Pacific Rim - Part 6

[-Arya-]

Saw this for the first time tonight. I had some issues, but I found it very enjoyable. Take notes Michael Bay.

 

[venom892]

I saw it again tonight. Still boggles my mind it wasn't nominated for special effects.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

^Wow didnt know that, astonishing, there wasnt a bad effect in the movie.

 

[The Endless]

Yea definitely some of the best CGI i've ever seen. Outside of Avatar, you won't find much better.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

^Agreed, I can think of only one moment when the CGI wasnt seemless, the rest of the time you wouldnt know it was CGI, great, stuff.

 

[KevanG]

When I first went to see the movie I figured it would just be another brainless robot vs monster movie. I was surprised it was actually pretty good and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

^I knew it would be more than that with GDT at the helm, the man doesnt make bad movies for me. I got what I wanted and more out of the movie.

 

[GremlinZilla89]

Godzilla is my most anticipated film of 2014. It's looks amazing and as a huge Goji fan I can't be more happy about how it looks.

But I'm already dreading the "this is what Pac Rim should have been" comments.

 

[Octoberist]

My two issues with Pac Rim is that it's all night scenes (I think it has weight), and I wish we had more character development with the characters. It's a fun movie but it's often sluggish.

 

[redhawk23]

See I thought the character development was okay, its just that it was limited to very few of the characters.

The all night scenes bother me less as time goes on. Its just kind of odd to see people assume that it was done to hide the effects. That may have been the case back in the practical effects days but with cg doing so often has quite the opposite effect. All the water and the multiple light sources actually made the movie harder to make, not easier.

But yeah the movie needed a whole lot more of this. The perspective really sells the scale.

 

[redhawk23]

Godzilla is my most anticipated film of 2014. It's looks amazing and as a huge Goji fan I can't be more happy about how it looks.

But I'm already dreading the "this is what Pac Rim should have been" comments.

Its like complaining that Captain America wasn't the The Dark Knight.

 

[GremlinZilla89]

A few more daytime scenes would have been cool, but it's not like the night scenes were hard to make out. Far from it. I just think GDT was obsessed with atmosphere, mood and texture. Most of the Hellboy stuff is a night too.

 

[GremlinZilla89]

Its like complaining that Captain America wasn't the The Dark Knight.

Yup. I hate people holding "It wasn't like this" against a film when it's clear the film was never meant to be what you specifically wanted in the first place. GDT didn't want to make a horrifying, real world type monster flick. He wanted to capture the comic-booky essence of the genre.

It's one thing to prefer one take over the other, but damning a film for being something it was never meant to be in the first place just isn't fair. I see it happen all the time on the internet. Take a film as it is and evaluate on it's own terms-not what you wanted or thought it was going to be.

 

[Soapy]

Godzilla is my most anticipated film of 2014. It's looks amazing and as a huge Goji fan I can't be more happy about how it looks.

But I'm already dreading the "this is what Pac Rim should have been" comments.

Yup. I hate people holding "It wasn't like this" against a film when it's clear the film was never meant to be what you specifically wanted in the first place. GDT didn't want to make a horrifying, real world type monster flick. He wanted to capture the comic-booky essence of the genre.

It's one thing to prefer one take over the other, but damning a film for being something it was never meant to be in the first place just isn't fair. I see it happen all the time on the internet. Take a film as it is and evaluate on it's own terms-not what you wanted or thought it was going to be.

Indeed. Pacific Rim was exactly the movie it should have been.

Regarding the night scenes, I have zero issues with them and find it kind of strange that other people do.

 

[SofNascimento]

Special Effects on this Oscar are very weird.

 

[redhawk23]

As weird as the Special effects awards are, I honestly think Pacific Rim should have been up for costuming and production design as well. Although they certainly made use of cg and set extension, there were still a lot of really great sets built for this movie not to mention the Con pods themselves with puppeteered machines.

Also "Her." "Her" built up a world mostly through very subtle costumes and production design that think was very effective.

 

[redhawk23]

I recently bought the Criterion edition of del Toro's "Cronos." Included with it is an essay by critic Maitland McDonagh. She has a one line particular reflecting upon Cronos that I found quite humorous given the context of del Toro's Pacific Rim.

A melancholy modern-day spin on classic horror themes, Cronos (1993) was the then twenty-eight-year-old Mexican writer-director’s feature film debut, and it marked the arrival of a startlingly distinctive voice. Cronos was fresh without being trendy, exquisitely designed without losing sight of the fact that even the coolest creature—and the film’s cronos device, an intricately carved mechanical bug with a living core, is extraordinarily cool—can’t compensate for thinly conceived characters or a tediously formulaic narrative.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1679-cronos-beautiful-dark-things

It can well be argued that Pacific Rim goes completely against that. Ultimately though its a matter of very different aims for the two films, Cronos and Pacific Rim.

While many are quick to complain that the characters are thin or archetypal, GDT would be the first to agree. In his commentaries and such he talks about a drive to mostly get his point about each character across mostly visually, particularly with the Russians who are puposefully Boba Fett like figures.

The thinness of the characters as shown through the story remains a fair criticism but I do think the filmmakers were successful in their aims in regards of very quickly establishing who these characters were.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

Indeed. Pacific Rim was exactly the movie it should have been.

Regarding the night scenes, I have zero issues with them and find it kind of strange that other people do.

Agreed, I think GDT made the movie he wanted to here, because it all seems to be done with love and the usual GDT quirks.

In regards to the night scenes, I would have preferred one more daytime scene just as a different setting. But the night scenes we got I had no problem with, even more so on blu-ray were everything is crystal clear.

 

[-Arya-]

I'm willing to forgive the thinness of the characters in PR, but I just cannot get past the irritating and unnecessary comic relief characters (Charlie day and Burn Gorman).

 

[redhawk23]

The dialogue definitely needed some work. Technobabble is one thing but they were misusing very common words.

 

[LEOZZTT]

Special Effects on this Oscar are very weird.

The absence of Pacific Rim is unforgivable.

 

[GremlinZilla89]

Charlie Day was the best character in the movie. I honest don't see what is so irritating about him or Gorman. They were both pretty tame to me.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

The absence of Pacific Rim is unforgivable.

I have to agree, Gravity was the only movie I saw in 2013 which bettered it in terms of visual effects, and that won!

Charlie Day was the best character in the movie. I honest don't see what is so irritating about him or Gorman. They were both pretty tame to me.

I wouldnt say they were the best characters in the movie, Mako and Stacker were that for me, but I really liked them, they brought comic relief and helped move the plot along, really dont see the problem with them in the movie.

 

[KevanG]

Am I the only one who wants to see the next movie open with the Kaiju fighting dinosaurs? They mentioned having tried it before in the movie and they didn't like the planet til we ****ed it up.

 

[Pink Ranger]

Am I the only one who wants to see the next movie open with the Kaiju fighting dinosaurs? They mentioned having tried it before in the movie and they didn't like the planet til we ****ed it up.

Not for Pacific Rim 2, but that would be a cool Pixar film. Dinosaurs (that can speak American English, of course) banding together to fight off alien Kaiju invaders. Kids will eat that up. $$$$