Pacific Rim Featurette Destroys All Kaiju

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

At this point it feels like we’re going to continue seeing new marketing for Pacific Rim long after the movie has come and gone, maybe forever. It’s like an endless parade of promotion from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures. But somehow, someway, I’m still not sick of it. Slap the words Pacific Rim on a video of paint drying and I’ll watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a little excited for the deluge to go away when Guillermo del Toro’s monsters versus robots epic finally opens next Friday, July 12, but not nearly as excited as I am to see the actual movie. Watching this latest behind the scenes feature that delves into every aspect of the Kaiju, the giant monsters in the movie, gets me that much more pumped.

This video from Warner UK is nothing but people involved with Pacific Rim talking about their monsters. And yes, they all look like enthusiastic children getting to live out a prepubescent dream. Listening to del Toro talk about his love of old Japanese kaiju films—kaiju in Japanese translates to monster, and is the name given to the old, guys-in-rubber-suits style monster movies—is infectious. You get the impression that he wanted nothing more out of Pacific Rim than to make a movie he would have loved as a kid. He even says this movie speaks to his inner child like nothing else he’s ever made.

They even purposely designed the monsters to loosely resemble actors wearing prosthetics and costumes. Most are bipedal, and stay true to the older kaiju types. It’s that level of nerdy fandom that makes me truly excited for this movie. Talking about the creation process gives you a feel for the scale and level of detail that went into rendering the monsters on screen. The creatures are so elaborate that the closer you get, the more the design sells the creation. Star Idris Elba calls them, “huge and grotesque,” while Charlie Hunnam refers to the beasts a “brutal.” Those are encouraging words.

I love that they had an American Idol style elimination contest to decide which Kaiju made it into the movie and which remained on the drawing board. More movie making decisions should be made with this method.

Just because I’m talking a lot about the Kaiju doesn’t mean I’m not also excited to see the Jaegers, the giant mech suits scientists create to fight the monsters. It’s really the combination of the words “giant,” “robot,” and “monster,” in any order, that sold me on Pacific Rim from day one. And now that we’re less than a week away, I feel like a kid counting down to Christmas, and I don’t care if people think it’s going to fail.