Del Toro's 'Pacific Rim' resurrects the Kaiju film

[AsahinaKimi]

Del Toro's 'Pacific Rim' resurrects the Kaiju film

By Jake Coyle

Entertainment Jul. 06, 2013 - 06:00AM JST ( 5 )

NEW YORK —

The appeal of “Pacific Rim” isn’t complicated.

Like the kind of boyhood fantasy that delights in flying men and relishes dreams of dinosaurs, “Pacific Rim,” the latest film from director Guillermo Del Toro, is predicated on the simple, childlike thrill of seeing big ol’ robots and big ol’ monsters slug it out.

But while summer spectacles have grown ever larger in recent years, the monster movie - the original city-smashing genre - has mostly ceded the multiplexes to superheroes and more apocalyptic disaster films. But 14 years after Roland Emmerich’s forgettable “Godzilla” remake, Del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” constitutes a large-scale attempt to bring Japan’s beloved Kaiju movies - their monster films, of which Ishiro Honda’s 1954 “Godzilla” is the most famous - to American shores.

“Monsters have always spoken to a part of me that is really, really essential,” Del Toro, the Mexican director of the Oscar-nominated “Pan’s Labyrinth,” said in a recent interview. “All of my life, I felt out of place. The tragedy of every monster in every movie is that they are out of place. That’s the essential plight of monsters.”

In the 3D “Pacific Rim,” the 25-story-high Kaiju emanate (as is tradition) from the sea one by one, each uniquely grotesque beasts. To combat these monsters and defend the coastlines of the Pacific, equally giant robots called Jaegers are built, each controlled by two brain-connected pilots.

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