Poll: Pacific Rim vs The Avengers

[Yuuki]

This is like ice cream vs chicken, which is better. Both do different things for me, and they do it very well.

Overall I'm not surprised Avengers has more votes, it had like 3 decent movies leading up to it and far bigger budget and scope (having 5 superheroes).

 

[tzimize]

The big geek movie of 2012 was The Avengers. Pacific Rim was big geek movie of 2013.

So there is a question for you guys:
Which one of these contenders do you think was (is) better?


I personally think that both movies were great in their own way:

The Avengers is the end result of the riskiest move of modern movie industry: creation of a few at first glance unrelated movies (for people that don't read comics, at least), that are linked together in the "final" one.

Pacific Rim is a brand new IP (which is another risky move in modern Holywood), which was the very first Mecha/Kaiju movie from west since Robot Jox and this USA Godzilla movie that is quite bad. It was basically a huge love letter to people who simply like such flicks. It also one of the few movies (if not the only one) where gigantic robots fealt, well, real: huge, hulking monstrosities, slow yet powerful, with minimum of decorative features, unlike those shown in most anime and western cartoons. Plus, freaking Cherno Alpha!

Yet in the end, for me, The Avengers is the winner in this debate simply because they had lesser ammount of OBVIOUS mess-ups: killing 2 most interesting Jaegers after 5 minutes battle just to show how powerful Kaijus are, this brain-link, which was IMHO made just to give reason to showing this great scene from Makos memories, and many others.

But both of those movies are still amazing.

Pacific Rim was AWFUL.

While the robot fighting was awesome (how could it not be) but the characters and story was just....terrible. Its been a long time since I've watched a movie and actually cringed at the acting/lines...Pacific Rim made me do that. I seriously had to avert my eyes and be embarrassed in the movie theater. Also, the fighting scene between the guy and gal was a disgrace.

Avengers was a clean 10 from the getgo. Great acting, fantastic lines and spectacular fighting. The two movies arent even a little bit close quality-wise.

 

[skywolfblue]

I liked Avengers a bit more, not 10/10 my favorite movie ever, but I did enjoy it a lot. Aside from the awesome, but totally impossible in real life helicarrier, most of the rest of it more or less made a certain kind of sense within the powers they were given. The characters were great, there's a number of lines and interactions between the characters that are really enjoyable.

For Pacific Rim I liked the nerd characters, but that's about it.

If you're going to make giant robots, make them look like beastly death machines, don't just make a standard human frame with fists. (AKA, make it something more like the walkers in Star-Wars or District 9, or Mech Warrior) I'm biased against human frame robots. I didn't like most of the bots in transformers either.

Use the damn sword from the beginning! Mechs doing wrestling is just weird to me. If they'd actually made more use of giant swords and agile robots that could put on some entertaining swordplay that would have been a lot better. As it is only the last two fights feature it in any great detail and I didn't think it was that impressive of a battle.

A nuclear powered robot is still electrical.
Why does every fight scene seem to take place in the ocean, yet somehow the bots are only knee deep in water?
Why do they "train" with staff weapons, when the robots don't even use staff weapons. You know, if one of the robots actually had been using a staff weapon then it would have been a lot cooler.
...And a myriad of other things like that that add up to a "this is nonsensical, and it would have been more awesome if they had spent the time to make it a bit more logical" conclusion in my book.

The main characters are bland. The characters in Avengers have a lot of flavor, the characters in Pacific Rim, not so much. Except for the nerds, they were awesome, but they weren't the main focus of the show and didn't get all that much screen time.

I suppose it's just weird to me because I haven't watched many Kaiju / Humanoid Robot shows. I've never had a deep affection for that stuff.

 

[Story]

The Avengers.

I'm actually surprised Pacific Rim is even being mentioned to be honest. It was a pretty mediocre movie, they both were in a way, but at least The Avengers was memorable.

 

[Crispee]

The Avengers, no contest. The Avengers had good characters, character interactions, character development, good action scenes, and good understanding of the source material.

Pacific Rim had none of that. The actions scenes were repeatedly obscured by neon blurs, random water splashes, and the fact that they didn't stand out against the dark backgrounds. The characters were completely forgettable, I couldn't begin to remember any of their names or motivations. And even though the climaxes both involved a character going through a portal and killing all the aliens, in The Avengers I understood what the sacrifice meant to the character and wanted him to live, in Pacific Rim I don't remember why the character had to go on a suicide mission nor did I care if they survived.

Sorry Pacific Rim, Avengers just seems far superior. The Avengers may be silly but it's meticulously crafted to be the precise degree of silly, Pacific Rim's silly feels like it was the first thing the writers came up with after skimming through the contents page of "Mecha Anime for Dummies".

But hey, whatever floats your boat, I'm sure there are plenty of legit reasons why one might feel differently to me.

 

[thejboy88]

I'm voting for PR. not to say that Avengers wasn't good, because it was great. But I like PR a little better because it managed to be just as entertaining and exciting without requiring several films worth of build-up behind it.

 

[GloatingSwine]

But still, I liked watching it. Just never use the Kaiju in a serious conversation about monsters. Any monster that has problems dealing with being hit from a cargo container in the face or a flare to the eye will last exactly 20 seconds in front of a small tank cannonade.

Except not. I mean it's even a point in the film that the first kaiju to appear basically took three weeks of being pounded on by everything the US military could throw at it and they only got bigger after that.

And why not just mount those plasma weapons and rockets on a smaller, less expensive chassis? Why not mount them on a battleship and have 10 or so battleships monitor the breach and just taunt the monsters and melt them?

The plasma gun doesn't look like it has anything like range. Every time it's used it's basically point blank. And in case you didn't notice, the breach is underwater. Battleships would basically be useless because the Kaiju would be absolutely free to chew their keels out one by one because they are underwater.

They're also pretty fast, since it's a matter of hours at most from them leaving the breach to them making landfall seemingly on either side of the pacific. Hence the large number of jaegers stationed at various points on the pacific rim, because there's no time to get into littoral waters to fight the Kaiju without it making landfall.

So the only thing that might be useful are submarines with supercavitating torpedoes (abandoned in real life because they don't turn very well so can't track a target that knows they're coming).


There is plenty to criticise about Pacific Rim, the key character development of Mako happens basically off screen (her learning to handle the drift and fight the Kaiju should have happened during the fight with Leatherback, because heroically overcoming your challenges in order to punch the bad guy in the face is at the heart of giant robots.), the silly scientist characters added nothing and there needed to be a fight with Crimson Dynamo and Cherno Alpha actually getting to do somehting, not having a scene where we're told how big their robot dicks are but then see them getting smashed in seconds and having no effect on the kaiju.

 

[GloatingSwine]

On the first point :
I know that. Does not make it less stupid. A 120 mm HEAT shell is QUITE a bit more powerful then getting hit by cargo containers at that speed. We are talking about around 40 MJ of force, that can penetrate 800+ mm of RHA steel. Less mass, but much higher velocity and penetrating power.

1. Joules are a unit of energy, not force.

2. An empty 40' cargo container weighs about 4 tons, that means it would have 40MJ of kinetic energy after a 10m fall.

3. The effect of a HEAT round is very localised. It might go through 800mm of RHA but it actually only makes a hole about an inch across. To a monster the size of a Kaiju it'd be like being stabbed really hard with a pin.

On the second point: Yes, though that leads to two problems:
1) Why do they seem to never be 100% sure on where the monsters are? Its like they still dont monitor the entire site properly
2) I envisioned it like the Battleships taunting the monsters like Cherno Alpha did. And then Annihilating them. But OK, fine. It may work the first few times, but then the aliens will code them to not fall for that trick. BUT WHY not mount those things, cannons and plasma cannons on Tank chassis? Like a tank (Kaiju) destroyer? Why not station Nuclear Submarines. Actually, no those can create tsunamis... Why not MOAB artillery? Less expensive then robots, less destructive then a nuke. Why not even mount those on the wall?

So you envisioned battleships fighting what are basically submarines by taunting them to the surface? Why would the Kaiju surface except to punch through the hull from underneath? (PS no-one has any battleships either, the second world war was the end of the line for heavy surface combatant vessels).

Bearing in mind that their time to landfall is sufficiently short that they must be significantly faster than any ship made by humanity. Probably actually employing supercavitation, so they can't be forced into an engagement by submarines either.

Also, do you know what a MOAB is? it's a bomb that weighs ten tons, and the size is essentially the whole reason it does what it does. You can't make artillery out of it, or use it at anything like close range to something you don't also want flattened (like your wall), and since the Kaiju only so far attack in urban coastal environments that means you basically have to bomb your own city flat.

And you don't address the range issue of the plasma cannon, it has a range of maybe 30m if you're lucky, you can't use it on a stationary platform, you need to bring it basically to contact with the enemy to make it do anything (the times it's actually used to kill Kaiju it's used at literally point blank range, as in execution style).

 

[lacktheknack]

I picked Avengers. They're pretty on-par, I think, except for the "Our mech is analog!" which made me die inside as an electronics student.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Avengers was a decently entertaining, pulpy super hero flick full of flashy action and cheesy one liners. It's not great cinema, but it was a good time at the movies.

Pacific Rim was fucking awful. One of the most disappointing films I've ever seen. Aside from maybe 5-10 minutes of monster punching action, it was almost unwatchable.

What's next? Batman Begins vs Howard the Duck?

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

ANd Idris Elba kicks Samuel L. Jackson's ass as the imposing comander (come at me).

I'd say that is because Elba is actually acting out a commander while Jackson never stops being Jackson, probably because the character he's playing is mostly the Ultimate Marvel version of Fury, who, lets face it, IS Jackson.

Whether by his own choice or because people expect it of him, I find that all too often in the movies he's in, Jackson ends up playing his typical 'badass ************' role, even though he's at his best when he plays something which is decidedly not that.

 

[GloatingSwine]

3) So why not shoot it a few hundred times then? Or use case shots (that how it is, nit sure)? Or even just good old missiles?

They did when the first one appeared. It took three weeks to kill.

On the second part, yeah. Cherno Alpha seems to be able to taunt them. That thing did not finish striker Eureka's crew when it could have.

You mean it responded to an actual threat rather than ignore it to kill something that wasn't? Note this happened when they were already in littoral waters, ie. not where you fight with a battleship.

The MOAB is a bomb (flaw of my english *facepalm* sorry), then why not monitor the Kaiju and as soon as they show up in front of a city shoot them down with it. It aint THAT powerful. They sure take their time when on land.

They don't show up "in front of" cities though, they show up at coastal cities, that means in harbours. The moment they make landfall they're in the city.

Also bear in mind that the category 5 ate a 2 megaton nuke right in the face and, whilst it wasn't particularly happy about it, didn't die.

As for the plasma cannon, that is why we use a chassis of a tank or a modified chassis. Or just those rockets.

No, that doesn't address the issue at all, it's a weapon which can only be used at point blank range, putting it at foot height is not going to be effective at all. You can mount it on a tank if you want to shoot the kaiju in the toes.

 

[shogunblade]

I fell in love with Pacific Rim. I saw it this summer in 3D and Imax, both were a first time for me, and I really want a sequel.

I cannot say the same for The Avengers. Something about that movie soured with me, and despite what people say about it, my opinion changes daily. Some days I hate it, other days, I don't dislike it as much, but Pacific Rim was just a blast from the first minute to the last.

It had so much more heart to it than The Avengers. There is that one scene with Mako which I won't spoil, but under my 3D glasses, I was fighting tears. It was so moving and horrifying. Watching The Avengers, I knew they were going to win. With Pacific Rim, I didn't get that as much, chalk it up to being an original IP.

P.R. reminded me of the live action Speed Racer that came out a few years ago, not well liked by many, but to me, I got caught up in it. It appealed to the little boy in me that doesn't get to come out all the time during movies, and was so much better.

TL;DR, Pacific Rim.

 

[Daget Sparrow]

Both are ok. Avengers had the better Comedy and characterization, but Pacific Rim had a more interesting antagonist and plot.

Nonetheless, when Avengers said/did something stupid, you didn't notice. When Pacific Rim did something stupid (eg: Dinosaurs having two brains), it was blatantly obvious. I'd say overall that The Avengers was the better film.

 

[Korolev]

I didn't really like the Avengers - mostly because I didn't grow up with any of the characters and find it hard to care about most of them. Also, they're so damned invincible and over-powered and the film has this distinctly non-serious vibe that there wasn't much tension. It look pretty cool, but it was just "heroes smash bad guys! Yay!".

Now, in Pacific Rim, the tension was always there. Sure, you knew the good guys would win (it is a summer-block buster after all), but exactly which characters would survive and which wouldn't wasn't known. The tension was more palpable. Also, I just happen to really like Giant Robots. The action was on a really grand scale and felt more believable to me. With the Avengers, it always looked a little silly with Captain America and Black Widow leaping around in their little costumes doing backflips and whatnot. The Live-Action Action seemed a little fake and hollow. With Pacific Rim, it's entirely CGI, and while it doesn't look "real", it never lacks impact or stylishness.

 

[sneakypenguin]

Pacific rim was embarrassingly bad. I actually walked out of the theater feeling like it was the death of nerd movies. Acting was terribad, plot was nonsensical, the way they fought the monsters was nonsense. The special effects were kind of meh ie lets put them in water so we don't have to render too much of anything else. I seriously thought the characters and their interactions were making fun of anime tropes. (why else would the be so garbage)

I went with friends thinking it would be dumb fun and it was just dull and dumb.

Probably my most hated movie and I wanted to like it.