Pacific Rim - Grading and Discussion

What can be said about a film that even Rob Schnieder won't appear in? Not much, apparently

 

Actually I think it's only the critics and scifi fans who are really calling for intelligent and good scifi. Most of the moviegoing public is perfectly content with their stupid comedies, formulaic horror movies, and endless sequels.

Although to be fair, I'm a huge scifi fan and even I wasn't sure I wanted to see PR for a long while, thanks to the rather generic and uninspired trailers that made it look like some Transformers/Cloverfield knockoff. I can only imagine how disinterested and turned off the general audience must have been-- so clearly I think there was a marketing issue here as well.

 

It's a shame this movie didn't come out years ago then. I'd hate to see it viewed as a "ripoff" of Cloverfield and Transformers when it is so much better than all of those movies put together.

 

Saw it yesterday in IMAX 3D, and it was just as awesome as everyone says, although I want to see it again in 2D, since Guillermo designed it that way.

And I always stay to the very end of the credits, so it was nice to see the dedication to Monster Masters Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda, and hear the deep growl reverberate through the theater (although I'd been hoping to hear Godzilla's roar).

 

The movie made close to $100 million worldwide. Let's hope word of mouth keeps it going in the USA.

 

It seems to me that you didn't like people calling it for Star Trek after one weekend yet you do the same thing to Pacific Rim after 2-3 days? There seems to be a lot of "Its the end of the first quarter . . . so who won the game?" mentality on this board. Personally, I think the fact that this movie will appeal to teenagers means this could have enough legs to exceed $120-130 million domestically and 2 1/2 to 3 times that internationally.

I personally think Grown Ups two has burned through its goodwill and that movie will virtually dissapear in the next two weeks while PR will get repeat and word of mouth viewers. Seriously . . . who would sit through Grown Ups two twice?

 

Add me to the group who doesn't care for anime but enjoyed the movie.

 

Saw it in 2D Saturday night. I enjoyed it quite a bit, lookin' forward to seein' it in 3D soon.

 

I actually felt a bit sad the Russians got their arses handed to them so easily and so quickly. I thought Cherno Alpha was supposed to be this brutish tank, built to take pounding after pounding, but it got torn apart like paper.

 

Yeah, agreed. I also thought the chinese 3 armed Jaeger was a pretty cool idea (Though what happens if something happens to one of the triplets? Does China have a surplus of 3 man crews?) but they didn't fare much better than the Russians. It also seemed like at that point in the war the Kaijus knew where the crew compartment/bridges were in those Jaegers and concentrated their attacks there.

And who's bright idea was it to build a giant concrete/steel wall around cities? I anticipate a worldwide concrete shortage during the contruction of . . . I dunno . . . the first 100' tall, 50-60' wide concrete wall's construction. And you are going to build those all over the world? Huh???? Good luck with that.

 

Right. "People" are not an undifferentiated mass with uniform tastes. And really, it stands to reason that the things that have the broadest appeal are going to be ordinary and average, while exceptional things are going to be of narrower interest.

I was always interested because of what I read about online, but I agree, the commercials did make it seem too much like a Transformers knockoff. Those who only knew about it from commercials wouldn't have really gotten it.

And again, it's a mistake to think the two films are in competition with each other. Rather, each one is in an independent competition with its own budget and box-office expectations.

Although I have to admit, I doubt Grown-Ups 2, whatever that is, has a budget anywhere near that of Pacific Rim, so if it's outperforming PR at the box office, that suggests it's exceeding its budget far more than PR is.

 

I didn't mean to suggest they were.

My point was that I believe that the target audience for Grown Ups doesn't include many repeat viewers while Pacific Rim does and that poor word of mouth will burn through the target audience of GU2 even faster than it normally would and won't have the legs of the original Grown Ups.

It doesn't mean Sandler and company won't make a lot of money . . . its just going to end up as a very forgettable film of 2013 whereas the original was a surprise, breakout hit.

 

Yeah that seemed pretty goofy to me as well. If those creatures could tear apart and destroy a giant metal robot, surely they could tear through a simple wall.

Or hell, even crawl over the damn thing.

 

^Haven't seen the film yet, but isn't the point of the story that the defense walls are a bad idea, that the governments are fooling themselves to believe they're a better solution? It seems to me that hiding behind walls is pretty symbolic of living in denial.

 

If there's a sequel and we're faced with a Cat 6 or 7 kaiju, maybe we'll see a super Jaeger a la Voltron

 

Yeah that was probably the intention, but once you see what the kaiju are capable of in the early part of the movie, you have a hard time believing ANYONE could seriously think a wall would stop them.

I think a better alternative might have been surrounding the cities with those giant plasma cannons the Jaegers use to blast the Kaiju with (after first wasting a lot of time punching and throwing them around first). Since it's usually what ends up killing them in the end anyway.

 

Right now, in real life, we have many members of the US Congress who believe that Creationism is scientific or that women's bodies can "shut down" pregnancies due to rape or that trying to reform and improve the health-care system is socialism. So no, I have no trouble accepting that political leaders could be that blind to reality.

 

I agree that the stand off weapons like the rockets and the plasma gun seemed to be pretty effective. But it also seemed like the Kaiju didn't show themselves until they openly attacked (it seemed like every Jaeger got surprised unless they found a Kaiju already busy destroying stuff). It seems like extreme cold (the coolant) and heat (the afterburners) was also effective at damaging the Kaiju.

 

A-, due only to some nagging little issues with, of all things, the science.

Otherwise, yeah, it's my favorite movie so far this year. Spectacularly WHEEEEEEEEE kinda fun. If you aren't smiling from ear to ear through most of it, your inner child is dead.

 

Or as it turns out . . . fly over.