Saturday, July 27, 2013

Pacific Rim: some questions


1. So there are these alien beasties coming through a sea-bed fissure in the space-time continuum (or summat) that can’t be bombed because the fissure only opens for the beasties and shuts tight when any human penetration is attempted. Okay, I get that. But the fissure stays in the same place and the beasties always rise up from the sea. So:

(a) why not just mine the entire area around the fissure for, say, a fifty mile radius? Alien beasties come through fissure, alien beasties immediately go bashing into a fuckload of mines, alien beasties get blown to shit. Job done!

(b) in the twelfth fucking year of the war against the beasties, why are people still living in coastal cities and townships? Why haven’t they been evacuated and moved hundreds of miles inland and said cities mined and booby-trapped?

2. So the alien beasties share a hive mind and there are gazillions of them lurking behind the fissure, and their incursions are increasing such that the time between incursions halves with each successive attack, counting down to zero hour when multiple beasties will burst through the fissure and mankind will be well and truly fucked. So: why not just send an army of beasties through at the outset, whup mankind’s collective ass first time round and avoid twelve years of fight back during which more and more big metal robots get built? I mean, c’mon, alien beastie dudes, where’s the strategy?

3. The jaegar pilots who bond deeply based on shared memories are the best suited to “the drift”, therefore maximising their prowess in jointly controlling the big metal robots. So:

(a) how come jaegar pilot tryouts are based on how aggressively they fight each other?

(b) where’s the logic in a scientist instigating a “drift” with an alien beastie’s brain when there can be no possible bond or common memory to facilitate it?

4. Didn’t anyone do a risk assessment on the Wall of Life construction project? Seriously, sliding down a girder with your only your cloth-gloved hands for purchase will not make you look cool. It’ll shred the gloves off your hands then do the same thing to the hands themselves.

5. Why does the jaegar pilot training programme seemingly insist on interminable hand-to-hand combat with the alien beasties during which the jaegers sustain metal-rending damage before any of the neat funky weaponry is deployed? Why not deploy the neat funky weaponry first and blow the alien beastie fuckers to hell?

6. Did nobody involved in the production do a quick Google translate to check whether “kaiju” actually does mean “giant monster”? Because, uh, it doesn’t. You need the suffix “dai” to make that one work.

7. How come a Mark 1 model of anything made later than 1990 is analogue? Let alone a bit of kit so sophisticated its operating system is configured to neural synthesis?

8. Weren’t the filmmakers aware that we’ve already seen ‘Godzilla’, ‘Independence Day’, ‘Transformers’, ‘Iron Man’ and every sci-fi outing where the alien threat is driven by a requirement to asset-strip the earth of its natural resources?

9. What the fuck kind of name is Stacker Pentecost?

10. How can it be possible that the supremely intelligent visual poet who made ‘The Devil’s Backbone’, ‘Hellboy’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ directed this POS?

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