GO BIG OR GO EXTINCT.

When alien monsters rise from the ocean floor and devastate cities, the nations of the Pacific Rim put their differences aside to build huge robots capable of fighting the beasts. A 3D summer blockbuster that will please most people – those looking for a Transformers clone will love the battles between the aliens and the robots, and those looking for something a little more sophisticated and a less heavy-handed touch than Michael Bay’s will get a kick out of how close the film is in style to Guillermo del Toro’s own Hellboy adventures. Very formulaic, and sometimes it’s hard to gather all the nuances and details of the intense battles… but still tons of fun.

2013-U.S. 131 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Jon Jashni, Mary Parent, Thomas Tull. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Travis Beacham. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Music: Ramin Djawadi. Visual Effects: John Knoll, and others. Cast: Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Stacker Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Max Martini… Ron Perlman.

Trivia: Followed by Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018).

Last word: “There are two sub-genres that are very, very popular and very powerful in Japan. One is kaiju and the other one is the giant robot sub-genre. Occasionally, they mix together, mostly in TV series. These are things that were part of my nutritional make-up, growing up. I was literally raised watching those movies. One of the points I wanted to make on the movie, and I made it clear to my designers and every department head, was that we should not reference other movies. We should not go and rewatch anything. We said, ‘Let’s create the world that we’re doing.’ It falls in here and there, but we should not be doing a referential film. If things happen, they happen because they are being made by people that love those genres, but I didn’t want to be post-modern or referential, or just belong to a genre. I really wanted to create something new that was madly in love with those things.” (Del Toro, Collider)

IMDb