MYST POST #7: Pacific Rim

Seeing how i nearly praised this movie in my Godzilla (2014) review, I decided to discuss Del Toro's Pacific Rim which was released in 2013 by Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures (coincidentally the same studios that distributed Godzilla 2014). The creation of Pacific Rim was actually very complicating. A man named Travis Beacham conceived the idea of Pacific Rim while walking on a beach. There he imagined a giant robot and monster battling it out, however, the movie originally went by a different name. Travis Beacham's Killing on Carnival Row was to then be directed by Del Toro back in 2006. It was only later that Beacham also thought of the idea of 2 pilots in the robot, and wondered "what happens when one of those people dies?" Legendary then announced the new title Pacific Rim, and then the film continued development. When approached again to work on the project, Del Toro said that he would work on the project only if his latest project, At the Mountains of Madness (an adaptation of HP Lovecraft's work) was cancelled. After the movie's production began to fail due to budget and rating restrictions, Del Toro turned to Pacific Rim.

To really bring out the monstrous size of the Kaiju Del Toro decided to shoot many of the shots from below the Kaiju. The scene above features a Kaiju busting through buildings and debris while attacking a city. The shot is clearly at a lower angle, and the buildings can serve as a scale as to how big the creature really is. There is also a scene where a Kaiju named Leatherback rises up from the see into a sky down pouring with rain, followed by an enormous roar. The scene was purposely shot from below to bring out the true size of the beast. Del Toro's main inspiration for these kinds of shots throughout the film was from Francisco Goya's The Colossus, wanting to achieve the same "sense of awe" from the painting.
Industrial Light & Magic was chosen to do the film's effects. Del Toro specifically stated that he wanted to distance this film from other blockbusters. He said that he felt that the movie "'needs to be theatrical, operatic, romantic.' We used a lot of words not usually associated with high-tech blockbusters … We went for a very, very, very, very saturated color palette for the battle for Hong Kong. I kept asking John to tap into his inner Mexican and be able to saturate the greens and the purples and the pinks and the oranges." With this unusual style, the film's visuals stood out among other films featured at the time.