Pacific Rim or Man of Steel

Pacific Rim was one of a kind monster movie. The best America has ever seen. Zilla sucked hard.

Pacific Rim is much better

Man of Steel hands down. The characters in Pacific Rim were generic as hell.

I like both but I would give MOS the slight edge.

Pacific Rim felt like it was made just for me....... Put a few of my favorite actors in a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters........

Not really fair to compare, as they were different types of movies. But I will say MoS had a bit more heart.

Pacific Rim for me.

I thought Man of Steel was boring as f*ck. I don't know why Warner Brothers would let such an iconic character be directed by Zack Snyder of all people. He has a way of ruining everything he touches by being overly dramatic and gaudy. I personally hated his interpretation of Krypton. Felt like he stole the set of Prometheus in my honest opinion.

Also, I thought the CGI was much better in Pacific Rim than Man of Steel. I watched both of these in IMAX, so I don't think it could get anymore impressive than that.

@the_stegman said:

The stereotypes and heavy archetypes were on purpose as homage to manga (nerdy scientists, main hotshot protagonist, good guy that bullies main protagonist). It was made even more clear of its homage at the slow-motion scene with the sword slicing through the flying Kaiju.

For me I like both evenly. Man of Steel was more epic overall, but Pacific Rim was a lot more fun and had better visuals in my opinion. Soundtrack barely edges to Man of Steel, but Pacific Rim still had a sick soundtrack (especially when they played it when Gipsy Danger appeared).

Loved both movies in my opinion. Stalemate for best movies of the year.

voted pacific rim. havent seen it. saw man of steel. that's why.

Pacific Rim over Man of Steel...

Man of Steel was kind of a letdown because of the Fanboys... people saying "It was the Greatest Film they had Ever Seen" to offset the Movie Critics killed the Movie Goer Potential for it... because you go in expecting to see GOAT and see just a "Good Movie"

You did not have this with Pacific Rim, you essentially had most people saying it was a "Good Film" and you essentially get out of it the Best Monster Film in the Modern Era of Film... it was a Surprise to me that it was that Good.

@yourneighborhoodcomicgeek: Homage or not,it still brought the film down.

Pacific Rim has great effects and pretty cool giant robots... but honestly it wasnt a very good movie.

I liked both, but i think pacific rim barely edges out mos

What do you think was especially good about it??? I mean, other than technical things like the effects. What made it a "good film"? I cant really think of anything.

The only really good monster movie I've seen recently is Cabin in the Woods. Before that, I really enjoyed Cloverfield.

Yup, they were as 1-dimensional, generic, and cartoony as could be. The "scientists" were simply horrible, the Jaeger pilots were bland at best, cartoonish beyond belief at worst. I mean, come on, that Russian Jaeger pilot dude looked so much like Zangief that I thought for a second that I was watching a new Street Fighter movie. The Japanese chick, which hot, was also a totally predictable character. <sigh> I could go on and on, just about the characters... dont get me started on the plot.

Man of Steel is a disappointing reboot of a character we've all seen done better before. Pacific Rim is exactly the kind of original blockbuster experience the theaters are normally lacking every year.

I honestly don't understand how people say it's a better film. People complained about lack of character development in MOS, but WHERE THE HECK was the character development in PR?? The main Jaeger pilot was the typical male protaganist, with nothing particularly interesting about him to make him stand out, he literally could have been played by anyone and it would have the same effect. The Japanese girl was nothing more than the standard "I'm a tough chick, watch me hang with the boys" character and even the one interesting aspect about her (her relationship with Idris Elba's character) wasn't properly explored. Then we have the standard bully rival who gains respect for the main character at the end, the two idiot comic relief characters and a very anti climatic ending. Nothing about the movie was better than MOS.

I agree pretty much with all these... although I have even more griped with the characters, but it's late and need to sleep soon.

Apparently the only thing that made the main Jaeger pilot special were his abs... which the Japanese chick couldnt stop looking at. And right from the very first scene with them you already knew pretty much what was going to happen. No character development for most of them, nothing interesting, except for the cartoonish ones, and then at the end what appeared to be minor characters suddenly become important and we're supposed to care about them... really, why?

The only character I liked was the bio scientist, and I think it's mostly because I love Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The other math/science guy was such a cartoon that I didnt care about or like him at all.

MoS at least had interesting characters with some development. Zod was a cool character with his own motivations, Faora was badass and stole here scenes. Pa Kent was a good character, Clark was ok... he could have used more development. Didnt care too much about Louis Lane.

I'm glad you liked the movie... heck, I wish I had liked it too. But, I have to disagree about it being an "original blockbuster experience". Other than the design of the robots and the cool effects, nothing was original. The entire plot was ripped off from Independence Day. Hell, the entire ending "sacrifice" was exactly the ending of ID, and of Avengers too. The characters werent original. The dialog wasnt very good, there were huge plot holes and stuff that made no sense. The structure of the plot was at times simply wrong to what it should have been if it wanted to follow it's formula correctly.

Pacific Rim got nothing on Superman.

basically, in the end, Pacific Rim is what I expected - live action animé

but MoS wasn't what I expected - live action Superman

so, my vote goes PR

It's weird that most pepole are saying Pacific Rim and yet MoS is winning

Pacific Rim. MoS was EXTREMELY dissappointing. Its only saving grace were the fight scenes

@jonny_anonymous: There should be a rule that if you're going to vote in these polls, you have to leave a comment.

Pacific Rim was better, I was disappointed by MoS. Maybe my expectations were to high.

Pacific Rim

1. The Plot was Simple and Moved along Perfectly

2. The Acting Was B Movie Stuff But It Fit In With The Plot Because It Was Simple Anyways

3. The Special Effects was Spot On

4. The Cameo Of Ron Perlman was Hilarious

I liked them both. But I thought MoS was easily better. Thats just me.

I agree the plot was simple, it came right out of Independence Day... but ID did it better. Unfortunately Pacific Rim actually screwed up parts of the plot and had huge holes and things that just didnt make sense.

• Why are people still living in parts of the world that are regularly getting attacked by giant monsters?
• Why build Jaegers in the first place, when spending the money and research on better aircraft would be the way to go? We know that regular projectile weapons, missiles, and explosives hurt them.
• Why do jet fighters continuously fly low enough to go between buildings and crash into the Kaiju? Are the pilots stupid?
• Why start building giant walls? That really takes the cake. You cant cover the entire Pacific Ocean in a huge wall like that, and even if you could the Kaiju will eventually breach it. And when they do, what then? They built no other defenses. Apparently the military in this movie are completely inept.
• If the Jaegers have a weapon that easily kills Kaiju (the sword), why not just use it right away in any encounter? Why waste time and possibly get killed brawling, when you can just show up, use the sword to kill the Kaiju, and go home? Maybe the Jaeger pilots watched too much Voltron or something. Maybe they want to be as stupid as the fighter pilots to not hurt their feelings.
• What the hell does it mean to say that some Jaegers were "digital" and one was "analog"? Do the writers even know what those terms mean? All the Jaegers obviously used advanced computer technology, and hence were all digital.
• Worst of all, the Kaiju only come out of one place... a hole in the ocean. Everyone knows where it is, and can tell immediately when that happens. Why not just keep a fleet of ships and submarines around the area? Then when one pops out you blast it with all the torpedos, depth charges, missiles, bombs, and whatever else it takes to kill it? I mean it's out in the middle of the ocean... if they need to nuke it, then nuke it. I just had another idea... invent some type of torpedo that when it hits the Kaiju it sticks to it and inflates a large bag. A few of these will float it to the surface... at which point the Air Force can bomb the Hell out of it.
• If all the Kaijus are clones, why do they all look different?
• If all the Kaijus are clones, why is one of them pregnant?
• If they're spending presumably billions of dollars, even after being down-sized, why do they only have 2 scientists? They must surely have a huge number of scientists, engineers, and specialists in all kinds of fields to develop and maintain the Jaegers. Where are they?
• If Mori's mental issues, i.e. wanting revenge, excludes her from being an adequate Jaeger pilot (Idris Elba's character said so), then why is she even getting Jaeger training? Surely that's expensive and time consuming, and they wouldnt just waste it on anyone who just feels like it.

Plot issues:

• Minor characters like the father/son Jaeger pilots suddenly at the end get major emotional arcs, presumably just to make whatever happens to them more important. However, throughout the movie there were just minor and mostly annoying characters.
• The climax really made no sense. What should have happened was that Becket and Mori were the ones holding off the Jaiju's while the other two got the corpse and dived to detonate the bomb in the rift... at which point they'd sacrifice themselves, adding the emotional impact you need at the end, and the sacrifice to save humanity. (The writers should have understood this since they ripped off Indepence Day, and ID did exactly that, with better effect)

And those are just the plot issues... I wont mention the characters and dialog which all also sucked.

I do agree the effects were very good. Still, I'd rather see a good movie with bad effects than a bad movie with good effects.

Well the plot was not exactly like Independence Day... I mean in Independence Day the Aliens came from Space and not out of our Earth. I can't say ID did it better either because ID was not like Pacific Rim in the sense if was not really a Monster Movie but a film about Alien Invasions.

Dissecting a Films Plot Holes is Easy... I mean Man of Steel had plenty of Plot Holes too. As far as Pacific Rim goes...

1. The same reason why people still live in Compton when they are regularly attacked by Hood Monsters.

2. Why not build these Robots ? I mean remember at first those Giant Robots was busting the Monster's ass anyways so it was working.

3. No, the Pilots are not stupid... they are probably scared sh!tless and making grave mistakes in their panic attacks.

4. Well maybe the Military was trying to build other things with the Wall... but when the Wall failed then everything went to sh!t afterwards.

5. Probably because all the Robots was not equipped with the Swords... obviously the weapon was very effective... but remember at first the Robots was kicking the Monster's butt and some of them did it with sheer H2H combat.

6. It was a play on Power Sources... the Digital Robots was connected to the Power Grid of the Bases while the older Robots had a Internal Power Source that could sustain itself even if the Bases was to go offline. Terminology can be problematic.

7. Because that rift could only be breached by the Monster's body... which would mean if they tried to nuke the breach it would bounce up from the rift to their world because if would not be fully open to us which would cause the nukes to harm our world more than theirs... that's why they had to use that Monster corpse to go through the rift at the end... cause they could not do it without the Monster DNA.

8. Special Effects Masterpiece IMO

9. That's a minor problem... I mean even if the beasts can get pregnant that should not take away too much from the flow of the film.

10. So the end was a little off... it worked for me.

All in All these are minor problems to a film IMO...

MOS

I enjoyed both, but I prefer Man of Steel.

Man of Steel.

I didn't like Pacific Rim that much.

Haven't seen Pacific rim yet :/ So I guess Mos.

Yes, I know Independence Day was about aliens... LOL, I didnt forget that. Point is, replace aliens with monsters, replace jet fighters with robots, replace space with that rift... you have Pacific Rim. And I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it was so obvious and the end was so blatantly lifted right from ID... I had trouble caring at some point.

As far as the counter points... here's my take...

1. Your counter-point is nowhere near the same. Compton isnt regularly attacked by city-destroying monsters. A real life example would be if there's some volcano somewhere that erupts like every 6 months, or whatever, and people lived in a city right under it. Makes no sense.

2. The robots worked at first, but that wasnt my point. My point was there's no need to build overly complicated robots when you can do the job better, faster, cheaper, and less riskier by using aircraft and other existing weapons. The robots are there obviously because the movie is about robots, and that's the only reason. Logically it makes little sense.

3. Jet fighter pilots dont make the mistake of flying at building level, that just never happens. There's no need to. They have weapons that work from long ranges and are especially designed to attack ground targets. Again, the only reason jet fighter pilots in the movie go down to the level where they actually crash into the monsters is because the director wanted lots of splosions and planes crashing into things. It's no different from a Michael Bay movie.

4. Maybe the military were trying to build something else from the walls, but they never said it. This is pure speculation to rationalize something that doesnt make sense in the movie. It's pretty basic movie making, really. You need to tell the audience something so that something else makes sense, then add a line of dialog here or there... it's easy. They could have said "Once the walls are complete and our new Super Duper Drones are in place, the monsters wont be able to breach the walls". Done!

5. If the robots were not equipped with swords, then equip them after you see how effective the swords are. Have all new models have swords. But besides that, even the Jaegers with swords always started fights by punching the Kaiju. Again... Voltron Syndrome. Fight back and forth for a while giving the audience the impression you're losing, then take out your sword and cut the monster in half. Done, you win. It's bad writing, simple as that.

6. The digital robots were connected to the base power grids??? I dont remember that.

7. Yeah, I know why they needed the monster corpse at the end. I was talking about when/where they attacked the Kaiju... why wait until they reach a city? Just have a fleet right there (the rift never moved) and when your sensors see one coming up, shoot it with everything you have. Problem solved!

Pacific Rim, no contest.

One is a big budget action fest with little to no character development. The other is a big budget action fest with cliched one and two dimensional characters. Hmm, I'll go Pacific Rim, by the margin of just one measly broken building. So yeah, it's close.

1. Look at all you have to change for you to have Pacific Rim instead of Independence Day. That alone should tell you they are not that similar...

2. Compton is regularly attacked by city destroying monsters... they call them Gangs and Churches. The Gangs provide the Violence in the City and the Churches suck all the funds out of the poor people in the city. LOL

3. Well how do you know that the faster and cheaper ways would have worked ? Perhaps at first they did try Jets and Bombs solely and failed... maybe that was the need for the Robots being built anyways.

4. Stupid stuff happens all the time in films...

5. They did not need to say anything IMO... I thought it was obvious that the Military would have other defenses in place just besides a Wall whether it was specified or not.

6. They probably couldn't have all the new models have swords after they lost funding from the Military... less funds less ability for upgrades. Plus Pride always comes in the way... you was able to kick the monsters ass for years without swords we can still do it now.

7. Yeah, that's why when the Power went out on the Base that other Robot was completely powerless.

8. Maybe they tried that and it did not work... that's why they saw the need to build the Robots... now attacking them at the Rift does seem like a better strategy to avoid serious damage to the City but like I said, stupid stuff happens in films...

These quarrels are not very serious IMO... I mean the plot was never meant to be anything over than simple with over the top action... it still works for me even with these quarrels. I mean I have seen people review Man of Steel for over an hour with 30 or 40 complaints...

For the one wondering why people don't move away from where the monsters are attacking, you do realize how many people live within a few miles of the coast, right? It's not that easy. Also, perching right over the rift would probably only work for a short time, considering the largest monster tanked a nuke with no injury. Most of your other complaints seem pretty valid though.

Man of Steel.

No question. No doubt.

Man of Steel was one of the worst films I've seen this year.

I actually enjoyed Pacific Rim, so yeah.

That one.

I understand it wouldnt be, but given that the monsters are drawn to large cities (I mean, it's their goal to kill humans) and they started showing up very regularly... I certainly wouldnt want to live in Tokyo or Sydney. I mean, I'd understand if they had a good defense system worked out, but they didnt. The best defense they had was to wait until the monster was attacking the city and then send in the Jaeger, which caused even more damage during the fight.

I dont remember one of the monsters taking a nuke and surviving. You sure that happened? I thought they tried to nuke the rift, not the monsters, and that failed. I dont see how the monsters could tank a nuke since they were easily hurt by conventional explosives, punches, and sword attacks from the Jaegers.

They armed forces dont even need to perch right over the rift, just have sensors set up to know when the monsters are coming out... and set up a defensive perimeter around the rift. Once a monster appears you just blast it with everything you got. If they couldnt hurt it underwater (for whatever reason), just track it until it surfaces and have the Air Force bomb it to death. A couple of Daisy Cutters should do the trick.

Here's an idea... create a type of autonomous robot (no need for pilots or that glitchy brain-connection tech) whose only purpose is to approach the Kaiju, wrap it's tentacles around it in a kind of bear hug, and then raise it to the surface of the ocean... air bags, rockets, whatever. Then once it's there the Air Force and Navy takes care of things. No need to wait until it reaches the coast.

A couple of things that get me about Man of Steel...

1. The Hot / Cold Reaction of People who saw it... It's either "The Greatest Film Ever" or "The One of the Worse Films Ever"

2. The way they had Jor-El riding on that Dragon creature at the beginning while everyone else was in Flying Ships.

3. Jor-El totally owning General Zod in H2H combat and Zod having to cheap shot Jor El to beat him... I just felt Zod should have been a better fighter than Jor-El in that situation. It took away from his menacing nature... made it easily possible for me to see Superman tagging his ass... I mean if a Scientist can do it why not a Farm Boy ?

4. The usage of the Terraforming Machines on Earth. I just wonder why the Kryptonians could not have used that Tech on another planet that was uninhabited and then lured Kal-El to that planet after they saw his Ship Beacon... they did not have to use Earth. So many other planets in the Galaxy that could have been Transformed into a new Krypton and then the process of rebuilding could have begun.

you've obviously never seen THEM!

and Man of Steel did better in any of those areas?

the characters in Pacific Rim were at least charming, and they talked like people actually talk

again, how did MOS do better in any of those areas?

people still live in Japan and California, all sorts of areas prone to natural disaster

and we don't even have ways of stopping Earthquakes in real life

dude, that's not what the movie's about

that's like criticizing Flash for not having the world getting destroyed when he approaches light speed

@betatesthighlander1:

What The #uck Are You Talking About?!!!

Pacific Rim and Man of Steel

why?

@betatesthighlander1: you've obviously never seen THEM!

- Yeah, what do you mean by that? I've seen both films and they were great. But I chose Pacific Rim because it was a kind of movie we haven't seen in over five years... And IT WAS GOOD!

There were some major, major problems with Man of Steel that I noticed.

1) Why would General Zod bother Terra-forming Earth when they get freaking superpowers in Earth-like conditions. That was really the major issue with me. They keep saying how Krypton was a harsher and crappier world than Earth, yet General Zod and his men want to turn Earth into a crappy place -.-

2) Supporting cast was crap. The woman who played Lois Lane was so boring.

3) Zack Synder's portrayal of Krypton. It was so dark and depressing. It's like a failed attempt at Gothic art or something. I personally thought he stole the set from Prometheus.

4) The constant switching between past and present was an atrocious way of story telling and many scenes were overly gaudy and melodramatic. Zack Synder has a tendency of going overboard with his scenes. The phrase "less is more" never seemed to cross his mind. For example, I practically lol'ed when the random twister showed up and killed Papa Kent.

5) Why on God's name would you place such an iconic character into Zack Synder's hand. The guy butchered Watchmen and 300.

what?

yeah, I saw them

and I also preferred Pacific Rim....

wait, oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh

no I meant

because I think that's a better American Giant Monster flick