WELCOME TO THE SHATTERDOME.
EMPIRE IS WALKING through the biggest stage at Fox Studios, Australia, one previously occupied by Alien: Covenant. You can tell we are Down Under because a) the crew are unflaggingly friendly and b) every other crew T-shirt is from Hacksaw Ridge. We are visiting the HQ of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, the international strike force set up to save the world from giant monsters (Kaiju) by twatting them with big robots (Jaegers). It’s day 52 of 90 on Pacific Rim Uprising, the follow-up to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 love letter to Japanese sci-fi traditions, global carnage and ridiculous character names. Uprising is looking to embrace del Toro’s vision but also find something else: new, more accessible colours.
Pacific Rim may be mid-tier del Toro (does it make your top three GDT films?) but, speak to anyone on Uprising and there is nothing but love for it — love for the live-action-cartoon aesthetic, the imagination, the notion of a world uniting to see off an outsized foe. But there is also a sense that, despite earning a healthy $400 million-plus worldwide, the purity of robots hitting monsters didn’t quite reach the numbers the idea deserved.
“I thought we needed to make a movie that was more relatable,” says producer Cale Boyter. “I also like to think of it as more aspirational.”
So therefore Pacific Rim 2 — it used to be a ‘Maelstrom’ and now it’s ‘Uprising’ — is going broader. But does this mean better?
THE DIRECTOR
TO MAKE PACIFIC Rim more “relatable” and “aspirational”, Legendary turned to Steven S. Deknight, a showrunner on Starz’s Spartacus series and Season 1 of Netflix’s Daredevil. Deknight had been developing his directorial debut, a small psychological thriller, with Pacific Rim producer Mary Parent. When that fell through, Parent mentioned to him a follow-up to Pacific Rim. Deknight was daunted but excited.
“Growing up, I’d always been a manin-a-suit fan,” he enthuses. “It was really in my wheelhouse. Giant robots fighting giant monsters. What’s not to love?”
Of course, Deknight had to get originator Guillermo del Toro’s blessing. So he used the meeting to wangle a visit to Bleak House, del Toro’s La-based museum of movie memorabilia and geek arcana.
“I walked in and there was Kane’s space suit from Alien and the skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts,” Deknight fanboys. “I told him I’d always wanted to go to Bleak House and he said, ‘This isn’t Bleak House. This is just the clearing place where I organise stuff.’ It boggles the mind.”
Prior to Deknight’s involvement, Uprising had a protracted development process. Del Toro had developed three scripts but decided to step back to make The Shape Of Water. Keying into his TV roots, Deknight assembled a writers room, cherry-picked the best bits from the scripts and hammered out the story in three weeks. At this point, the plot focused on the first film’s hero, Raleigh Becket, played by Charlie Hunnam. Deknight turned in the script and everybody flipped.
“Then the next day it was announced that Charlie Hunnam was doing the remake of Papillon and the dates conflicted. Unfortunately he had to drop out. So we retooled it for the son of Stacker Pentecost as the main character.”
Lest we forget, Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba, was the marshal in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps who made huge pronouncements about cancelling the apocalypse and gave his life taking on Kaiju Slattern and Scunner. Ten years on, his son Jake may have Stacker’s big balls, but not his colourful first name.
“We talked about that quite a bit,” says Deknight. “I wanted him to be a little bit more normalised, less heroic to start with. An everyday guy who has an impossible hero of a father to live up to.”
Perhaps Stacker wasn’t his real name, rather a nickname?
“I’d buy that,” says Deknight. “His name is probably Jerry. Jerry Pentecost.”
THE STAR
ONCE THE DECISION had been made to centre the story on Jerry Pentecost’s son, there was only ever one choice. “John Boyega has a certain natural charm and ability,” says Boyter. “There couldn’t be anyone better.” Boyega was even a self-confessed manga and anime fan. Elba’s participation in Pacific Rim “immediately made me more interested,” he says. “I remember seeing him in the [drive] suit. I’m a big fan of Idris, especially coming off The Wire.”
The conception of Stacker’s son was that he never established a relationship with his dad — “People forget Stacker was a bit of an arsehole,” laughs Boyega —
“I’VE ADDED A BIT OF RUDENESS TO IT. KAIJU CAN’T HACK SOUTH LONDON.” JOHN BOYEGA
causing Pentecost Jr to leave the Jaeger programme, also letting down his fellow pilot and best bud, Nathan Lambert (Scott Eastwood), now a trainer of a new generation of Jaeger pilots. Jake started eking out a living selling stolen Jaeger parts on the black market in a derelict San Diego. His route back to the Shatterdome, Jaegers and redemption begins when he meets streetwise teen Amara (Cailee Spaeny) who has constructed her own Jaeger, the fourfoot Scrapper, out of detritus. A postapocalyptic Pacific coastline may seem a million miles from Boyega’s upbringing in Peckham, but he says he’s managed to keep the role personal.
“Steve gives me freedom to rewrite my lines, give them more seasoning,” he explains. “I think Jake is a South London boy. So being a South London boy myself, I’d add a bit of that rudeness to it. Kaiju can’t hack South London.”
Boyega’s induction into Pacific Rim Uprising was similarly “rude”. After The Force Awakens, he was doing meetand-greets in Hollywood, pitching his company, Upperroom Productions. One of those meetings was with Mary Parent, who casually offered to show Boyega some Pacific Rim Uprising concept art.
“She opened a door and I am seeing myself in concept art doing a high kick in the drive suit,” the actor laughs. “It was an ambush. They said, ‘Here is the offer. We want you to bring your company on board and have some creative input.’”
Martial-arts moves? Towering metal men? Boyega was in.
THE JAEGERS
JAEGERS ARE THE 270 foot-high, 200-ton robots controlled by two pilots who synchronise neurally by a process called Drifting to take the strain of controlling Kaiju-crushing machinery. In 2030, the Jaeger programme has received an upgrade, and exotic new nomenclature. Look out for Gypsy Avenger (Gypsy Danger 2.0), Bracer Phoenix, Sabre Athena, November Ajax, Titan Redeemer, Guardian Bravo and Valor Omega.
“We spent the whole day sweating over these names,” laughs Deknight. “I think we rejected Battle Witch, which still delights me. It was like word soup, a form of poetry. A day at work coming up with giant robot names is not a bad day.”
Yet it is not just outlandish monikers signalling the difference. It is a criticism of the first film that, in the face-offs with the Kaiju, it was often difficult to tell the Jaegers apart. Accordingly, the Jaegers now have brighter, more distinctive colour-schemes, and the interiors of the Jaegers have also been updated.
“When you watch the first movie, these machines are doing wonderful things, but you still feel detached from what Raleigh is doing,” says Boyter. “Now you are going to see a hologram of what faces them in the outside world right there in front of them. So when they are punched, you are going to see the fist come into the Conn-pod. It’s a way to integrate what is going on outside the Jaegers to what is going on inside.”
THE COMBAT
ONE OF THE first thing Boyega did as a producer on the film was to bring on his Force Awakens fight co-ordinator Liang Yang to spice up the pre-viz, making the action less choreographed, more freeform. He also got some notes from the master himself
“There was a moment we thought we needed to amp up the desperation,” Boyega remembers. “Guillermo came up with a great moment where Gypsy grabs a bullet train and just chucks it at one of the Kaiju.’”
Each Jaeger also has trademark weapons: a gravity swing that can pull down buildings (Gypsy Avenger),
“A DAY AT WORK COMING UP WITH GIANT ROBOT NAMES IS NOT A BAD DAY.” STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
a retractable mace (Titan Redeemer), samurai swords that form a broadsword (Saber Athena) and a plasma whip (Guardian Bravo). They are now more athletic than their previously lumbering counterparts. Deknight likes to use the video-game term ‘Y buttons’ to denote their nimble, agile strokes.
“The fighting style is a big thing for me,” says Boyega. “The cadets are kids, so you are not always going to have a robot doing what it is supposed to do. It’s like driving your first car. The car looks great — you’re the problem. You want the characters to shine through the robots.”
On set, Empire watches three cadets — Amara, Vik (Ivanna Sakhno) and Jinhai (Wesley Wong) — preparing to take off in Bracer Phoenix’s Conn-pod, rocked about on a manually operated gimbal. Dressed in helmets, drive suits and going through carefully choreographed movements (“Initiating neural handshake”), the three resemble an early 2000s French avant-garde synth band. As the take begins, the erratic shaking of the gimbal sounds like thunder and the physical toll on the actors is tangible. Deknight shouts instructions (“Shit, it’s going to explode!”), clearly relishing shaking the life out of his cast.
Amara’s journey to becoming a Jaeger pilot keys into the idea of making Uprising more accessible. “I always thought Pacific Rim should have connected with kids, but there was nothing in the DNA of the original that really spoke to them,” says Boyter. “Amara’s a girl who walks into this programme and goes, ‘Fuck, yeah, I get to drive this motherfucker!’ She’s excited and motivated and that is fun to watch. That’s what I mean by aspirational.” If bringing in a YA cast attracts a wider demographic, it is potentially alienating to the hardcore sci-fi nerds, something of which Deknight is acutely aware.
“I feel like a lot of movies I loved as a kid didn’t have kids in them, so it’s that fine balance,” he admits, citing Raiders Of The Lost Ark in particular. “You don’t just want to drop a kid into it. But it’s a classic story: a group of cadets who have never been tested in battle have to save the world.”
And what they are protecting us from has just got a whole lot more formidable.
THE KAIJU
LIKE THEIR METALLIC counterparts, the Kaiju have also become brighter, both literally and figuratively.
New Kaiju — including the bipedal Raijin, the quadruped Hakuja and the adaptable Shrikethorn — have bioluminescent livery lines to help us pick them out in battle.
“The first one mostly took place at night,” says visual-effects supervisor Peter Chiang. “Obviously the bland colours on the original creatures worked because you can have more reflections of street lights. Now 90 per cent of the film’s action scenes are set in daylight. We’ve had to play up the textures a lot more to be more colourful.”
At the end of the first movie, Raleigh Becket dropped a nuclear device, the world’s biggest Jaeger-bomb, into the breach, the inter-dimensional portal that allowed Kaiju to access Earth. Deknight was adamant that “one nuclear bomb was not going to destroy a whole world”. The Kaiju — and for Rim-nerds the Precursors, the alien race who created the Kaiju and which were glimpsed at the climax of the first film — are very much around.
“One of the questions this film raises is, ‘What are they doing?’” the director asks. “‘What are they waiting for?’”
Without giving any further hints — they are probably waiting for pay day like the rest of us — Deknight promises a deeper dive into the “mythos” of the Kaiju. He has also raised their IQ. The final thirdact battle in Megatokyo will see them communicating with each other, calling out for help. For their human opponents, this creates even more jeopardy.
“They are really intelligent,” Boyega says. “They know what they are doing and that adds more fear to the situation. Their world is layered as much as ours. They’re not just monsters walking through a city banging things over aimlessly. They have a serious intention, and it’s a shocking one.”
Deknight is so fascinated by the critters that, if the franchise moves forward, the next film would delve deeper into their backstory.
“There’s a plan for the language and the history of the Kaiju,” he says. “My goal was always to have a world that is expanded in the way of Star Wars and Star Trek, where you can have different adventures, standalone movies. We are in the process of setting up a gigantic universe.”
There is also talk that, beyond Pacific Rim 3, the Jaegers and Kaiju could cross over to Legendary’s monsters universe involving King Kong and Godzilla. A prospect which sends man-in-a-suit fan Deknight into raptures. “I would just love to see that happen,” he marvels. Fingers crossed, but let’s see if they can walk before they stomp.
PACIFIC RIM UPRISING IS IN CINEMAS FROM 23 MARCH