For those of you who’ve been waiting to see more skyscraper tall mechanical monsters clash with the flesh and blood variety, we’ve got some good news for you. The next chapter of Guillermo del Toro’s massive mechs versus monsters saga, Pacific Rim 2, just took a huge, lumbering step forward.
Talking to Yahoo, del Toro, who delivers his gothic haunted house horror film Crimson Peak later this year, revealed that, after many false starts and pushed release dates, Pacific Rim 2 will indeed begin filming this November. And just in case you were wondering, it’s going to be big, and end big. He said:
We have an epic battle at the end [that] we started designing a couple weeks ago.
As it stands, we don’t know much about the plot of Pacific Rim 2, and probably won’t for some time. It reportedly picks up a few years after the first film, and has more of a focus on the monstrous Kaiju, the creatures from another dimension. Presumably this means that, after thinking they were banished back to where they came from on the other side of the interdimensional rift at the bottom of the ocean, they have found a way to come back and once again we need to turn to the Jaegers, the giant mechanical suits designed to combat this particular menace.
To be fair, I don’t care too much about the specific plot subtleties and dynamics. That wasn’t really Pacific Rim’s strong suit, and I still loved it. Whatever we get is gravy, but as long at Guillermo del Toro is at the helm, and this film has the same feeling of glee, like a small kid playing in the dirt, smashing his toys into one another, and making explosion noises with his mouth, that’s all I need.
There hasn’t been any casting news to speak of in regards to Pacific Rim 2, so it remains to be seen if we’ll encounter any familiar faces. Del Toro has given strong indications that we will see the return of Charlie Day’s Kaiju obsessed Dr. Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman’s Gottlieb, but we don’t know if Jaeger pilots like Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett and Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori will be back. Both Hunnam and Gorman are in Crimson Peak, so they at least have a current working relationship with del Toro that could pay off.
There are going to be some interesting questions to be answered. Like what are Geiszler and Gottlieb up to now that they don’t have Kaiju to study? What do you do with the Jaegers when there is no threat (fingers crossed it turns out like Robot Jox)? Are they just rusting away somewhere? Are the pilots just homeless and unemployed now? I can see the two scientists cooking up some wacky scheme to peer into the other dimension to check up on the monstrous horde, only to have it backfire and allow them back into our world, but that’s pure supposition.
However the story turns out, we’ve got a while to wait, as production for Pacific Rim 2 was halted indefinitely, and now the release date is set for February 23, 2018.
