New Pacific Rim Feature Explores Drift Space
This article is more than 2 years old
The more promotional material that comes out for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming monsters versus robots adventure Pacific Rim , the more I wish I could just put myself into a state of suspended animation and not wake up until July 12. But since that isn’t feasible at this juncture, I’ll just have to content myself with videos like this new feature that talks about the concept of Drift Space.
What is Drift Space, you may ask? That is an excellent question. When giant monsters called Kaiju emerge from the bottom of the ocean, the human race creates giant robots dubbed Jaegers to stand up to these new bullies. As we’ve seen from the previous trailers, two pilots working in tandem control the Jaegers. Through a process called Drift they go through a kind of mind meld that allows them to operate in more complete collaboration.
One side effect of Drifting is that you have to share everything in your head with your partner. In this case, when you say things like how there are no secretes between partners, you mean it in a very literal sense. With someone else kicking around inside of your skull, you can’t hide anything. This level of connectivity creates an intense level of intimacy and vulnerability as you basically live each other’s memories. The controllers also fuse with the machine, which, in the initial stages of the Jaeger Program, proved too much for a single driver, hence the pairs approach.
Pacific Rim stars Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, Charlie Day, Clifton Collins Jr., and Heather Doerksen.
