Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is pretty awesome. That goes without saying. Giant monster movies, while not as awesome as Mr. del Toro are still pretty damn cool. So when you combine the two what do you get? PACIFIC RIM.
But you already knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that del Toro recently chatted it up with the folks over at io9 about his upcoming comic book THE STRAIN. I’m not here to talk about that though. io9 couldn’t help themselves and asked del Toro how his monster movie PACIFIC RIM was going and that’s what I’m here to report! When asked how things were going on the film del Toro responded:
“Very good, we’re at the end of our second week. We are shooting everything for the main complex in the movie, which is a huge complex in Hong Kong where the robots are maintained. We are doing that, while building downtown Hong Kong streets.”
Sounds good to me! While that’s all del Toro mentions regarding PACIFIC RIM he does touch on his “The Incredible Hulk” project as well. To check that shite out just head right over HERE.
The first is an alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.
Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry. Within the first act alone, we are given enough detailed background on the god-like Jaeger systems, its shared neural piloting system (called “pons”), and the relentless beasts. But Beacham is an absolute master at immediately establishing characters and their conflicts.
The central character is Raleigh Antrobus, 23, a skilled Jaeger pilot still wrestling emotionally with the loss of his co-pilot and biological brother, Yance, during a mission a year earlier. The ordeal has wreaked havoc on his mind spirit, leaving him with ghostly nightmares of the battle from the shared “pons” experience. After the initial setup, the damaged hero is recruited to re-join the task force in Tokyo, where pilots are in demand, and team with a fellow “leftover,” 22-year-old female Japanese pilot Mako Mori. Naturally, the language barrier (among other things) presents an issue for the out-of-sync duo, meaning an even steeper learning curve for the unprecedented pairing.
Meanwhile, Felicity “Flick” Kincaid, a journalist and Yance’s former fiancée, circles the globe (ours) to discover answers about this mysterious rift and the origins of its intensifying threat.
The highly anticiapted PACIFIC RIM is set to hit theaters on May 10, 2013 with a cast that includes Ron Perlman, Idris Alba, Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day, Clifton Collins Jr., Rinko Kikuchi (below), Rob Kazinsky and Willem Dafoe. You read that right folks – 2013! So we’ve got a ways to go with this one…