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SuperMechagodzilla posted:By focussing on merely exterminating/containing the 'inhuman' invaders, the protagonists ensure that nothing is actually solved on Earth. Except the very immediate problem of kaiju killing everyone. The idea that you can't solve anything unless you solve EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG is odd to say the least.
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Jan 18, 2014 17:03
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Maxwell Lord posted:Except the very immediate problem of kaiju killing everyone. The characters' stated goal is to prevent the apocalypse, and they don't do that. If the film were about the moral compromises that 'needed to be made' in order to simply preserve status quo, that's a whole other kettle of fish - and still highly questionable besides (since they don't prevent the apocalypse, and 'what needs to be done' is the extermination of the rat-lizard invaders).
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Jan 18, 2014 19:18
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CelticPredator posted:Look how loving cool this is. It's gonna flail its twin cocks all over them kaiju. This is what you've done to me SMG. Are you happy?
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Jan 18, 2014 20:10
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Hodgepodge posted:It's gonna flail its twin cocks all over them kaiju. Clearly the linked-together blade segments represent fascism in a literal sense, and when they join together perfectly tight they form a blade that is more powerful than when separate. The robot itself is a penis, though. It's just a penis.
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Jan 18, 2014 21:15
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The characters' stated goal is to prevent the apocalypse, and they don't do that. They prevent this one. And just maybe the film doesn't subscribe to the position that revolution is the only way to save the world, which is a specific political ideology and not empirical fact after all.
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Jan 18, 2014 21:45
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Captain Invictus posted:Clearly the linked-together blade segments represent fascism in a literal sense, and when they join together perfectly tight they form a blade that is more powerful than when separate. Note that all the links are homogeneous in build, save for a very small extra-pointy percentage at the top that literally spearhead things.
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Jan 18, 2014 23:45
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Maxwell Lord posted:They prevent this one. And just maybe the film doesn't subscribe to the position that revolution is the only way to save the world, which is a specific political ideology and not empirical fact after all. True, but the film is dissatisfied with the elites. They're presented as selfish, bungling, and deceitful. Del Toro very easily could have made a movie where all of humanity was united, or where the groups that had to pull together were nation-states distrustful of each other, but instead he made one where a barely-legitimate paramilitary organization funded by a black market gangster are the only ones who can save the world. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call that writing "revolutionary," but it's definitely anti-authoritarian. The legitimate authorities and government of the world nearly doomed everyone, and at the end of the film, nothing has changed with respect to their power. At best, they've learned to respect the Jaeger program again, but closing the rift sets the program up for bigger obsolescence than ever because now they're a defense against an enemy which, in the public mind at least, doesn't even exist any more. You don't have to be a Marxist to consider that an unresolved issue in the film. (Though it helps!  )
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Jan 19, 2014 00:02
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Stackman: Today, we are briefly postponing the apocalypse!!
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Jan 19, 2014 06:38
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Deferring the apocalypse to the sequel.
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Jan 19, 2014 14:46
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Hodgepodge posted:Deferring the apocalypse to the sequel. Pacific Rim 2: The Search for More
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Jan 19, 2014 15:00
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CelticPredator posted:Look how loving cool this is. This toy makes me want a "Pacific Rim Rising: Revengeance" video game so bad.
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Jan 19, 2014 17:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:True, but the film is dissatisfied with the elites. They're presented as selfish, bungling, and deceitful. Del Toro very easily could have made a movie where all of humanity was united, or where the groups that had to pull together were nation-states distrustful of each other, but instead he made one where a barely-legitimate paramilitary organization funded by a black market gangster are the only ones who can save the world. True, but I think unresolved issues are sort of inherent to the genre. At the end of Gojira, Godzilla is dead and Serizawa has prevented his particular horrible weapon from being made again, but there's still the threat that it will happen. In the 70s films where ecology starts becoming a concern, you have the cockroaches in Godzilla vs. Gigan representing a logical endpoint of mankind's mistreatment of the Earth, and Godzilla destroys them, and this doesn't solve pollution- at the end the human characters are saying "Well, this may yet happen to us if we don't shape up." It's traditional that killing the monsters doesn't mean the underlying issue goes away, and the heroes don't generally solve that. That is handed off to the viewer, as it were. And I would argue that when Pentecost is saying "We're cancelling the apocalypse" it's partly a statement against the apocalypse mentality- against the fundamental despair that eats at the setting, where everyone gave up because the Jaegers initially fell short of the hype. (So basically they are Obama, I guess? Or OWS?)
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Jan 19, 2014 21:13
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"To fight monsters, we created monsters." The jaegers are kaiju. Gipsy wins by doing exactly what the kaiju do: traveling to the other world, being menacing and violent, and dying with a lot of very deadly byproducts. It's a heroic monster because its intention is to defend rather than exterminate humanity, but it's better to not have any monsters at all. At the end of the film, there are no jaegers or kaiju left, so in that sense it is an authentic victory; the PPDC rid the world of all kaiju, not just alien ones. Pacific Rim takes place in a polluted world that is hospitable, even nourishing, to kaiju. That world hasn't been cleaned up, of course, and the film doesn't give any indication of whether it will be - although Newt, who knows why the kaiju invaded, is still alive and presumably still tells anyone who'll listen. Still, I would say that a film can depict sympathetically the end of a war without it being the end of all wars.
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Jan 19, 2014 23:55
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CelticPredator posted:Look how loving cool this is. £100 on ebay. Tempted. Severely fascistly tempted.
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Jan 20, 2014 00:45
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CelticPredator posted:Look how loving cool this is. God drat I love the design of the Jaegers.
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Jan 20, 2014 04:44
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Is this movie good?
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Jan 20, 2014 11:19
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If you like giant robots, giant monsters, or fascism, you should go see this movie.
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Jan 20, 2014 11:46
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Just watched it today in glorious 1080p. It's pretty and fun, but also very silly and dumb. Your relative tolerance for the latter allows far more appreciation for the former.
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Jan 20, 2014 11:53
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GladDOS as the voice of the robot made me laugh whenever she spoke. I kept expecting her to declare the two pilots were failures and deadly neurotoxin should be employed to prevent damage to the robot.
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Jan 20, 2014 13:21
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^^^ Would have saved the film, really. kraftwerk singles posted:Is this movie good? If you like fascism and the vague idea of giant robots, but have no respect for giant monster cinema whatsoever, you should go see this movie.
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Jan 20, 2014 13:27
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kraftwerk singles posted:Is this movie good? If you like seeing awesome giant robots beating the crap out of giant monsters in a totally awesome way, you should go see this movie.
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Jan 20, 2014 15:46
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What do you call a happy giant robot? A Yay-ger! 
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Jan 20, 2014 15:50
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Doublehex posted:If you like seeing awesome giant robots beating the crap out of giant monsters in a totally awesome way, you should go see this movie. I'd actually say the robot fights are pretty boring to be honest. The Kaiju themselves lack personality and agency and are more sympathetic/tragic figures than antagonistic ones, there's certainly none of the hot-blooded action drama you see in better mecha media like Gurren Lagann or Metal Gear Rising: Revengence. Also, this way of deliberately talking like a six year old who can't express thoughts more complex than 'IS IT LOUD AND VIOLENT?!?' is really boring and childish, if you can't discuss if something which features tropes you normally like is bad how can you recognise when something is genuinely good? For example: I like mecha anime and over-the-top action scenes but I dislike Pacific Rim because it fails to recognise the conventions of neither the Kaiju films nor the Super Robot shows which inspired it which would inform when and why our protagonists can cut loose and Go Nuts at their enemy (i.e. their enemy had agency and has made a clear moral choice to antagonise our heroes/humanity), leading to scenes of grotesque violence against sentient creatures who have been established in the plot to be slaves, forced to fight against their will for a cause they have no dog in. This is pretty gross and from a film-making perspective; immoral. To borrow SMG's analogy, the Kaiju should have either been the Krytonians or they should have rebelled against them, as it is we watched a slave army get lavishly murdered for two hours.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:04
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quote:To borrow SMG's analogy, the Kaiju should have either been the Krytonians or they should have rebelled against them, as it is we watched a slave army get lavishly murdered for two hours. If they're all of one mind (literally, it's a hive-mind) how is it possible that any single creature, a part of the hive-mind, can be a slave to another, another part of the same hive-mind? It'd be like saying my arm is enslaving my other arm.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:12
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The more you care about the tradition of moral symbolism in kaiju cinema, the more you will dislike Pacific Rim's indifference to that tradition. It is spectacular, however.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:14
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RBA Starblade posted:If they're all of one mind (literally, it's a hive-mind) how is it possible that any single creature, a part of the hive-mind, can be a slave to another, another part of the same hive-mind? It'd be like saying my arm is enslaving my other arm. I think the Kaiju were supposed to be a hive mind because they're basically organic robots but their masters were not part of that.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:26
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computer parts posted:I think the Kaiju were supposed to be a hive mind because they're basically organic robots but their masters were not part of that. They gained information on the masters' plan from the kaiju brain, and showed it from an outside perspective with the masters though, didn't they? I thought the point was they were a single species and mind and the kaiju were the equivalent of the jaegers. e: Come to think of it they intentionally got every other science thing wrong so it's not too far a leap to guess they did it with the hive-mind idea too.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:29
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I would go so far as to say if you're griping about something like the impossible physics of a giant robot wielding a tugboat as a weapon and not just enjoying a giant robot wielding a tugboat as a weapon, you should probably have your sense of fun overhauled.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:34
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RBA Starblade posted:If they're all of one mind (literally, it's a hive-mind) how is it possible that any single creature, a part of the hive-mind, can be a slave to another, another part of the same hive-mind? It'd be like saying my arm is enslaving my other arm. They're a hive mind species subservient to the humanoid aliens we briefly see in the other dimension, they're not the ones who ruined their own it and they're not the ones who plan to take over Earth, they're literally forced to invade us by the other dudes. Bongo Bill posted:The more you care about the tradition of moral symbolism in kaiju cinema, the more you will dislike Pacific Rim's indifference to that tradition. It is spectacular, however. Purely on a 'popcorn' level I think it's weaker for it; as all we ever see until the last few minutes of the film are the anonymous slave-soldier Kaiju who are killed off in the same scene they appear in the film never develops an actual antagonist the characters and audience can root against, that's pretty lovely construction for what's meant to be a love letter to Kaiju and Super Robot shows imo, especially as scenery chewing villains are usually one of the best parts.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:39
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kraftwerk singles posted:Is this movie good? It was probably the most fun I've had with an action movie in years. The fights are very well done and I really dug the design of the Jaegers. You can pretty much ignore all this dopey talk about fascism that people have been prattling on endlessly in this thread. The screenwriters almost certainly didn't intend for this to be a ringing endorsement for fascism and you really have to do some mental gymnastics to actually get that from this film. The human characters were paper thin though.
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Jan 21, 2014 00:58
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Even setting aside the politics the problem with this movie is that the fight choreography is dull and the script resolutely steers away from everything Del Toro's actually interested in.
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Jan 21, 2014 01:22
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General Battuta posted:Even setting aside the politics the problem with this movie is that the fight choreography is dull and the script resolutely steers away from everything Del Toro's actually interested in. The most baffling thing about Pacific Rim is that Del Toro directed it.
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Jan 21, 2014 13:46
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I love that downtrodden kaiju SMG and 
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Jan 21, 2014 13:58
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I find it funny that this thread is rated lower than the movie itself.
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Jan 21, 2014 15:04
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:^^^ You should stop watching movies and get into a hobby where it doesn't show how much of a crazy wrong person you are when you talk about it.
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Jan 21, 2014 19:21
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It's weird that I mostly/only get this reaction from the Pacific Rim thread. I do not receive similar complaints about Her or Star Wars, despite using exactly the same approach in those threads. The only real difference is that, while I liked Star Wars and thought Her was OK, I disliked Pacific Rim. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 20:27
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I think it's because you're going after a goofy campy monster movie instead of something with actual substance. I love this movie dearly, but it is what it is, and not much more.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:31
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This thread is a lot more enjoyable if you put SMG on ignore.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:34
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Every movie is exactly what it is, nothing more.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:42
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WastedJoker posted:£100 on ebay. You need to do it. It's worth every penny. 
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Jan 21, 2014 22:47
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