To make sure he has ample time to refine the finished product, Guillermo del Toro has set an October 31st start-date for filming his large-scale monster-movie, PACIFIC RIM. How awesome is that…who else would begin their first day of principal photography on Halloween?!?
Of course, the ample time factors in when you consider PACIFIC RIM won’t hit theaters until July 12, 2013. Word from THR has it that del Toro has quietly reserved space on the Pinewood Studios lot in Toronto, with a 6-month schedule that will carry filming through April of 2012. By my math, del Toro will have some 15 months of post-production to calibrate his film exactly to his liking. Should be fun to follow.
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day and Idris Alba – PACIFIC RIM takes place on two alternate worlds:
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.
PACIFIC RIM floats in July 12, 2013.