10 things you NEVER knew about
Pacific Rim!
Welcome back to Behind the Screens, the series where I’ll be
talking about some of the most popular movies, TV shows, games and more and
teaching you 10 facts about each that you likely have never heard!
Ah, Pacific Rim. Perhaps the action flick magnum opus of newly crowned
Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, this is one of those movies that asks the
audience burning questions that they’ve thought about their entire life, such
as “Hey, you wanna see giant mech suits punch shark monsters for 2 hours?”
Very thought provoking.
As always, Pacific Rim has a lot of fun secrets hidden behind the screens, and
we’ll be looking at 10 of my favourites today!
1. Mako wasn’t always bilingual
While Raleigh and Mako’s relationship
makes up the emotional crux of the movie, there was initially an extra
dimension to the growth they make together as they train to become Jaeger
pilots.
According to writer Travic Beacham, an
early draft of the script featured Mako only being able to speak Japanese and
Raleigh only speaking English, but as the movie went on and their connection
grew stronger they would slowly start to become bilingual, ending the movie by
speaking to each other in their native languages. While this would’ve been
pretty darn cool, it was likely excised in favour of having them communicate
through dialogue throughout the movie.
2. The Kaiju were designed
traditionally
While the film’s inspirations rooted
in the days of old Godzilla movies
and stuff like Power Rangers are
obvious, del Toro wanted to ensure every facet of his movie felt like watching
a modern upgrade of one of those.
While the Kaiju were always going to
be CGI from the start, each one was designed to resemble a costume that would
be worn by an actor in one of those classic movies. Each Kaiju in the movie had
to be not only possible, but plausible that the CG model could be remade as a
costume with little difficulty.
3. del Toro wanted to create a
pacifistic action movie
Despite having scene after scene of
mechs smashing up cities while fighting the monsters, del Toro, a known
pacifist, wanted Pacific Rim to
inspire as little violence as possible.
While admitting that big action
sequences involving lots of collateral damage were integral to the movie, he
directly avoided showing the Kaiju stampeding over hapless citizens. He also
employed the use of traditional Western ranks such as “ranger” and “marshal”
instead of typical military terms like “general” and “captain”. His ultimate
goal was to avoid creating a movie that said war and human on human violence
was good.
4. The movie holds a secret for video
game fans
Iron Man has JARVIS, Luke Skywalker
has R2-D2, and the Jaeger pilots have…Portal’s
GLaDOS?
Believe it or not, it’s true. While
the computer voice in the mech suits isn’t the game character herself, they
share the same voice actress in Ellen McLain. del Toro, a huge fan of the game
series (a love he shares with your humble author) specifically wanted her to
voice the computer in the movie, though he avoided direct similarities to her
most famous character by keeping her role minimal and altering the voice
slightly so it didn’t sound like GLaDOS and the computer were one and the same.
5. The kaiju had to go through an
audition process
Part of what makes the monsters in Pacific Rim so great is how awesome they
look, and this was an aspect of the movie del Toro wanted to ensure he got
right. He wanted his Kaiju to be as iconic-looking and memorable as classic
Japanese movie monsters like Godzilla and Mothra, and came up with a clever
solution.
He had the art department design 40
different silhouettes of Kaiju, and then tasked the rest of the production team
with voting on their favourites American
Idol-style. They would eliminate the lower ranking monsters and keep the
winners until only nine remained. The winners are the ones you see in the
movie.
That just begs the question: when are
we getting Kaiju Idol? I’d be way
more interested in that than the crappy reboot they’ve got going right now.
6. The kaiju were designed to be more
like animals than monsters
Similar to Jurassic Park, del Toro wanted the larger-than-life beasts in the
movie to act like real animals instead of monsters hell-bent on destroying
cities.
Instead of incorporating more alien or
monstrous designs, the designers looked to nature for their biggest
inspirations on what the Kaiju should look like. This is why you see throughout
the film that they all have some resemblance to some real like creature,
particularly the crab-like Kaiju Mako encounters as a child.
7. The Jaeger connection was
initially deeper
In early drafts of the scripts pilots
got more than just a glimpse of the memories of their partners when they were
connected. An original idea was that the two minds would come together in a virtual
world known as “the headspace”, where they could interact together while
piloting.
This idea made it into a Pacific Rim comic where the pilots that
met in the headspace had a rather…passionate time. del Toro, on the other hand,
decided against shooting scenes in the headspace for the movie, saying it would
be a waste of filming time.
8. Why Jaegers are called that
It isn’t exactly the first name that
comes to mind when trying to decide what you want to call you giant mech suit
that fights shark monsters. So why the name?
First of all, “jaeger” is German for
“hunter” (although it’s spelt “Jäger”), which is fitting as what the Jaegers do all day is
hunt Kaiju. In-universe the reasoning is because the mechs were invented by a
German scientist, but according to del Toro he called them that because he
wanted the movie to have a more international feel and not just inspired by
American or Japanese culture.
9. The Jaegers were designed to each
be fun to look at
Similar to the Kaiju designs, del Toro
wanted each Jaeger to looks different and recognizable from each other in
silhouette. In-universe the reasoning for the vastly different appearances is
that the military wanted different mechs that specialized in fighting any type
of kaiju thrown at them.
But for del Toro, he wanted each
Jaeger to look unique. Starting with silhouettes, he and the production team
picked five they thought looked the most fun and built off of them. The initial
use of silhouettes also helped pick out which Jaegers would be the easiest for
the audience to differentiate from each other in scenes set at night during a
storm.
10. The young Mako scene was designed
to act like a real monster was there
One of the biggest character moments
in the movie comes when Raleigh winds up in Mako’s memory of the first time she
witnessed a Kaiju tearing up her hometown as a little girl. But what you may
not know is that the set was specifically designed to match what was happening
in the scene.
Each time the supposed Kaiju would
take a step, the entire set would shake. This made the scene feel much more
real for the actors doing the scene, as when the rumbling got more intense they
knew that the monster was getting closer.
Are there any I missed? Let me know
and I’ll see you for the next Behind the Screens on April 18!
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