The film’s putative hero, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam, a study in blankness), loses his co-pilot and brother in the opening battle scenes, and only reluctantly returns to fight at humanity’s last stand in Hong Kong. The Jaegers are directed by two pilots who sit inside the giant head, stuck in a mind-meld virtual reality that’s made that much more effective when the two have some emotional connection. To fight back, huge Robotech-styled vehicles called Jaegers (German for hunter or fighter) were built. They’re actually called kaiju, in case you didn’t get what del Toro was going for. Long, scaly, Cloverfield-type beasts are crawling out of a hellish interdimensional gash on the ocean floor and laying waste to coastal cities around the Pacific Rim. The setup is handled somewhat clumsily at the start by a narration that continually emphasizes the “we” of humanity (the film is a throwback to the old style of kaiju and disaster films, where people put national differences aside and work together). In the case of Pacific Rim, what del Toro wanted to do was create a scenario in which giant robots get to slug it out with monsters. Hopefully, that won’t involve any more Hellboy sequels. A number of them sound as though they could approximate the greatness of his earlier fairy-tale work in Pan’s Labyrinth and Devil’s Backbone, but maybe this could prove to be the big international hit that he needed to finally become one of those directors who’s allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness put aside (probably a smart move on the studio’s part, but a sad day for fans of the fantastic), del Toro still had a number of irons in the fire. After getting nixed from The Hobbit and seeing his plans for a mammoth, R-rated take on H.P. In some ways, this is the great demolition derby that Guillermo del Toro has been working towards in the past decade or so that he’s been trying to get various mega-budget projects off the ground. But when humanity’s last hope is undergoing serious identity crises right at the moment of peak battle, it adds just that extra dollop of tension needed to make this more than just another del Toro comic-book film. Granted, that spectacle in and of itself is no slouch, with more artful textures and layered colors than can be found in the flat, sunlit destruction of a Transformers film. But, then, us viewers would be left with just the sight of skyscraper-sized fighting machines beating the unholy tar out of ravenous cross-dimensional beasts. You can get it here.You would think that with the end of the human race practically around the corner (or, in this case, underneath the Pacific Ocean), people would have an easier time of putting their psychological baggage to the side until the fighting is over.
If you would like a copy of last Friday's webinar "5 Simple Steps to Improving Your Fertility TODAY.Even if You're Over 40", it's available for download until todayWed Apr 4 at 6pm PST. Learn to cultivate emotional detachment and accept these events as part of your process. The emotional charge you give them determines how they are handled. If you can look at them from a standpoint of what can you learn, this then becomes an expansive process of growth and curiosity to improve your fertility rather than a contractive one of fear and blame so you can say you tried everything (but didn't stick with it long enough for it to work). There is no easy way to wave a magic wand and say "just let it be". But that's really what you have to do. I see it when each tampon you use takes a slice out of your dream to be a mother. I see it when your partner is on a business trip just as you're ovulating. I see it when partners blame each other for having waited so long to get pregnant. I see it when women blame themselves for having waited so long to get pregnant. That got me thinking about how letting go of the past is so important when you're trying to get pregnant.
The risk is that a pilot can get lost in his/her memories when in this neural merge with their co-pilot, lose grip of the present, and therefore the robot. That can be disastrous cuz the robot is loaded with suped up weaponry. In order to battle huge, dinosaur-like aliens, humans created robots. The robots are so massive they need 2 people to control them, one for each side. These pilots need to do a mind meld, sorta like Spock so they can coordinate the right and left sides of the robot.
When others go to church, I go to the movie theaters. So I took my girls to see "Pacific Rim Uprising" Easter morning. Great special effects with ugly aliens fighting shiny robots. That's my kind of bling! Not for most people but right up my and my 13yo's alley.