Guillermo del Toro is Praised for Building Worlds Like Pacific Rim

Concept art for the kaiju skull city

 Ryan Lambie from DenOfGeek.us praises Guillermo del Toro's world building; from Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) through to Pacific Rim (2013).

Below in an excerpt you can read the high praise and interesting insights Mr. Lambie  has specifically for Pacific Rim:

In terms of world-building, Pacific Rim is arguably the most expansive movie del Toro’s yet created. Set in a near future torn apart by giant beasts which have, for reasons initially unclear, emerged from our oceans to wreck havoc on our cities, it sees a dwindling defense force gather together a handful of skyscraper-sized, human-driven robots to repel the incursion.

Proudly inspired by Japanese giant monster movies and anime, Pacific Rim creates its own realm of fantasy logic. We come to accept the strange, majestic movements of these towering robots, whose limbs move in time with the pilots’ own. Like all of del Toro’s films, it communicates so much through images rather than words; Pacific Rim’s designers draw from the symbolism of World War II tanks and submarines to give the machines a rusted, battered, lived-in sense of history, while the screeching kaiju have their own unique markings and individual videogame-like killer moves.

Like Mimic, Pacific Rim isn’t at all ashamed of its own inherent goofiness, and del Toro pulls off an impressive high-wire act of giving the movie both a sense of violent impact and also a childlike, playful sense of awe.

It’s this child’s eye perspective, perhaps, that is also key to the director’s world-building. Not all of his films are literally seen through a child’s eyes (though several of his best are), but they are all invested with the same childlike fascination for minute details and exotic, surreal images. Take, for example, a location somewhere in China, where an ad-hoc city has been arranged around the gargantuan bones of a fallen kaiju.

It’s a detail that is largely incidental to the plot, but it’s an idea that tells us so much about the history of this world without anyone uttering a word: the corpses of the kaiju are so utterly enormous that they’ve simply been assimilated into the landscape, and formed the part of a new and strangely beautiful place.

Things like this abound in Pacific Rim, and if you take the time to see them, they add depth to a story that is constantly thundering along like an untethered beast. Look how the little blue highlight in heroine Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) precisely matches the color of the coat she was wearing when she was almost killed by a kaiju as a child - a little bit of her traumatic past still clings to her as an adult.

Continuing with the same theme, they take the kaiju skull city a step further by not only building around it, but by turning it into a temple.

You can read Ryan Lambie's  praise for Del Toro's other works at the Den of Geek article Pacific Rim and Guillermo del Toro's world building

WATCH: Guillermo Del Toro Compares Transformers vs. Jaegers

How do Transformers and Jaegers compare?

AskMen.com asked Guillermo Del Toro who would win between a Transformer and a Jaeger. The question is easy to answer. Jaegers are almost 10 times bigger. Even Devastator, the giant transformer that is a combination of six Decepticons is only 120 ft tall. 

Now for you nerds, there is Metroplex, in robot mode he is 698 ft. When transformed into city mode the Autobots use him as a fortress. But for the most part as Guillermo Del Toro explains, the scale is totally different.

WATCH: del Toro Says Pacific Rim 2 Script in the Works

Although not greenlit by the studio, Pacific Rim 2 Script is in the works.

Earlier in the month Guillermo del Toro confirmed he is already working the sequel to Pacific Rim. You can read his response to an IGN interview below.

IGN: Do you think with something like Pacific Rim 2, can the Blu-ray make or break a sequel?

GDT: No, we are writing the sequel. Travis Beacham and I are writing, so that is active. The decision to green light or not, that’s definitely above my pay rate.

IGN: Right, that’s definitely a film we hope to see. Obviously, you’ve already built this universe. So for someone like me looking from the outside it seems like in a lot of ways it would be easier to make the sequel, because so much of this infrastructure already exists. Does that make sense?

GDT: It does. To me, what was beautiful and flattering was how people saw the movie not once or twice but three, four times or more. People that love it, love it with great passion. So I would love to continue telling stories about that world.

Del Toro also told MTV, "We will have Gipsy 2.0 for sure. Second thing is you're gonna see a merging of Kaiju and Jaeger. And that is quite special."

Other ideas of potential sequel spoilers were reveled by actor Charlie Day in an interview at Crave Online

“I remember when I first met with him that he liked the idea of Newt becoming a bit of a villain in the second film,” Day said. “But, I think over the course of making the film, and the way the character resonated with the audience, I don’t think he would want to turn him into a villain now, but I really have no idea.”

Despite fans returning to theaters multiple time, domestically in the Pacific Rim domestic take was modest, but international sales have soared. According to SciFi Now, "Opening in China this week, Pacific Rim has taken $9 million which is a new record number for Warner Bros, bringing the full takings so far to $226,446,094  – with over 60% of that being from outside the US.

Fingers crossed, hopefully we will see Hannibal Chau in a more pivotal role too. You can watch the MTV interview with del Toro below.

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