Science Fiction World

If you thought the robots featured in Michael Bay's Transformer movies were big, you obviously haven't heard about Guillermo del Toro's upcoming science fiction monster film Pacific Rim. This is Del Toro's first film since Hellboy 2 (not my favourite film) and is the film he took on after At the Mountains of Madness fell through and he abandoned Peter Jackson's The Hobbit (a crazy thing to do I would have thought).

When huge alien monsters from the ocean depths threaten Earth, massive robots are constructed to fight off the menace. Piloted by humans, the robots (called Jaegers) are bigger than skyscrapers and thankfully not at all toy like. The giant monsters (called Kaiju) have risen from Earth's oceans to wreak havoc on human cities and appear to be unstoppable, even with the Jaegers and their human pilots fighting them back. When defeat looks certain, two unlikely heroes, a washed up pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi) team up to pilot a legendary obsolete Jaeger from the past. As you would expect, these giant robot Jaegers can only be controlled by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge. Together they stand as mankind's last hope against a mounting apocalypse.

Apparently the film is a homage to Japanese giant monster films, known as Kaiju. Del Toro spoke recently about Pacific Rim to Wired magazine:

“We are working with actors that I absolutely adore. Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman. It's really, it's a very, very beautiful poem to giant monsters. Giant monsters versus giant robots. Twenty-five-storey-high robots beating the crap out of 25-storey-high monsters. We're trying to create a world in which the characters are real and how it would affect our world politically, how it would affect the landscape if creatures like this really came out of the sea.”

The film stars Charlie Hunnam (from the TV show Sons of Anarchy), Idris Elba (Thor), Rinko Kikuchi (The Brothers Bloom), Charlie Day (Horrible Bosses), and Ron Perlman (the two Hellboy films).

A Warner Bros. film, Pacific Rim’s screenplay is by Travis Beacham and is due for release 12 June, 2013.

I’ll definitely be there for this one. They had me at “giant robots”.