In 2013 a Kaiju came out of a breach at the bottom of the Pacific and took three days to kill, flattening San Francisco. More came. Humanity’s answer was the Jaeger programme: robots the height of buildings, too big for one brain to control, so two pilots link minds in what the film calls the Drift. Pacific Rim is Guillermo del Toro making the Japanese monster film he wanted to see as a boy, with a 190 million dollar budget and no irony at all.
What Happens In The Film
Raleigh Becket lost his brother in the middle of a Drift and quit. Seven years later the Jaeger programme is being shut down in favour of a coastal wall that does not work, and Marshal Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba, has four Jaegers left in Hong Kong for a last run at the breach. Raleigh is paired with Mako Mori, played by Rinko Kikuchi, who has her own reasons for wanting to fight. The Hong Kong battle in the rain is the film’s centrepiece, and Elba’s speech before the final drop, “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse”, is the line people kept.
Why It Became A Favourite
The Kaiju were designed by del Toro’s team as animals with their own biology, and the Jaegers move with weight. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman play the two scientists who provide the comedy, and Ron Perlman is Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer in Kaiju organs with gold shoes. It did modest business in the US and huge business in China, which paid for the sequel.
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131 minutes in HD above. Free, no sign-up.
