If you like movies about giant robots, go see it. I mean that's basically it really. If you enjoy watching giant robots beat the snot out of aliens, then what the hell are you waiting for? Go see it.

The movie was actually surprisingly good. I won't go so far as to say it was 'amazing', because it wasn't, but it was certainly better than my initial expectation after the first few minutes. The film opens with the entire premise being introduced within five minutes. You have the aliens appearing, wrecking everyone's shit, the Jaegers being created, the Jaegers winning, then an implication that it doesn't stay that way. That's the first five minutes.

The next ten minutes are spent watching a Jaeger get its shit wrecked. So much for that!

So hardly even 20 minutes in and already what I'm seeing here is a rushed story. A lot of movies as of late are less than 2 hours long, so for all I know there's hardly more than an hour left to flesh this stuff out and I still don't have any particular attachment to anyone nor do I know anything sciencey about the Kaijuu! How the heck am I supposed to get into this film if I can't grasp any science!?

Well... thankfully, the film is longer than 2 hours, and they do spend time getting into the biology and origin of the Kaijuu, and they do spend at least some time giving characterization to the lead cast. There's also quite a bit of robot action, which is always good, and some humor here and there to mix things up. Before I start saying any more positive things about the film, however, let me start by getting the negatives out of the way as I so enjoy doing.

First off, the reviews that say the film is 'noisy' or 'loud' are accurate. I didn't know what the hell those critics were talking about (it's an action film, of course it's noisy!) but after seeing it I totally understand what they meant by it. A lot of lines get drowned out by noise. There were quite a few places where I found myself creasing my brow and wondering what the heck someone just said. That's not good. That's an audio mixer who needs to be fired. You can't drown out the cast when they're speaking their lines. It confuses the audience.

Secondly, I didn't feel any particular attachment to the cast. Yes, there was a moment where I felt a pang of sadness (hilariously, only because I could understand Japanese as the line wasn't subtitled for the audience) but there was no real attachment. I didn't particularly care if any member of the cast got killed off. There was nothing making me think anyone was any more important than anyone else. No one really stood out. No character got a whole bunch of flesh except the lead female and even she only had enough to give another character more depth than just I'm-a-clone-of-Millard-from-Macross-Plus. It was a little closer to being action, a little further away from being drama. That's okay, I guess, but don't you want to empathize with a character so that you can feel their desperation? Doesn't that enhance the experience of the world ending around you?

Thirdly, while there were some good comedy moments, some of the comedic moments were horribly misplaced. For example, there's a scene where a Jaeger misses a punch and the fist goes through a skyscraper instead. It gets partway through the building, stops just before an office desk... and a Newton's Cradle on the desk that had been idle starts going right before the camera goes back to the action. The building is completely obliterated seconds later. Huh? Why take away from the action sequence there? That makes no sense. It's so forced that it made me frown instead.

And finally, I have to rag on the science. For the most part, the film does a good job of staying within its allowable boundaries as a science fiction film. We all know that giant robots are in fact inefficient and that all the R&D would be better spent on building a better bomb instead. In fact, some of the weapons on the Jaegers themselves would be put to better use on a UAV. However, since I love giant robots and MechWarrior and Evangelion and all that shit I can ignore that because screw you, giant robots are cool. If I ragged on it for the Jaegers then for one, I wouldn't have seen the film and for another thing I wouldn't own so damn many Gundam models.

Nor am I going to argue over the biology of the Kaijuu themselves, for instance how such massive creatures are able to move so nimbly within Earth's atmosphere, or how one of them practically has an EMP projector on its forehead which seems like it would fry itself but whatever. No, that's fine, they're aliens so again I'd have to disregard my love of Gunbuster if I wanted to rag on the Kaijuu. I cannot do that, it's one of my favorite mecha series of all time. So yes, even the Kaijuu themselves get a pass.

So where do I draw the line? At the conclusion of the film, that's where. Similar to my argument that the conclusion of Star Trek (the first JJ Abrams one) made no goddamn sense within the realm of science, the 'epic climax' of Pacific Rim makes no goddamn sense within the realm of science. Hell, even before that scene you run into an issue. Strap in, I'm about to get really nerdy.

So that Kaijuu with the EMP on its forehead. It fires the thing, stopping one of the Jaegers dead in its tracks and also taking out part of Hong Kong. Cool. Well except Hong Kong is apparently okay a few scenes later (!?). Oh and apparently all of the other Jaegers are 'digital' (whatever that means!) but there's this one old Jaeger with two nuclear reactors in it that's 'analog'. And because it's 'analog' it can operate after the EMP hits. O...kay. I don't... uh... okay. Let's think for a moment here.

Problem #1: What the fuck? Digital/Analog? I'm sorry but the control system for any Jaeger is Digital. I don't care that the nuclear reactor will generate power regardless of an EMP. If your electronics are fucking fried it doesn't matter that you're pumping electricity through them, they're fucking fried! And okay, so this one Jaeger that's got a reactor in it works because of that. So then what the fuck are the others powered by? We know one of them is powered by '50 diesel engines', and yeah, if that got hit with an EMP and fried its ECUs then it's dead in the water. Robotics;Notes suggests that powering a giant robot with diesel engines is also INCREDIBLY inefficient from a power/weight perspective, but eh, whatever. The point is, I don't care if you're still generating power if your control system got hit with an EMP. Make all the electricity you want. It won't matter.

Problem #2: How the fuck are you going to get the command unit (the head, that is) into the Jaeger while the base is struck by an EMP and nothing's working, genius!? You have to get the thing lowered into place and connected! Well guess what, nothing's fucking working. The base is offline. No power means no power to the cranes which means no power to get the head into place which means no power to launch the Jaeger which means I'm sorry but again, I don't care how 'analog' you are you're not getting launched.

Problem #3: Here's the big problem I alluded to before. So at the end of the film the idea is that they have to detonate this thermonuclear device strapped to the back of one of the Jaegers inside the interdimensional portal in order to collapse it. Okay, sure, I'll go with that. Except oops, they have to blow the thing well before getting into the portal just to clear a path to the portal itself. What's left? Well, you've got that one Jaeger with two nuclear reactors in it, so let's just blow that in the portal! DUDE, GENIUS! I mean come on, it's a nuke! It's a nuke so just put it into the portal and blow that shit to kingdom come! Yeah!!

Except no, get the fuck out of my face that is NOT HOW A NUCLEAR REACTOR WORKS!!! Maybe if I hadn't read every fucking atomic physics book I could get my grubby little hands on when I was less than double-digits in age you could have fooled me but unfortunately for you nuclear power generation is one of my top subjects that I obssess over. It pisses me off to no end when moviemakers try to pull this whole nukes=explosions bullcrap because it's not true. To me, this sort of thing is like the feeling firearms enthusiasts get when they watch an AK-47 or an AR-15 unload 500 rounds in an action movie without reloading. That's not how it fucking works so please just stop.

For those of you who aren't aware, a nuclear reactor works by converting heat (thermal radiation) into mechanical (and then electrical) energy by way of a turbine. Usually. At their most basic I suppose you could consider them 'analog' in that they will continue to generate heat without any outside influence and aren't affected by EMP, but as Fukushima showed a loss of electrical power to their control systems will still cause really nasty unwanted things to happen. Can you make a completely analog reactor? I believe you could, you would just need a way to move the control rods without electricity or have a reactor that controls itself via negative reactivity coefficients (achieves dynamic equilibrium by slowing reactions when it's hot and speeding reactions when it's cold). While incredibly difficult and arguably inefficient, this is science-fiction so we can let them have that much.

The thing is, a nuclear reactor designed to generate power, whether that's pure mechanical power or electrical power, is wholly incapable of creating an atomic explosion such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let alone one on par with the thermonuclear device they were going to send into the rift in the first place. An atomic/thermonuclear bomb has a small amount of nuclear material surrounded by conventional explosives. The conventional explosive compresses the nuclear material to extreme high pressure, setting off an uncontrolled chain reaction with incredibly mass/energy in an incredibly small area. This differential is what actually causes the explosion. In essence it is simply a regular bomb with a little energy added as a kick.

A reactor vessel is not designed like a bomb casing. It cannot attain the pressure of an atomic bomb detonation. Even if you yanked all the control rods out and even assuming that the reactor has a positive coefficient of reactivity (inherently unsafe when left unsupervised), a complete core overheat and meltdown would not cause an atomic explosion, period. The best example of what would happen to a completely out-of-control reactor is Chernobyl. When that reactor went supercritical the spike of reactor vessel pressure caused the top to pop off, creating a small explosion that destroyed the reactor building but little else. Once the reactor was exposed to air its power level increased once again and created an atomic explosion that was equivalent to all of ten tons of TNT which also ended the reaction and prevented further explosions.

So that meltdown's biggest explosion was about ten tons of TNT. Hiroshima was 16,000 tons. Our first thermonuclear test was 10,000,000 tons, or almost a million times more powerful than Chernobyl's meltdown. The hydrogen explosions at Fukushima--not atomic in nature--were pitifully less than a single ton of TNT equivalent. The fact is, reactors are not designed to explode. Reactors are designed to generate power. Generating stable, reliable power and creating a massive, deadly explosion are completely opposite engineering principles. When it comes to fission you either do one or the other. Either the whole thing goes KABLAMMO in an instant, or it peters out some power over a long period of time. That's it.

Are any of you even still reading this? If so, props for sticking with me and please join me to discuss nuclear physics sometime, I happen to love the subject and it seems you have an interest as well. In any case, the point is that if the Jaeger is powered by a fission reactor then the biggest possible explosion it could make, reacting seawater with an exposed core within a pressure vessel, is a few tens of tons of TNT. Pitifully small and nowhere NEAR the destructive force observed in the film as the Jaeger self-destructs.

Now, that brings up a fun point. They reference the Jaeger 'self-destructing' but specifically point to manually forcing the reactor to run out of control and go into meltdown. Well... sorry but meltdown and 'self-destruct' on the scale you're talking about are two completely different things. Now, on the other hand, they could have avoided my entire rant if they just said that the Jaegers had a nuclear weapon on board as a last ditch self-destruct. You know, 'the needs of the many' and all that. So we lose two pilots and a robot. We (hopefully) killed the Kaijuu. I could see that being deployed. However, instead of doing that they insist that the nuclear reactor onboard the Jaeger is capable of a massive atomic explosion. Nope. You lose, Guillermo del Toro.

Okay, so all that aside... did I enjoy the film? Yes, I did. It was a wonderful romp. It's giant robots! Giant robots fighting giant aliens! It's Godzilla, except infinitely more awesome because it's giant robots!! Oh and it was a nice touch that you know, the Japanese-speaking character was actually Japanese and actually spoke it properly? Sure the subtitles were a little iffy at times and there was one point where they didn't even bother to try subtitling what she said, but hey, it's there and it's accurate! Cool! Does the movie have problems? Hell yeah it does! But would I tell someone that it's not worth watching just because they decide to make a fission reactor explode?

Only if I told someone not to watch JJ Abrams's Star Trek because it's impossible for a matter-antimatter explosion to have enough force to counteract the gravitational force of a black hole. And you know what? I haven't said that to anyone yet.

This was his commentary on the concept of keeping the illegals out by building a wall? I mean, that's actually something real people in real life wanted to make happen as a real solution! ROFL!!

The problem being, of course, that they were trying to stick to 'real' physics but when physics got in the way they changed the laws of physics in the film rather than doing the Star Trek thing and inventing a gadget that would solve the physics problem in a scientific way (SEE: monopole motors, structural integrity fields, magnetic joints, etc). That's where I have to draw the line. The robot shows I'm into tried their damndest to come up with solutions that worked within the realm of actual science. Even Gunbuster, with its 250m tall robot, tried very hard to have a concept that actually was plausible (assuming you accepted having a power source of a Kerr black hole).

This was just a cop-out. "Oh well we didn't like the effect here so we increased local gravity. Oh we didn't like how much water was being displaced so we just turned down the effect radius. Stupid physics, just behave the way I say instead of like real life!" Absolute nonsense.

Then we have a subject I didn't really touch on in my first review. Drifting. No, not Initial D, but the VULCAN TUNA MELT that is the neural interface for the Jaegers. So let me get this straight here. The idea is that you have two pilots right? They suit up in this fancy neuro-suit, plug into the Jaeger, and the computer forces their brains to synchronize with one another. To reduce 'mental stress' only one hemisphere is used per person. Am I hearing that right? Do I have the concept down?

That's bullshit.

Brains are not a RIGHT SIDE-LEFT SIDE device. They are infinitely more complex than that, with subsets of thought processes being handled by different areas. If half of my brain were synchronized with half of someone else's brain, even if they were my identical twin, there would be NO WAY for us to even TALK. In the case of identical twins you might have a situation where they could at least fight and control the robot properly but there would be so much noise from independent thought that it would be incredibly difficult to keep the interface clean...and that's not mentioning ridiculous situations like Mako/Raleigh or Bro/Chief.

Now, to be perfectly nice to these guys, at the very least they did have the halves on the correct sides in the monitors. The right-side pilot controls the right-side of the Jaeger with the left-side of his brain, and vice-versa. That's correct as far as motor control goes for humans. The motor controls of the right side of your body are on the left side of your brain. That's just how it is. So they at least got that basic-of-basics right...but I refuse to let them off the hook for being able to get two totally unrelated brains to synchronize with no noice and, oh, still allow both pilots full freedom of independent thought.

In Evangelion, introducing more than one person into an Entry Plug created a lot of noise in the neural interface, reducing the ability of the pilot to synchronize normally. This could be overcome by will, for instance if Shinji's balls drop and he goes FUCK THIS NOISE and forces everything, or like in the instance where he and Asuka are in the same cockpit and manage to push the sync rate over 100% for a short period, but even Evangelion tells you that without a pilot suit and/or with other people in your cockpit the ability to synchronize with the robot is gonna take a huge hit.

Oh, and speaking of Evangelion... I like how the very first scene with Gipsy Danger when the pilots are getting in, there's this yellow fluid that's filled their helmet. It then appears to empty from the helmet. This fluid is never shown again in the entire film, nor is it explained what it is. Now, since we know the screenwriter saw Evangelion we can at least assume that it's a nudge to LCL...but if so then it shouldn't be emptied out of their helmet right before the sortie! So what gives!? What the hell is that yellow goo and why do you only see it once!?

Ugh. UGH. YOU, I WANNA LIKE YOU! Seriously I wanna like Pacific Rim but... I can only do so if I classify it as an action film instead of science-fiction. There's just not enough science.

Yeah the Yellow Liquid is where some people have been arguing with me that its LCL and thats how its related to Eva.You never see the Jaeger pilots breath it and its only showing once thru out the movie.My theory is that I think its between two pieces of glass in the helmets,kinda like a shield.Even Cherno Alpha was a Gen1 Jaeger and they never had it either.

Maybe it was a concept they dropped midway thru filming,even after reading the Art Book all the way thru theres no mention of it what so ever.If anything LCL is straight from The Abyss movie and Eva took from that.

If they're just arguing blindly, they're idiots who don't care about the details. That we see it drain away before launch means that it's not present during combat, meaning it's not acting like either LCL or the oxygenated fluid from The Abyss. I won't get into the difference between the two here, but the point is that for either fluid to work they would need to actually be present. If it's drained then it's not doing anything.

I was confused by that part too. It leaves two possibilities that I can see.

1.) del Toro got his history wrong (or learned it from cartoons) and thought that dinosaurs existed at the same time as humans, insinuating that dinosaurs were Kaiju.

2.) The reference is to Kaiju appearing in the time of the dinosaurs but then going back.

I honestly don't know which it is. Maybe the director's cut bluray will have more answers. Sorry I can't be more help.

I'm guessing that it's the latter, Occam's Razor and all.