Impending tl;dr alert:
(who made so little impact that I can't even remember his characters name.)
And it also took me a LOTTTT of time to remember what the main guy's name is. Raleigh Beckett. I didn't even have to look it up but it just took me a while. Which is really sad since part of my damn name is in there and it still couldn't stick in my head.
I really think Mako should have already been the new pilot and they were bringing the SOA guy because of his experience. I also didn't like how Mako wasn't much of a badass at the start.
I was just thinking the same thing. Nobody needed the fetishism of Mako. Her freaking out inside the jaeger, not being able to fight her own fights, and just being all shy around daddy and her co-pilot. I wanted more badass shit like where she pulled out that sword. That shit was dope.
Imo, there were just too many narratives here:
Raleigh Beckett - ranger, lost his brother, gets dragged back in, needs a new partner.
Mako Mori - newb, trying to prove herself to everyone including daddy
Stacker Pendecost - his nose drips blood because of death, his funds are cut, has a last minute plan he must execute, daughter issues
This doesn't even take into account the angry arrogant young Aussie, the two bumbling scientists, and whatever was going on with pimp Perlman. Actually, all of it was interesting but it was too much in a single feature film. Here's what I would've done, at least for the first part of the film:
I would've kept the beginning the same. Then after the title card, have almost the same scene we had earlier with Stacker talking to the world leaders or whoever they were. Except it takes place in Hong Kong. Raleigh's already there with Mako as his partner. We have some sort of dialogue about how Raleigh had left to build the wall but the wall was ineffective. Because there apparently no other way to stop the kaiju, Raleigh knew he had to overcome the trauma of his brother's death and return to the project. So yeah, cut out all of that shit where we travel to Hong Kong and see Raleigh
working in construction. Like, HUH? What a waste of time. That part should've been cut and been a web extra or something.
The Heckle and Jeckle scientists were a bit of a time-eater, too. The Torchwood guy's part should've been scaled back. He could've still been there somewhere, but not in the foreground as often as he was. The whole Mako-Stacker was given way more time than it needed. Again, these are interesting events and would've been great web extras or for a graphic novel. But all of this stuff took away from the kaiju and the battles we should've gotten. I wanted to see those other jaegers rock out and they just went splutzzzzz.
The movie needed to be leaner about the story it wanted to tell so that every element had time to play out. And it was like they just crammed in and left remnants of things inside of it. Like when a scene gets cut but part of it is still present in the movie so only the people who wrote the script in the first place even know what it's doing there. But to the audience, it's kinda wtf. So we were still left with a good movie, but it just wasn't, um,
tidy I guess.