Guillermo del Toro has finally loosened the leash on Pacific Rim and offered up the first public look at his larger than life monster flick. By “large” I mean really big, as in dwarfing the Transformers that the film’s robots will undoubtedly be compared against.
The trailer opens with a monster attack on (presumably) the Golden Gate bridge as a voiceover explains that these monsters are actually aliens that came not from the sky, but through a dimensional portal located deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. A massive monster plows through the bridge, echoing the initial Cloverfield monster attack on a bridge that resulted in that film’s first cast casualties.
The Pacific Rim monsters aren’t here for a quick romp in the Big Apple that ends shortly thereafter. The battle between these monsters and humans stretches several years, and the only way humans have been able to stay alive is by “fighting monsters with monsters” i.e. giant human-piloted robots called Jaegers (German translation: Hunter/Fighter).
Enter Gipsy Danger, an obsolete Jaeger robot called into action as one of earth’s last hopes to defeat the monsters. Charlie Hunnam stars as one of Gipsy’s pilots, and Rinko Kikuchi rounds out the two-person crew. As the trailer shows, Gipsy Danger will take a beating by the monsters and lose an arm at some point, but the big guy puts up one heck of a fight despite being flung several hundred feet through the air by an unseen beast.
Del Toro seems intent to keep many of the monster designs under wraps for the time being, opting to use what appears to be the same or similar monsters for the trailer cut. We know from previous interviews with the director that there are many different monster varieties including some that stay in the water and others that fly through the air. The trailer monster(s), especially the final shot, are an obvious shout out to Godzilla and the kaiju film genre that inspired Pacific Rim.
Co-starring in Pacific Rim alongside Hunnam and Kikuchi are Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Robert Kazinsky, Max Martini, Clifton Collins, Jr., Burn Gorman, Larry Joe Campbell, Brad William Henke and Diego Klattenhoff. The voice of Gipsy Danger’s AI is provided by Ellen McLain who gamers might recognize from blockbuster games Portal as GLaDOS and Half-Life 2.
I fully expect Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim to take the summer 2013 box office by storm when it comes ashore on July 12. Click either the new one-sheet poster or banner below for a high-res look.
