'Pacific Rim' Questions Answered

So what is Pacific Rim really about?  Over on io9, writer Meredith Woerner put together a piece after her set visit to Pacific Rim.  It was an interesting read, and if you're interested, I'm going to touch on some points she covers.  If you're looking to avoid spoilers, then, um, heads up!!!

Spoilers

The called the production scale massive, using all of Pinewood Studios in Toronto.  For much of the filming, they went native, meaning, that bits of giant robots, wrecked cars and what not were strewn about the lot.

But then Meredith gets some questions answered about the story.

As you know, in Pacific Rim, humanity is attacked by Kaiju, or giant monsters.  We respond in kind by creating giant robots that use two pilots to fight them off.  But how or where are the monsters coming from?

The Kaiju are spewing forth from a portal that opened up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in the year 2013.  (Events in the movie take place 12 years after that.)

It's explained that rather than start from year zero, or 2013, del Toro wanted to start at a point when our heroes already have the odds stacked against them.  For director Guillermo del Toro, he said that for him, it's interesting when a character starts out down on their luck.

There are different models of Jaeger to make it interesting.  Del Toro thought it would be boring to have them all look alike.

They touched on a point that was bugging me, and that was the need for a dual-pilot scenario, where it took two people to pilot a Jaeger.

Alas, it comes down to that pesky "teamwork" thing.  Me, I'm a Ronin kind of guy, but for del Toro, he wanted the two pilots to represent the different sides of the brain.  That, and when you put two pilots together that don't get along, we'll see a fascinating dynamic, as they fight to put their differences aside.

The coming together of the pilots, is much like the coming together of humanity to fight off the Kaiju.

I won't totally blow it, but the Jaegers are not our only defense against the Kaiju.

No, there will be no friendly Kaiju.

Yes, there's more than just Kaiju in the movie.

They went CGI rather than man-in-suit mode for most all filming, but more to staying true to the laws of physic.

Yes, there's real death.  Yes, it's rated PG-13.  They're just not going to show the death.  No gory details, nothing graphic.

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You know, if this movie is done well enough to be a big enough hit, they have a ton of direction to go with it, from either direction - prequels or sequels.  We'll see.

For now, here's the cast rundown on Pacific Rim:

Charlie Hunnam
Idris Elba
Ron Perlman
Charlie Day
Sunil Narkar and
Clifton Collins Jr.

[io9]

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Bruce E. Simmons
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