Pacific Rim
Pacific Rim was a 2013 action blockbuster from acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro. As an over the top love letter to the mecha-genre and all that that entails. Receiving a strong reception for its style and visuals. In this case however the style dwarfs the films substance. The technical jargon used in the film usually falls apart under the lightest scrutiny and much of the world building suffers the same fate. While the absurd premise of Jaegers and Kaiju provides some cover for explicit shortcomings.



Before we get underway a little bit of trivia; all the jaegers have two word names as a concept was born out of the two pilot system so the jaegers have two call sign. Crimson Typhoon which has three pilots was originally slated to have a set of quadruplets as pilots and in Chinese (traditional and simplified) Crimson Typhoon is written with 4 characters.
The Breach makes no sense as a tactical hot spot. All the scenes that depict the breach make is seem likes it only a few feet from the ocean floor (hard to tell with all the scale issues in the film) but wouldn't that choke point be a tacticians wet dream?

Why wasn't it covered in concrete or littered with mines? Why aren't there submarines and torpedo boats patrolling armed to the gills with tactical weapons. The weapons that supposedly didn't work against the Kaiju is also kind of hilarious
By the time tanks, jets, and missiles took it down, 6 days and 35 miles later...
We're not shown tanks or missiles just F-35's. F-35's that don't have side mounted guns by the way.

I can understand not having a tactical doctrine for Kaiju in the first engagement but to make the leap of giant fighting robots is blissfully ignorant of the breadth of military weapons. Was there no attempt to use chemical or biological weapons against the Kaiju, they are alive after all. All we're really shown being used against the Kaiju are "maybe" the 25mm Gatling guns. That's not exactly heavy artillery. Hell the old coastal defenses around San Francisco bay; where the first Kaiju attack takes place, used to have 400mm guns. Where's the rest of the navy in all this? I mean Kaiju always come from the water and the Navy is where giant guns call home. Jets to, no knocking on jets but jet fighters are mostly for air superiority. For Kaiju you'd want a bomber or a gunship something with actual firepower.
Drifting is no more sensible, even in the context of the movies usage of it. I know it there for the plot and to have Newt (Charlie Day) drift with Kaiju but the movie does a terrible job actually justifying the technology.
The neural load to interface with the Jaeger proved too much for a single pilot
What neural load? How does adding an extra pilot reduce the load if they have to also actively synchronize two brains plus the jaeger?


In all the scenes the appearance is that the pilots control their jaegers with large full body haptics like in the Assassin's Creed film adaptation.

So there's no logical root to start from. If jaegers are run off manual controls then whatever information is being sent back to the pilot just needs to be better managed or just a thought here...not pumping feedback data into a pilots brain.
Hermann Gottlieb's (Burn Gorman) calculations are just bad math. He starts fine; the interval between kaiju attacks are halving periodically 24 months, 12 months, 6 months, 12 weeks, etc.

That's basic, a linear model, a logarithm, not sure why it's delivered like a revelation after so many years. Where the film loses me is how it leaps to "double event" there just no basis for it.
Why would drifting with the Kaiju reveal tactical information? At no point is it clarified that Kaiju are anything more than living dumb bombs. If I have my dog chipped the dog wouldn't have intimate knowledge of how the microchip works. It's actually worse than that because Newt and Hermann don't get that information from a kaiju that's even gone through the breach, they get it by drifting with a new born kaiju which would have no way of knowing...anything really.
The idea of the Jaeger program being shut down and replaced with a coastal wall is painted as an absurd idea most of the movie but it never actually concludes. In the first act we're told the coastal wall is more viable. A few minutes later we're shown that's not the case as a Kaiju bowls his way through the wall.


Okay you could still make some kind of case for the wall but in the second act of the film we get a flying kaiju. That fully neutralizes the costal wall completely, it does a fair job of neutralizing the jaegers too and the government is dead silent.
What does the movie mean when it said the Gypsie Danger was analog? Gypsie Danger is not analog in any way. Is the films suggesting that all the gear on Gypsie Danger doesn't use computers or isn't susceptible to EM pulses?
- Its compact nuclear reactor powers
- Holographics heads up displays
- Plasma weapondry



You will not convince anyone that a twenty-story tall nuclear powered fighting robot doesn't use any electrical circuitry.