Film / Atlantic Rim

Atlantic Rim (also known as Attack from Beneath) is a 2013 film by The Asylum that (mostly) knocks off Pacific Rim.

In the movie, giant monsters begin hatching from eggs in the sea and start attacking the East Coast of the United States, forcing the Navy to use the Humongous Mecha they created (as part of a secret deep-sea rescue program) to combat them.

It was featured in an episode of Season 12 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and at time of 'airing', stood as the most recent film the show had ever covered.

A sequel was released in 2018, just in time to cash in on Pacific Rim's sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising. The navy's Mecha are brought out for the first time since 5 years ago to fight a new group of monsters attacking Los Angeles.

Atlantic Rim provides examples of:

• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Admiral Hadley pronounces "capische" with a short "I" instead of a long "E" making it rhyme with catfish.
• The Alcoholic: Red partakes of intoxicating beverages at every opportunity. Several characters remark on this and it's hinted he even pilots his mech while under the influence.
• Arrested for Heroism: Red is arrested for disobeying an order to withdraw even after helping kill the first monster. The rest of the unit is not, despite the fact that they fully intended to also disobey the order, they just were close enough in that their bots could be remotely shut down, thereby forcing them to obey.
• Artistic License – Military: It's painfully clear that no one at The Asylum has even basic military knowledge and didn't go to any lengths for realism. To wit...
  • When we see a line of five soldiers preparing to fire on the kaiju, a close-up shows that one of them is a woman wearing a nose ring.
    • Each of the above carries a different weapon, unlike a standard fire team which typically is 4 riflemen and possibly a support weapon like a grenade launcher. The guns they do have are obviously airsoft props, only one (an M249 light machine gun) is even similar to actual military issue, and one guy has a shotgun which would be completely useless at the range depicted.
  • Also, Geise, who is wearing a Captain's insignia on his collar, claims to be privy to things above an Admiral's pay grade. And not just above, but "way" above.
  • Geise launches a nuclear warhead behind his superior's back without getting in trouble.
  • For that matter, Admiral Hadley is wearing three stars on his collar, meaning he's not an Admiral, he's a Vice Admiral.
  • Jim, Red, and Tracy are seen cheering "Hoo-ah!" which is an Army thing, not Navy.
  • At one point, Hadley refers to Red as "Captain Waters." Red's insignia, seen at the beginning on his B.D.U's, is that of a lieutenant (it would be a captain's if he were in a non-seafaring branch of the military, but...).
  • Red and Tracy wandering around Mardi Gras in their uniform fatigues, visibly drunk, violates SO many regulations. Not to mention that their haircuts are way too long for any branch of the service.
  • Geise and his eyepatch. Sailors with eye patches are a relic of the Age of Sail. Geise would not qualify for uniform service with a missing eye.
• Blood Knight: Geise, who was obsessed with nuking the monsters. Weirdly, specifically obsessed with it, in fact, for reasons that aren't really at all clear. It's suggested that he's more knowledgeable about the creatures (and more paranoid of them) then the others because he was a part of the project that originally discovered them... but he should still be smart enough to have noticed that conventional weapons have already defeated two monster attacks. If anything, the fact that two monsters were downed without nukes and that the robots are winning the final battle actually upsets him. It could be explained as him having a grudge against Red (who doesn't?) except that the two never actually interact, and while Geise does openly express a dislike of Red, casual dislike seems to be all it really is. It can't even be explained as him having a vested interest in seeing the mech project fail; in fact, he specifically requests that the bot pilots be ordered to retreat before the nuke hits because he doesn't want them to get hurt. Really, why he thinks the monster would kill more people than nuking New York City is not at all clear, except that he just thinks nukes are awesome, and the film seems to think it needs a human villain for some reason- mainly he exists to set up the ending, which rips off The Avengers (2012).
• Brick Joke: Near the beginning of the movie, Admiral Hadley is shown a Youtube video about the monster attack by one of his subordinates and chews the man out, calling him "worse than my grandkids." At the end of the movie Hadley is seen filming the wreckage of the bots on his phone, presumably intending to upload the footage to Youtube.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each of the three mech pilots has their own color motif.
• Commander Contrarian: Geise serves this role as Admiral Hadley's advisor. Hadley specifically asks for Geise to be called in, then spends the rest of the film ignoring what the man has to say. Admittedly, rightly so; but you wonder why he was called in at all.
• Covers Always Lie: Those tentacles on the cover (above) never appear in the movie. The kaiju is more dinosaur-like and doesn't have any cephalopod features.
• Department of Redundancy Department: When Red shows up at the beach and tries to warn the beachgoers about the impending monster attack, and explains that he's in a "U.S. Government issued mechanized robot." As opposed to all of those non-mechanical robots?
• Dull Surprise: Graham Greene never changes his facial expression, whether complaining about not following orders, yelling at a subordinate or getting shot.
• Establishing Character Moment: Tracy and Red are introduced getting drunk at a street festival and then picking a pointless fight with two random hooligans to establish them as irreverent badasses.
• Eyepatch of Power: Geise has a villainous one, just in case we couldn't tell he was an antagonist.
• Faux Action Girl: Tracy, the only female mech pilot, is established to be a tough Action Girl yet needs to be saved twice by her male comrades.
• Jerkass: Red is a complete prick to everyone, especially his supposed friends Tracy and Jim. It's not at all clear why they even hang out with him off-duty; they don't seem to actually like him. He also seems completely unaffected by the many, many civilians he accidentally kills in the first fight. He actually gets upset at Jim expressing remorse over it, accusing him of "bringing down [the] party."
• Just a Flesh Wound: In the climax of the film, Admiral Hadley is shot in the arm, which he brushes off as just a flesh wound. In the final scene, his wound is gone and he's happily fist-bumping the mech pilots without difficulty.
• Just Plane Wrong: When Spitfire comes in, anything resembling realism leaves the scene. He is obviously filming in a helicopter cockpit. His plane is a stock-footage F/A-18E/F Super Hornet in the takeoff and any scene where it's not interacting with anything else (likely because the production company couldn't obtain any Stock Footage of Super Hornets shooting at anything to use). In close-ups and scenes where it's firing weapons, it changes to a very obvious CGI F-22 Raptor. Its missiles are generic CGI missile assets that don't move like they have mass, and it's firing .50 calibre machine guns (both the F/A-18 and F-22, like nearly every U.S. jet fighter built in the last 50 years, use the 20mm M61 Vulcan gatling cannon. The one exception, the F-35 Lightning II, uses the 25mm GAU-22/A).
  • There's also a couple blink-and-you-miss-it moments where we can spot U.S. Air Force F-16 fighters at what are supposedly Navy facilities; especially egregious when a few appear on the deck of a sinking aircraft carrier (and, for no good reason, are painted in desert camoflage to boot).
• Kaiju: Of unexplained origin other than being "millions of years old."
• The Lad-ette: When we're introduced to her, Tracy is out drinking and picking fights alongside Red.
• Large Ham: Geise and Red. Geise seems to have only one emotion: rage.
• Love Triangle: Between Red, Tracy, and Jim. It's more a friends thing though. When Red is told by Tracy and Jim that they kissed once, Red is RELIEVED, saying that they survived a robot fight and a kiss was only just a kiss.
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Margaret Adams can be considered a (mild) female example.
• Misidentified Weapons: During his first fight with a Kaiju Red uses a weapon which he refers to as a “railgun”, however, this weapon fires a beam similar to a laser. Actual railgun’s shoot high-velocity projectiles.
• The Mockbuster: This movie is one for Pacific Rim. The monsters attack New York City. Its page on amazon.co.uk has a note saying "Were you looking for Pacific Rim? Click here to be notified when the real thing is released." But in rather more official language.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The mechs were apparently developed by the Navy for deep-sea operations but are revealed to be flight-capable in the latter part of the movie and Red's is shown to be able to launch into space.
• A Nuclear Error: Colonel Geise is able to go behind the Admiral's back to pass on an order to nuke Manhattan to a missile submarine, who obeys it immediately instead of asking for confirmation. And after Hadley finds out about it, he doesn't immediately have Geise arrested.
• Real Robot: For the most part, though they start getting more Super Robot-like towards the end.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: First Red disobeys Hadley to go after the first monster; later Hadley himself refuses to accept the President's order to nuke New York.
• Shout-Out: The ending is straight out of The Avengers (2012).
• Take Our Word for It: The three mech pilots survey the underwater wreckage left by the kaiju, and all agree it's like nothing they've ever seen before. It's also like nothing the audience has ever seen, just because the audience never gets to see it.
• Technobabble: When the divers are first examining the oil rig wreckage one of the base techs suggests that it was destroyed by unspecified "underwater phenomena". Hadley instantly calls him on how unhelpful that is.
• Unfortunate Name: It's pretty easy to understand why Captain Sheldon Geise chooses to go by his last name. The Admiral is happy to oblige, at least until Geise goes nuts and pulls a gun on him, at which point Admiral Hadley starts using his first name to taunt him.
• Unusual Euphemism: Bull Butter!

Atlantic Rim: Resurrection provides examples of:

• Giant Enemy Crab: The kaiju from the sequel resembles giant crustaceans, compared to the dinosaur-looking monster of the first film.
• The Worm That Walks: At one point in the film an entire horde of smaller monsters fuses themselves into two kaiju-sized forms. And later both kaiju forms executes a Fusion Dance fusing together as well!
• Zerg Rush: In a scene borrowed from the Ripper Drones attack in Pacific Rim Uprising, this movie has a similar moment when an army of man-sized crustacean monsters swarms the streets of LA.

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