Thanks to Geeks Are Sexy, I came across this Honest Trailer for this year’s popular flick, Pacific Rim. To be perfectly honest, while the movie was entertaining, it did require a lot of brain inactivity. Attempts to be mentally conscious elicited at least ten plot questions before the title sequence had even displayed.

Here’s the honest trailer. There are some minor spoilers so watch with caution if you’re still intending to catch the movie.

And because I’m optimistic that somebody somewhere may have the answers my plot red flags, here they are:

Naturally this next section comes with a Spoiler Alert warning.

So these are the thoughts that flitted through my head in the first 20 odd minutes of the movie, before the main title sequence. Not many of them were answered as the movie progressed.

• It took FOUR attacks before humanity started taking these attacks seriously?! Really? I mean, sure, watch Reality TV and you could possibly accept this. Then again, look at the followup to any terrorist incident.
• Why were there only singular attacks so many months apart? Even when you didn’t know these beings are supposedly as organised as is indicated later in the movie, it seems very suspect.
• “Then it all changed.” Again. Like that time it changed when the robots were winning which came after that other time when it all changed when those monsters attacked. That’s just stupid dialogue imo. There was a lot of poor dialogue in this movie.
• Cool outfits but I don’t get why they have such excessive pain transmitters. That just seems unnecessary.
• Also, why must both pilots move their same arms together? It seems pointless that the pilot who controls the left part of the robot moves his right arm in an exact mirror to his partner. Use the free arms for something useful and stop tiring them without purpose.
• Okay, so there’s a little fishing ship in the middle of the ocean that seems to not expect that there are scary monsters on the planet. You’d think they’d be a little more prepared after the innumerable battles since the narrator started talking.
• As a future suggestion, Jaeger soldiers, recharge your plasma canon while you’re not actually fighting the enemy. Every FPS player knows you reload as soon as you’re able. Even after only a single shot. 😛
• And how long were these soldiers in training? Their reaction times are pathetically slow. “Oh my, the hull is breached, let’s stare stupidly at this development instead of invoking any evasive maneuvers.”
• It is good to know there is a back-up plan should either of the pilots be incapacitated for whatever reason. Oh wait, no there isn’t.
• I like that there’s this element of mental connection between the two pilots but it wasn’t played with as much as it could be. In this, the first real battle the viewers get to be part of, we really don’t feel the trauma experienced by Becket when his brother is killed given that he is, through his link, experiencing exactly what his brother is experiencing. Also, this.
• Why isn’t there an emergency escape module? Or any visible safety features? You’d think that would be standard given the regulations on existing flying vehicles. (Those were my thoughts at the beginning of the movie; the escape pod eventually was revealed later.)
• And then came the title sequence. But one more rant….there’s eight months available to build a wall. So attacks are at least eight months apart, right? Also, it’s been a further five years in the story line. Has nobody been able to come up with a better idea than building a wall? Seriously?! Did everyone currently working for Google and Apple die?

Okay, I’m done whingeing. I love action movies but, seriously, put some thought into the script. We have some amazing, intelligent storytellers on this planet and this movie has some really cool action and visual elements to it. It just grates my goat when the two seem to be mutually exclusive in Hollywood’s fare, especially when it involves otherwise brilliant and talented people.

I was taken by the lengths that director Guillermo del Toro went to craft the shots in the movie; it really is visually spectacular. That doesn’t mean it has to be stupid. The pretty-but-dumb jock routine died with the 80s.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.