Pacific Rim - Grading and Discussion

.....aaand Godwined. Thread over.

 

Technically not. Never used the, "N" word.

 

An entertaining but really dumb movie.

The wall seemed to be an ill-conceived way of having the Jaegers working with no resources.
Why not surround the rift (or what ever it was called) with a hundreds of those blasters the hero Jaeger had?
It also seems silly to station the Jaegers on land and wait until the monsters make (or almost make) landfall, when the Jaegers are water proof and could have been stationed next to the rift on rotating duty (no need to spread them out).

 

eh, close enough.

 

Everything that happens in this movie, happens because why not and because of rule of cool.

Every engineering undergrad can pick this movie apart in about 10 seconds. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

 

Might as well put upThe Trope Pacific Rim page

 

^^^
Pretty much this.

I loved the film and found it very entertaining (and still hope we'll see a sequel); but you CAN'T look too closely at the plot.

I mean come on - they KNOW exactly where the portal is; and have for years and are even able to predict, practically to the second, the next incursion. Given that, WHY build giant robots at all? Just set a nuke or two up at the portal, timed to go off as soon as a kaiju steps/swims through?

 

It's also much easier to build 1000 bombers which can be armed with bunker busting type of rockets, have them in the air as soon as kaiju shows up and blast the damn thing until it drops dead.

There's a rocket that can penetrate 60m of reinforced concrete. I'm sure it's much easier and faster to build thousands of those than one giant robot.

But again, this movie is so entertaining that none of its logic and common sense defying plot points are able to diminish the fun of watching a giant robot punching a giant monster in the face with oil tanker.

 

By the logic of the movie they must have tried that with the existing inventory before the Battle of San Francisco went six days. Only giants can stop giants and for years they swung ships and cargo containers at the kaiju in hand to hand combat before trying a purpose built sword as a last ditch weapon

 

Kaiju are only vulnerable to massive amounts of kinetic energy (like a rocket power fist) or nuclear radiation. Conventional explosives just doesn't work.

The problem is that Kaiju move (quite fast when they want to). Bunker Busters are only for fixed installations.

 

1. They tried that and it didn't work. The aliens just sent more Kaiju.

2. Irradiating the ocean is not a good idea.

3. The Kaiju will just keep coming. Even worse they are coming with increased frequency and number.

 

Kaiju were susceptible to being frozen, burnt, cut and blasted with plasma cannon. I'm sure rockets would do just fine (and that's how the first kaiju were probably defeated, before the robots) and more bigger rockets would do even better in a real world. As to bunker busters - drop 100 of those at the same time at the general area where kaiju is expected to move and statistically you would hit it. 100 is not enough? Then drop 200. It would probably still be cheaper and faster than building and maintaining 30 giant robots.

Also, the world that had invented and built giant robots with mind-melding pilots in 14 months, could invent bunker busters with homing mechanism that could hit a moving target. This is again the part where applying logic and common sense to the idea behind the movie is pointless.

 

Not sure about the frozen part but I don't remember Kaiju being susceptible to being burned. The Plasma cannon appear to punch holes in Kaiju rather than burn them. Cutting still uses kinetic energy.

Rockets would do fine since that's the primary weapon of Stryker Eureka but I would argue that they don't have explosive warheads. Axehead was killed by a nuclear device.

But that was one of the problems, the collateral damage plus the spread of Kaiju remains. Jaegers could deliver the same amount of destructive force and not endanger an entire city

I was thinking about the same thing. Instead of a bunker buster a more effective weapon would be a "Rod from God"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

That being said Jaegers are more adaptable and won't splatter the Kaiju all over the place.

 

No. In the film they stated they tried to send a nuclear bomb to the other side (the Kaiju's dimension) - and that never worked as the portal was thought to be 'one way' (until the end of the film of course).

They never stated they tried just wringing the portal area on our side with nuclear bombs that detonated as the kaiju finished appearing.

As for irradiating the ocean - the U.S. did that for years in the 1950ies; and they found the ocean itself dispersed the radiation so well, the waterbourne environmental impact was negligible. (The effect on the land portions of the Bikini Atoll were greatly affected; but again, we're talking underwater. )

 

The info came from the comic "Pacific Rim: Year Zero". It was realized quite early that dropping nukes was not a productive strategy.

What you just stated is myth promoted by the Nuclear energy industry and the US Navy.

Here is the truth.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446783/

 

So why wouldn't dropping even a small fraction of the materials they were using the build the wall on top of the hole, or at least build something confined to that area instead? If they honestly thought the wall could keep them out... well, I just don't understand the thought process there. Why waste thousands if not millions of times as much material as needed to construct the wall would they could have just clogged the portal? And even if they couldn't clog it with the same relative amount of metal as they wasted on the wall, they obviously had thousands if not millions of times as much material to make it even more hardcore.

It just seems odd to me.

 

Just got my Limited Edition Blu-Ray package of the movie today. Excited to watch the special features tomorrow--watched a few tonight, loved seeing how gleeful Guillermo got while working on it.

 

The mechas are quite inefficient as weapons.
Just take the plasma cannon, make a lot of them and put them on a perimeter along the inter-dimensional door.
You can always make them mobile with tanks, planes, etc.

No need for hand-to-hand combat against the kaiju in order to kill them effectively.

 

I seem to recall something being said about the fact that the kaiju were getting stronger and adapting to the tactics being used against them. Hence the Jaegars, who being robots with human pilots would be a lot more unpredictable to fight against and therefore hoepfully stand a better chance in combat than a weapons platform.

Of course the real reason is it would have been pretty boring to see the awesome kaiju fighting a rocket launcher

 

As opposed to any other vehicle with equally unpredictable human pilots?