Pacific Rim

Mark and I saw Pacific Rim on Friday, but in my laziness I have not posted this discussion about it until today. However, this does allow me to see how the movie performed over the weekend, in case that pertains to our talk. In this case I think it does. It's true that this has been the summer of blockbuster let-downs. A lot of high-profile titles that have left people scratching their heads as to what was the point. However, this past weekend, we got a movie that is not a reboot or a remake of any kind.

And how did this movie fare? It came in third at the box office. A fact that wouldn't be as painful if the first and second slots weren't held by Despicable Me 2 and Grown-Ups 2. There is zero originality left in Hollywood, but I guess that's exactly what the average movie goer wants. Every Adam Sandler movie in the past decade has been an enormous disappointment, and yet people still pay to see him act like a handicapped child. Thank you, America, for proving that you really are as dumb and tasteless as everyone assumes.

Too much? Well, if you're still reading, maybe you agree with me.

Viewers: Us, though we did not sit in the back row
Time Elapsed Since Release: 0 hours

Dylan: It’s refreshing to have a big budget apocalypse/future movie that doesn’t in some way feature New York being destroyed. From that alone, I say this movie is pretty original.

Mark: And damn does Del Toro make those destroyed buildings look pretty when they come down.  Well, this whole movie is damn pretty.

Dylan: As the title indicates, we’re dealing with the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding lands. Which for some reason took me a while to realize. Giant beasts come out of the ocean and start wreaking havoc wherever they can, which ends up being places like San Francisco, Manila, and Hong Kong. And the whole time I was thinking “wow, we might actually be safe from this one. That’s different.”

But yea, I thought the sets were fantastic. The Hong Kong scenes were just magnificent. The scale worked, the CGI worked. One thing I have been thinking about is the camera work. This is the kind of movie where you want to see the action. But the action is so big, how does the filmmaker go about showing it? If you’re too zoomed in, you can’t tell what’s going on and it’s just stuff moving and blowing up, ala the Transformers trilogy. But if you’re zoomed too far out, you don’t really get the sense of how huge these things are and the creatures and buildings just look like models. In the end I was really impressed by del Toro’s blending of the two so that we saw plenty of the action in panoramic, but also got plenty of street-level perspective as buildings came down and cars and trains and boats and bridges and what not were tossed around.

Mark: Yeah I was so thaknful that this didn’t turn into one of the other summer blockbusters in which the filmmaker thinks we need to be right up in the action where we can’t even figure out who’s thrown the punch or whatever, like Man of Steel.  Instead we sit back and take in all of the giant robots and monsters duking it out in the ocean or city.  And what blew my mind was that when they’re in the city, surrounded by building, it never felt cluttered.  Nothing was ever blocked off by some debris.  We never lost sight of them, and the action stayed as frenetic as it was in the ocean, albeit slow cause we are talking about massive things here.

And on that, what I love the most is that the Jaeger’s and Kaiju all have this tremendous sense of weight to them.  in Transformers, they were jumping around and flipping and shit like they weighed nothing.  But here, we watch how long it takes for them to wind up a punch, and then cutting back to the pilots made it even clearer.  It made it all feel so much more realistic, but never lost that sense of fantasy.

Dylan: I wouldn’t be a good little physics student if I didn’t say that this movies takes some liberties with the unforgivable laws of motion and gravity. That being said, I agree that it honors just enough to make the action tolerable. There were a few moments that I found annoying. Like how the Jaegar can be carried by a half a dozen helicopters when it’s the size and mass of a skyscraper. But overall, I found it pretty believable.

My other comment is how amazing the detail is. The sets were gorgeous. But I’m talking specifically about the Jaegars and the Kaiju. I loved that each Kaiju was a little different. And each one sort of had a perk. As they got harder to fight, they had more abilities, from wings, to acid spit to the ability to emit an electromagnetic pulse. And each one looked completely unique from the others and from any other monster we’ve seen on the big screen before. Del Toro has always had an interesting eye for weird creatures, and he really gets to play with that here.

Mark: And what I like, too, is that even on such a massive scale you really see the details on everything.  And I don’t mean just the Jaegers and Kaiju, but the cities too.  The neon lights in downtown Hong Kong shining off the wet streets and Jaegers, creating this almost dreamlike quality.  But then the gritty aspects after you see everything destroyed.  There’s a scene with the aftermath of a Kaiju attack, and it could have easily just all been CGI, but it’s a real set and that gives more realism to it.  Not to say the CGI doesn’t feel real, because it does.  But I think we’ve established how amazing it looks.  How’d you like the story?  And the characters?

Dylan: I was about to get to that. I thought the characters were kind of lame and cliche. Now, I can’t really complain, because this movie delivered exactly what it advertised: giant monsters fighting giant robots. But I thought Jax from Sons of Anarchy was just playing the same character. And the emotion just seemed so out of place in this movie. Whenever Mori had an emotional moment with either Jax or Stringer Bell, people in the theater with me just laughed because it seemed kind of contrived. The human drama was there, but didn’t really need to be. I thought the father-son dynamic of the Australian team was kind of interesting and I sort wanted to know more about the Marshal's past.

Mark: Well luckily Del Toro wants to expand this universe, so we might get a prequel of the early days or something along those lines.  But, i’ll agree that most of the characters were one-note, but on one level, that’s all they needed to be.  The human element needed to be there, but this was the right amount.  If the movie got too emotional or dramatic, it would detract from the monster fighting.  But I thought, if anything, they struck a good chord with the serious characters and comedic characters.  I enjoyed the science team; I thought they played off each other well and helped to break what could have been a overly consistent dark tone.  Cause you can’t have a super serious tone with monsters v. robots, it would feel too disjointed.  And as always, Ron Perlman was just fantastic.  But just to say, I thought Charlie Hunnam (Jax) was surprisingly upbeat for most of it.  Aside from the seriousness of the battles, he always kept a smile, to balance everyone else.  I found it remarkably refreshing to have a lead who wasn’t either insufferably smug (Kirk from Star Trek or Tony Stark) or fairly depressing (Superman).

And I thought the story was good.  Cliched at points, though it played with the cliches so it didn’t feel as obvious.  And if you pay attention, you’ll see where things are going very early on.  But it was the opening that set the stage for this whole movie, and I thought it was just brilliant.

Dylan: Yea the opening scenes brought us right into the action and showed us just what we had to look forward to for the rest of the movie. I’d like to see a sequel (or prequel) with a little more humanity in it; better dialogue, more interesting characters. I know that’s asking a lot these days, but just as the weight and scale of the Jaegars added to their believability, some more three dimensional character would definitely add some credibility to the entire film. Yes, I want to see giant robots smashing ships over giant monsters' heads, but it would help if I cared at all about the tens of thousands of people dying every time one of these battles takes place.

Mark: Yeah, hopefully this does well enough that they’ll go on and expand it, and with that Del Toro will know that he’s definitely not lacking in the action but just needs to bump up the character depth.  But even saying that, this movie deserves to be seen.  It’s damn fun, looks amazing, and is something original in a summer that’s been drowning in remakes, sequels, and reboots.  It’s giving us something new, which for the first time gave me some tension while watching.  Cause I didn’t know who might be killed.  Instead of Star Trek where none of the leads were ever really in danger or Man of Steel where obviously Lois or Perry isn’t going to die, this brings back those old days of being held in suspense of what’ll happen to the characters.  So go see it damn it!

Dylan: Yea, I don’t usually say this, but I kind of wish I had seen it in Imax 3D. I just felt like the screen was too small. I would go see it again. But I doubt I’ll get the chance. The color-scheme, scale, cinematography, everything is just begging to be seen in high definition. So I would definitely recommend a viewing in one form or another.

Mark: Yeah, I’d see it again, and try to get to at least an Imax, cause damn, it would look amazing on that.  Best summer blockbuster this year.  By far.

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UPDATE...

Dylan: So I went back and saw this bad boy in IMAX 3D. You may know already that I don't really care for 3D; I find that even when the filmmakers and studio promise that the 3D looks better than the 2D, it usually muddles the visuals and just costs more to see. (Also, up until recently, I had to wear prescription glasses underneath the 3D glasses, which was just humiliating.) But Pacific Rim is probably the first film I have ever seen in 2D and thought to myself "wow, I need to see this on a bigger screen." So I gave it a whirl and, holy shit, did it look magnificent. I remember I saw Avatar in 3D. That's about all it was good for. But Pacific Rim in IMAX 3D is an entirely new experience. It is never gimmicky at all (nothing flying at the screen). It serves only to make the beautiful destruction so much more visceral and mind blowing. If you haven't seen this movie yet, and, box office statistics from the past few weeks suggest that you probably haven't, I highly recommend that you see the movie in this format. You will not regret it.