8. What's Up With The Wall?
I have no idea why every country discontinues the Jaegar program and decides instead to build a huge wall to secure their coastal borders. I'm not an expert on giant monsters, but if I were to take a look at a kaiju's CV, I'm pretty sure knocking over big buildings and other large man-made structures would be high up on their work experience and technical skills. I think I get where the movie's going. The leaders of the world have pretty much admitted that they're screwed. The wall is somewhere between one last desperate attempt to save themselves and creating something to keep humanity busy before the end of everything. It's really just plot setup, though. It allows Raleigh to drop out of the world for a few years, and it leaves the Jaegars in short supply, making them feel more like underdogs. There's a surprisingly bleak scene where Raleigh and his fellow workers on the Alaskan wall watch another country's completed wall on TV as it is destroyed by a kaiju. It certainly sets the dramatic stakes pretty high for the rest of the movie, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why don't the larger countries move everybody into the mainland and build more Jaegars? If the kaijus had to walk a thousand miles for their supper, they may lose interest in the whole destroying humanity thing.