Last week, Guillermo del Toro and his Pacific Rim team released posters spotlighting the various giant robo-craft – called Jaegers – built by mankind to battle huge monsters known as the Kaiju. With WonderCon hitting this past weekend, two more stomped in, giving us another look at the central Jaeger, the US-built Gypsy Danger, and the Australian vehicle Striker Eureka. Check them out below.
Gypsy Danger plays an important role in the plot, as it’s the slightly outmoded, battle-worn craft that washed-up pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and a talented, if raw recruit (Rinko Kikuchi) must take into action against the latest wave of monstrous beasts.
Del Toro was typically talkative at the WonderCon panel for the film on Saturday, showing off a new trailer (which he says won’t be generally released) that included an impressive, crowd-pleasing moment where a Jaeger uses a freighter like a baseball bat to attack a Kaiju. To create one of the battle scenes, the production built several blocks of Hong Kong in Canada so that they could be destroyed, while a four-storey practical Jaeger head was created to show Kaiju damage.
The Jaegers themselves, meanwhile, are controlled by two pilots (three in the case of China’s Crimson Typhoon), because the neural bridge is too powerful for one human mind alone. Twelve Kaiju designs and nine Jaeger types were originally conceived before del Toro held an American Idol-style elimination contest to find the most popular creatures and ‘bots.
{Pacific Rim Jaeger set}
Finally, the director raised the subject of writer Travis Beacham’s Tales From Year Zero tie-in graphic novel, which chronicles the original Kaiju attack and the race to building the Jaegers in response. It’ll hit shelves on June 5 in the US.
Pacific Rim arrives on our shores on July 12. The latest trailer is below, and you can read our feature on the footage right here...