Lovecraft dream project At the Mountains of Madness).Ī director of taste and sensitivity, he is also a giant super-fan – when a particular Pacific Rim ‘knifehead’ Kaiju looks like a biologically credible redesign of Guiron, the monster that fought heroic flying turtle Gamera in Daiei Studios’ rival to Toho’s Godzilla series, you can be sure it’s a deliberate homage. Del Toro is known for straddling Spanish-language arthouse fantasy cinema ( The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and off-Hollywood edgy comics material (the Hellboy films, Blade II), as well as for his attachment to more unmade, cult-friendly projects than any other filmmaker of his generation (he comes to this after the collapse of his big-budget H.P. Guillermo del Toro is a far better filmmaker than others who have essayed large-scale 3D devastation, such as Michael Bay in the Transformers films and Zack Snyder in Sucker Punch and Man of Steel.
There’s no denying that Pacific Rim delivers the awesome.
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However, Japan has been spinning variations on this premise for decades, whether in live-action movies pitting famous monsters against mecha-doppelgangers (1967’s King Kong Escapes, 1974’s Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla), in which at least initially the flesh-and-blood monsters were the goodies and the metal imitations controlled by wicked aliens or earthly villains, or in anime series like Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-96). This might be fresh to Western audiences, though Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox (1990) also featured piloted anthropomorphic combatants (not strictly robots but ‘mechas’), and the Iron Man movies have familiarised multiplexes with the notion of an armoured battle suit. The planet’s defence forces prove valiantly unable to cope – leading to the creation of giant, humanoid-shaped fighting machines. In a long narrated prologue, Pacific Rim gives a precis of what might have been an entire series of films, in which coastal cities around the Pacific are attacked by huge monster specimens, or ‘Kaiju’.