Pacific Rim trailer; Idris Elba still believes that”we are cancelling The Apocalypse!”

This is my favourite Pacific Rim trailer so far; not least because we get to go through most of Stacker Pentecost’s (Idris Elba) awesomely Cheesy, or cheesily awesome, do or die speech. 

 Synopsis...

“When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity's resources for years on end. To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge.

But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes—a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi)—who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past. Together, they stand as mankind's last hope against the mounting apocalypse.”

Time to ramble on...

So we have Giant human piloted Mecha (Robots) called Jaegers (Jaeger being German for hunter). Each Jaeger need 2 pilots who have to share memories to work in Synch; except for the Chinese Jaeger (which looks the coolest with its three (or four?) arms and spinning blades) which has three pilots, who happen to be triplets – see below.) 

They are defending the planet from the Kaiju (Giant monsters) from another dimension. (Kaiju being Japanese for monster; well technically Kaiju means strange beast / creature and even though Kaiju is commonly known to mean monster, these creatures, like Godzilla are ‘Daikaiju’, as in 'giant strange beast / monster'.) 

This is extremely, very, astonishingly cool, but it isn’t something that people in “western countries” are used to seeing on the big screen. Even if you count King Kong as a DaiKaiju (he’s too small really) There’s still really just a handful of films, and mostly from the 50s & 60s where everything was a metaphor for communism; as opposed to a metaphor for Nukes and the consequences of weapons of creating and using Mass destruction and the lasting damage they cause. Let’s see if these films being unique in terms of Hollywood films can be an advantage for Pacific Rim, or will the producers of next year second attempt at an American Godzilla film have a lot to worry about.

At The Edge...