Pacific Rim

How the robots move in Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 film is a deliberate choice. No motion capture was used on the Jaegers at all. The animation was keyframed throughout, because the animation team wanted movement that stayed mechanical rather than fluid and organic. That is why the machines feel heavy and always land slightly behind the beat: the sense of a person inside a suit was engineered out on purpose. The cockpits go the other way. Legacy Effects built a working conn-pod out of levers, springs and metal, and the actors were strapped onto a gimbal and hit with real water and sparks. It gives the shaking a physical basis, but it costs something too, because the film keeps cutting out of a monster fight to two people shouting inside a box. The reason the franchise exists at all is geographic. Against a budget of 190 million dollars it took 101 million in North America, while its largest single market was China at 136.4 million. The sequel came out of that arithmetic rather than out of domestic enthusiasm. Not for you if: you want to see the creature design in daylight. Almost every fight happens at night, in heavy rain or underwater, and what you are left with is silhouettes lit by neon.