I saw Pacific Rim yesterday and enjoyed it a lot! Giant robots! Giant monsters! I saw it in 2D and none of the action bothered me from a headache/vertigo standpoint. Unlike the trailer for Gravity, which made me say "NOPE" rather emphatically in the theater.

Also, y'all, I am seriously worried about Jeff Bridges' choices lately.

I suspect you got The Seventh Son trailer before Pacific Rim, didn't you?

possibly RIPD, what do you mean?

Indeed, it's the combination of RIPD and Seventh Son.

I view his part in RIPD as basically a retread of John Astin's in The Frighteners, and therefore awesome.

I appreciated how rushed and obligatory the prologue was, because really if you stop and think about it for even a little tiny moment, the Jaeger program is incredibly stupid and dangerous. Just park a submarine down at the breach and nuke whatever comes through. Except according to the prologue we tried that and blah blah blah ROBOTS ARE BETTER STFU.

The plot point didn't seem to make it into the movie, but initial background materials I saw stated that the kaiju were filled with organic toxins that would spill out when they were blown up by conventional ordinance, making their corpses deadlier than the live creatures. Hence fighting them with giants robots that could beat them to death or dismember them with cauterizing plasma weapons and then quickly drag the carcasses away from populated areas rather than just using planes/tanks to shoot them dead.

The plot point didn't seem to make it into the movie

It did, but it was blink-and-you'll-miss-it. There's a quick news report about "kaiju blue." That also does explain why they don't just use that damn sword immediately; it doesn't cauterize, but it spills blood everywhere all the same.

I'm reading a somewhat bad mecha fic that makes me desperate to go see Pacific Rim (it's a two-hour movie in theatres nao! or trying to track down some anime show from the nineties). It's bad because it's skipping so many steps and scenes inbetween action that it comes off as fairly cold. Suddenly romance after the characters have no significant interaction! I thought his arm was permanently paralyzed, and now I thought he was dead from strapping a bomb to his chest, but he's back again without fanfare? Her daughter is near death and is the main character's best friend, and she's never mentioned again!

So here is a question: what do people think Newt meant about the kaiju and dinosaurs? Was he saying that the dinosaurs WERE kaiju or that the kaiju KILLED the dinosaurs? I thought the former (especially given the whole "dinosaurs have two brains" thing), but there's a good case for the latter as well.

I thought they were the dinosaurs. The climate got inhospitable and they were dormant until we poisoned the planet making the climate more hospitable again.

Yep, that was my interpretation. But it's not as explicit as I thought. Newt says, "They tried before—the dinosaurs?" Which could mean, "That explains what killed the dinosaurs." The kaiju killed them and then the climate became inhospitable, and so on.

Even still I am NO dinosaur expert, but were any of them close to as vicious as the monsters in the movie? Besides the fictional second brain, did any of them have electricity flowing through their bodies? Because that is a scientific discovery!

Well, remember that they have been adapting (the EMP was new, for instance), and they've also had plenty of time to mess around since dinosaur times, so I don't think we have to assume that the kaijusaurs were all that different from our current conception of them. Well, except for the violence thing, maybe they were really nice at first but then got pissed off when the first invasion didn't work out.