Thanks to Total Film we have the above image of Idris Elba (Prometheus) in costume in Guillermo del Toro‘s upcoming film Pacific Rim, which will serve as his first film in five years following Hellboy 2: The Golden Army after he made the decision to drop out of directing The Hobbit and watching his passion project, At the Mountains of Madness, die at Universal.
Pacific Rim is a monster feature starring Elba, Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Rob Kazinsky, Clifton Collins Jr. and Ron Perlman in which legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, igniting a war 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. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes — a washed up former pilot (Hunnam) and an untested trainee (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.
Along with the first look image above, del Toro was also quoted by the mag discussing its massive scale. “When we’re talking about the physicality of the fight, we ended up building several blocks of Hong Kong, and literally demolished them,” he said. “We built a building and then we took down the buildings. We built command centers of the robots that were the size of the house. We started them on hydraulic rigs that shoot and elevated them and moved them round so you could really get a sense of the physical nature driving a robot like this.”
Warner Bros. will release the film on July 12, 2013 and I expect they’ll be putting together a trailer very soon, probably to be released alongside The Dark Knight Rises. That, of course, is just a guess.
