From director Guillermo del Toro and writer Travis Beacham comes a tale of human piloted giant robots that battle aliens for the survival of Earth in “Pacific Rim.”
The film doesn’t come out until July 23, 2013, and there’s plenty of secrecy about the story, but the director and a few cast members visited Comic-Con Saturday to tease the potential sci-fi blockbuster.
Del Toro said the film was inspired by Japanese cinema and tips its hat to monster films like “Godzilla” and classic sci-fi, including “War of the Worlds,” but his goal was for “Pacific Rim” not to be a referential film.
“We said, ‘Let’s create the world that we’re doing (from scratch),” del Toro said. “I wanted to create something new, something very madly in love with those things.”
(l-r) Charlie Day, Ron Perlman and director Guillermo Del Toro for Warner Bros. Pictures' Pacific Rim
He added, “There are things in the movie that I’m proudest of that I’ve ever made and part of that is because of the way it was designed and who I collaborated with and things are not executed like you necessarily thing they would be ... I wanted to create a movie that I was proud of on it’s own.”
In the film, Charlie Hunnam plays a pilot, Raleigh Antrobus, who has seen tragedy recently. He teams with Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), another pilot with a difficult past.
“He’s in this world that Guillermo created, these super soldiers that pilot these giant robots,” Hunnam said. “You meet me in the beginning of the story when I suffered a gigantic loss and it killed my sense of self-worth, but kind of my will to fight and keep on going ... they bring me out of retirement to try and help on this grand push. I think that journey is a very relatable one. I think that everybody at one point in there lives has fallen down and not felt like getting back up, but you have to no matter difficult it is.
Charlie Day plays another character, Newt Gotlieb, who has issues of his own.
"Guillermo has made movie where we’re saving the world ... and you need big tough guys and strong guys and people you can believe could fight and save the world,” Day said. “In the case of my guy, you think he’s sort of the everyman who seems he couldn’t fight himself out of a paper bag. How is that guy going to contribute? If there’s anything people latch onto with my character is sort of how flawed he is in his attempts to help save the world really.”
(l-r) Director Guillermo Del Toro and Charlie Hunnam for Warner Bros. Pictures' Pacific Rim
Ron Perlman plays a war profiteer with “no scruples whatsoever.”
“I’m a black marketeer in this film,” Perlman said. “I have this relationship with the powers that be whereby I have all the rights to these fallen monsters that sell on the black market to people who have way too much money and are looking to collect rare and exotic strange shit. So I have no morality. I have no moral compass.?
For a more emotional impact, del Toro created the enormous robots with personalities that have their countries and identities.
“Each has names and they have as much character as the pilots,” he said. “I wanted each robot to have a personality and for you to feel when the robot gets hurt or when the robot wins. I wanted very much to make the audience feel for those machines.”
(l-r) Director Guillermo Del Toro and Charlie Hunnam for Warner Bros. Pictures' Pacific Rim