of Cherno doing stuff? Nobody would really miss the shot of the Australians standing there yelling "we can't just watch them die!" That's exposition, when they could make Cherno's death seem like a really awful injustice with cinema. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Nov 22, 2013 |
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Nov 22, 2013 07:15
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Imagine you're watching a version of Die Hard where half of each action scene consists of exterior shots of the Nakatomi building, shot from miles away. Like, you repeatedly cut from Bruce Willis pulling the trigger, to a little poof of breaking glass on the side of the massive building. That's what Pacific Rim does in every fight scene. Lines like this are why I still read this thread. I seriously can't believe that people are objecting to the idea that Pacific Rim should have given us more and clearer scenes of robots fighting monsters.
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Nov 22, 2013 08:23
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Ferrinus posted:Lines like this are why I still read this thread. quote:I seriously can't believe that people are objecting to the idea that Pacific Rim should have given us more and clearer scenes of robots fighting monsters. That's great because literally no one has said this.
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Nov 22, 2013 08:35
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I think I said it when the movie came out, but my core beef with the fight scenes was how they kept cutting back to the pilots doing some move we just saw the robot do, or vice versa. I get cutting back to the otherwise-uninteresting fleshy things when something important is happening, but otherwise my butt is in the seat to see robots fighting monsters. Hell, my favorite fight is the one where Australian mech fights the monster that broke through the wall. No cutaways, in daylight, and a stronger feeling of genuine combat going on.
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Nov 22, 2013 11:22
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Pacific Rim just catered to the kid in me with a mass array of color, giant robots, mass destruction as well as tongue in cheek humour. The sheer ridiculousness of it and that it is a film made for the sake of fun just made me love Pacific Rim even more.
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Nov 22, 2013 13:10
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DStecks posted:On the note of Evangelion, what the hell was the orange poo poo in Raleigh and Yancy's helmets at the start of the movie? It's there for less than a second and is never seen again. It's pretty obviously an allusion to LCL, but what is it actually in the world of Pacific Rim? I thought it was actually a reference to the liquid oxygen suits in The Abyss, myself (except it was some sort of insulating/pressure regulating liquid, rather than straight up liquid oxygen in the mask). As sort of a backup if the pilots ever had to bail from the jaeger in the depths of the ocean (and the system was upgraded with the actual ejection units later).
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Nov 22, 2013 13:13
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I assumed it was some sort of shock dampener since they get thrown around like ragdolls in those harnesses. Or some sort of anti-radiation thing.
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Nov 22, 2013 13:27
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Milky Moor posted:I assumed it was some sort of shock dampener since they get thrown around like ragdolls in those harnesses. Or some sort of anti-radiation thing. Yeah, somd sort of shock dampener is exactly what I thought it was, too (it made me think of the FTL travel mechanism from Forever War), or potentially a conducting fluid for the neural suit or whatever.
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Nov 22, 2013 16:14
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Movies don't 'feature feelings'. They evoke concepts through their visual language. I love the hell out of the movie but I agree with this post. We get a lot of shots of the robots doing stuff cut frequently with shots of the pilots inside, and as a result the robots never feel like characters or extensions of the characters. At least, not to the extent I think Del Toro was aiming for. The best robot moments are the longer, lingering shots of them doing "character" type stuff from the outside. There is a part at the beginning of the fight where Otachi smacks Crimson to the ground, Crimson props itself up and shakes it's head. When you think about it, there is literally no reason for the robot to shake it's head like that, but it gives Crimson this little moment of character. You get the impression that the pilots weren't ready for this. It's a tiny, fleeting moment but it's great. We never get a moment with Crimson like that again, because Crimson gets it's rear end kicked. During the brief fight sequence though we get plenty of cuts into the cockpit of Crimson though, but like 90% of the interior edits, they just show us the pilots doing exactly what the robot is doing. Maybe Del Toro intended for that to be a way to connect the pilots and the robots visually, but he kind of overdoes it. It's not necessary. We get enough in the opening sequence to establish that's how it works. Cherno gets a nice character moment too: when it blows it's horns after Crimson bites it and beats it's fists together. That's the Cherno character, that shows us just how the pilots feel about this. We don't need cuts to the cockpit with the pilots being mad. When Cherno gets beaten up I think what we needed was less quick edits of the pilots getting thrown around, and more of the wide shots of Leatherback kicking its rear end. But it's like every punch gets a reaction shot inside the cockpit, and all it does is kind of cause this weird separation between the pilots and their vehicles, when it's probably intended to do the opposite. When Cherno goes down I think we needed maybe 3 cockpit shots. a couple at the beginning when the acid hits, and then at the very end, when the palm comes down and ends them both. The rest should just be the wide shots of Leatherback brutally beating it up. When we finally cut back to the cockpit, it's in far worse shape, the pilots are clearly hosed, and the hand represents the end, the final twist of the knife. We don't need a bunch of quick edits of them getting slammed around, we can just see the robot get slammed around in a longer shot instead, and we will get it. Especially if they play some audio of the pilots screaming as Cherno bites it. Striker's best character moment in the movie is the Sydney fight. We don't get a single cockpit shot in that bit. It's just striker kicking some loving rear end, and it tells us everything about the robot and pilots we need to know. It doesn't play defense, it goes straight for the jugular and just wrings the kaiju out to dry. Striker is a cocky rear end in a top hat. We meet the pilots, and guess what, one of them is a cocky rear end in a top hat. But we knew that, because we already saw Striker being a cocky rear end in a top hat. Gypsy gets way too many cockpit shots, but it also gets more character moments. There is the moment when it dodges the acid, and we see it look at the aftermath of the acid, like it's realizing what just happened. Then Gypsy goes and tears out the acid sac. Everytime the robot is doing something that isn't directly punching related, it acts like a human. It runs down a street, then stops and looks confused. Those are the moments we really needed more of, not edits of the pilots. We needed longer shots of the robots being their characters, without seeing the pilots, because the robots are the pilots. Seeing both do the same actions is needlessly redundant. In the end, Gypsy keeps getting played up as a character, but never actually feels like one. The ending shot of it looking at the aliens before jaegerbomb feels weird, because we aren't seeing a character die like we should be, just a big metal husk that looks sorta human floating there. In a better version of this movie, that moment would have meant a lot more, because it's literally the human race surrogate from our side staring down the enemies on the other side and going "Eat this motherfuckers". It should be the final defiant act of a character, not a big metal thing simply going boom. I got rather hyped up by this thread, and I still love the movie, but it definitely felt like it was really close to being something better then it came out to be. Febreeze fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Nov 23, 2013 |
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Nov 23, 2013 00:59
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Movies don't 'feature feelings'. They evoke concepts through their visual language. Have you ever written a million word post about a movie with actual substance?
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Nov 23, 2013 01:36
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quote:Nobody would really miss the shot of the Australians standing there yelling "we can't just watch them die!" You say this, but in this very thread we have people suggesting that there needed to be expository dialog to explain exactly how Cherno and Crimson were defeated.
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Nov 23, 2013 03:13
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DStecks posted:On the note of Evangelion, what the hell was the orange poo poo in Raleigh and Yancy's helmets at the start of the movie? It's there for less than a second and is never seen again. It's pretty obviously an allusion to LCL, but what is it actually in the world of Pacific Rim? The fluid in the mask is from the fluid synapse system. It also looks loving cool during the part when Yancy and Raleigh are suiting up. A page or so back there was a discussion on how the pilots interacted with the environment and why they had a wireframe representation of the boat in the opening fight with Knifehead, but we don't see any wireframes of Kaiju or environment after that. The wireframe of the boat was projected from the ring-shaped white hand controller that was part of the Gipsy Danger 1.0 interface. Gipsy 2.0 didn't have the same interface and instead had holographic displays on the distal arms. There doesn't seem to be any projection of the environment inside the connpods beyond the bit with the boat. I just assumed that when the jaeger was grappling with a Kaiju or holding something, the harnesses and linkages to their suits provided force feedback.
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Nov 23, 2013 04:17
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I too thought the movie was disappointing because it "disobeyed" a bunch of "rules" I pulled out of my rear end. It's okay though, I wrote a fanfiction to fix it which you all should read:
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Nov 23, 2013 15:55
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Clipperton posted:I too thought the movie was disappointing because it "disobeyed" a bunch of "rules" I pulled out of my rear end. It's okay though, I wrote a fanfiction to fix it which you all should read: You have it backwards; the disappointment came first. James Hardon posted:Have you ever written a million word post about a movie with actual substance? No. Milky Moor posted:You say this, but in this very thread we have people suggesting that there needed to be expository dialog to explain exactly how Cherno and Crimson were defeated. They've rightly noted that something is missing, but 'more exposition' is not it.
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Nov 23, 2013 16:28
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I thought the movie was visually incredible, but I ultimately had the same problem as I did with every transformers movie. The technology is so fantastical and little explained, that we are helpless and clueless without obvious cues. For example, one punch seems to really hurt, and another punch seems to not even phase. Do they ever run out of fuel? How long does it take to reload that gun that seems really effective? Why aren't they always using the sword? Why does every fight scene involve 15 "throw the other guy into a building" when that never produced any results? We essentially just have to sit there brain dead, and just accept whatever we are being shown as logically sound because we don't have a foundation of reality to base our own logic on. I know that sentence sounds a little out there, but I think you guys can understand what I'm trying to get across. It's like in a superman movie when you see superman grit his teeth and struggle to lift something heavy and the music and direction is epic as he lifts this huge thing! Ah man, hes doing it! But it's like, he's loving superman. We can't conceptualize his strength because it's magic. And we can't conceptualize a giant robots strength because it's magic. We just watch and go "uh, sure why not. Use a cruise-ship as a club."
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Nov 23, 2013 17:43
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James Hardon posted:Have you ever written a million word post about a movie with actual substance? Good avatar, good question to SMG... something is unusual about this post.
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Nov 23, 2013 18:12
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Baldbeard posted:We essentially just have to sit there brain dead, and just accept whatever we are being shown as logically sound because we don't have a foundation of reality to base our own logic on. I know that sentence sounds a little out there, but I think you guys can understand what I'm trying to get across. Your "problem" is why most people loved the movie. It's a universe where people actually consider giant robots and all the necessary logistics therein to be the best (not to mention viable) means of saving the planet from rampaging extraterrestrial hypermegafauna. All bets are off.
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Nov 23, 2013 18:42
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:They've rightly noted that something is missing, but 'more exposition' is not it. Yeah, instead they've been lamenting the absence of scenes that were actually in the movie.
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Nov 23, 2013 19:18
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Arrowsmith posted:Your "problem" is why most people loved the movie. It's a universe where people actually consider giant robots and all the necessary logistics therein to be the best (not to mention viable) means of saving the planet from rampaging extraterrestrial hypermegafauna. All bets are off. Not to mention that when you start making rules for your giant robots and quantifying punch-power, you're taking the first steps on a road which leads to this. e: VVVVV I guess I'm just better at the LANGUAGE OF FILM than you because it was pretty clear to me what was going on. Don't feel bad though, you'll catch up! Clipperton fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Nov 23, 2013 |
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Nov 23, 2013 19:30
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Clipperton posted:I too thought the movie was disappointing because it "disobeyed" a bunch of "rules" I pulled out of my rear end. It's okay though, I wrote a fanfiction to fix it which you all should read: I too refuse to acknowledge that narrative film is a language with it's own rules of structure and syntax, and like language, ignoring the rules can result in a message that is not communicated as clearly or effectively as it tarsal taco under the on ! simpatico shouldn't of.
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Nov 23, 2013 19:49
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It's like at least one a year there's a thread about a movie I like that seems determined to ruin my enjoyment.
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Nov 23, 2013 20:25
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Maxwell Lord posted:It's like at least one a year there's a thread about a movie I like that seems determined to ruin my enjoyment. How is this an issue? If you like the movie, defend it on its merits!
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Nov 23, 2013 21:54
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Somebody made a movie about giant fighty robots getting in giant punchy brawls with giant alien dinosaurs, set in goddamn Hong Kong and the Pacific. They got a 200 million dollar budget and, as far as I can tell, got their money's worth in effects. At one point, a giant thermal nuclear turbine powered punchy robot got angry at a giant acid spitting alien dinosaur, so the robot hit him repeatedly with a goddamn container ship. At another point, a giant death sawblade robot did a giant vault over a huge dragon with a series of RCS/jetpacks on its back. Because that wasn't cool enough, it also used the jetpacks to swing its building sized circular saws even harder. When the awesome 3 armed robot was killed, a giant Russian gangster with a nuclear cooling tower for a head and huge jet engines for shoulders became visibly angry, and went and hit him with Big O style super fists. Several of these giant fighty robots had hands that were also huge swords and/or plasma cannons. What the gently caress are you goddamn goons complaining about, that sounds like 2500 tons of awesome to me. PS, I would bang Idris Elba without compunction or questioning my heterosexuality (I'm a dude) Pps: Super fast Gundam with a giant nuke on its back, and a giant trifoil in case it was ambiguous.
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Nov 23, 2013 22:03
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I liked when the one alien dinosaur turned into a pterodactyl and lifted the robot into space
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Nov 23, 2013 22:14
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Macaluso posted:I liked when the one alien dinosaur turned into a pterodactyl and lifted the robot into space Me too. I also like how the robot cut the pterodactyl in half with a suprise sword and fell all the way back to earth from space to crash unharmed in a soccer stadium.
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Nov 23, 2013 23:01
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Wizchine posted:Me too. I also like how the robot cut the pterodactyl in half with a suprise sword and fell all the way back to earth from space to crash unharmed in a soccer stadium. Probably the same way the pterodactyl managed to reach the upper edges of our atmosphere in about ten seconds flat without tearing itself apart.
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Nov 23, 2013 23:34
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:How is this an issue? If you like the movie, defend it on its merits! I did for many pages. It gets tiring.
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Nov 24, 2013 00:20
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