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a love letter to pacific rim, a 2013 science fiction film directed by guillermo del toro and written by travis beacham & guillermo del toro.

this page is not finished — there's a lot i want to add to it, but i also have actual work to do at the moment & wanted to get this finished in time for 32bit.cafe's first community code jam, "that special thing close to my heart"!

jaeger name generator

name sources: canonical jaeger names, names of moons, mythology, names from friends at the table, names of real-life spaceships

Today. Today... At the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. Today there is not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone. Not today. Today we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!
- stacker pentecost, marshal of the pan pacific defense corps

today in pacific rim history

behind the scenes

storyboards of tresspasser attacking the golden gate bridge by raúl monge.

guillermo del toro on avoiding the aesthetics of war:

“I carefully avoided the car commercial aesthetics or the army recruitment video aesthetics. I avoided making a movie about an army with ranks. I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world."

“I am a pacifist. I have been offered movies that have huge budgets that have war at its centre and I said, ‘I don’t do that.’ I have two daughters and I wanted to make this movie for kids. It’s my lightest movie and yet it’s one of the most precise, adult exercises in world design I’ve ever made. It has the craft of a 48-year-old and the heart of a 12-year-old."

“What I wanted was for kids to see a movie where they don’t need to aspire to be in an army to aspire for an adventure. And I used very deliberate language that is a reference to westerns. I don’t have captains, majors, generals. I have a marshal, rangers . . . it has the language of an adventure movie. I want kids to come out of the movie and say, I want to be a Jaeger pilot! I really think that would be my dream come true.” *

I don't want people being crushed. I want the joy that I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank ... What I think is you could do nothing but echo the moment you're in. There is a global anxiety about how fragile the status quo is and the safety of citizens, but in my mind—honestly—this film is in another realm. There is no correlation to the real world. There is no fear of a copycat Kaiju attack because a Kaiju saw it on the news and said, "I'm going to destroy Seattle." In my case, I'm picking up a tradition. One that started right after World War II and was a coping mechanism, in a way, for Japan to heal the wounds of that war. And it's integral for a Kaiju to rampage in the city.

darren franich for entertainment weekly on pacific rim's campiness

Unlike Godzilla, Pacific Rim doesn’t try to be serious even when it’s being serious. Characters have names like Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. The film requires you to believe that the best way to battle a giant monster is to build an even larger robot to fight that monster.

Much of the Act 2 drama derives from inter-pilot tension airlifted from the Val Kilmer scenes in Top Gun. It’s the polar opposite of the Godzilla school of drama, where everyone is a total professional who has absolutely no personal goal besides Saving The World. In Pacific Rim, Idris Elba is Rinko Kikuchi’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and two of the last Giant Robot-pilots in the world frequently get into sneering fights over who’s the bigger badass, and Charlie Day is a scientist.

So, for all these reasons, Pacific Rim is a movie that I’ve heard perfectly smart people describe as “stupid” or “silly.” The problem with this line of thinking is that, really, that every blockbuster is pretty “silly,” in the context of Things Adults Should Care About. Godzilla is not less stupid than Pacific Rim just because people frown more. […]

The difference, I think, is that Pacific Rim glories in its own silliness. There’s a flashback scene where Idris Elba rescues a little girl, and when he emerges from his giant robot, the sun shines upon him like he’s the catharsis in a biblical epic. There’s a moment when one giant robot swings an oil tanker like a sword. Then it grows a sword out of its wrist. Then it falls from space to earth.

There are real complaints to make about Pacific Rim, I guess, all of them fair and most of them pedantic. I know a lot of people who have issues with the story. (“Why didn’t they use the wrist-sword earlier?” is a popular one.) Conversely, I don’t really know anyone who minds the story in Godzilla, possibly because everything stupid that happens is prefaced by Frowning Watanabe saying “This is why the stupid thing that’s about to happen makes sense.” Godzilla wants so badly to make sense. Pacific Rim wants so badly for Ron Perlman to wear golden shoes.”*

find me in the drift

pacific rim is fully, unironically, the most romantic concept i can think of. it's a sweeping statement about soulmates and the importance of love for humanity wrapped up in an action movie.

the creators of the jaeger program realized early on that the mental toll required to pilot skyscraper-tall mechs was too much for one person to handle. after the death of the first test pilot of brawler yukon, caitlin lightcap (creator of the pons system, through which pilots plug their minds into the jaegers to control the jaeger's movements) created the drift system, in which two pilots share the mental load caused by the jaegers.

to do this, pilots have to be drift compatible — able to work in sync, connect, and trust one another. during the drift, pilots share their memories, instincts, thoughts, and emotions in order to act as one person and control the jaeger together.

the giant robots are piloted by soulmates!!! not necessarily romantic soulmates, but soulmates nonetheless. the sheer trust and vulnerability required by drifting is astounding.

pacific rim is a movie that sayss yes, we can save the world, but we'll need love to do it, and i think that's beautiful.

bonus lore from the pacific rim novelization:

… Interviews with former Rangers suggest that their cognitive systems are permanently altered by the experience known as the Drift. They report persistent perceptions that another consciousness is operating in tandem with their own, as well as feelings that each action they take is recreated on a larger scale somewhere else. Some Rangers call this "Drift hangover," but unlike hangovers, it does not appear to diminish over time.

The number of surviving ex-Rangers is very small, necessitating a degree of skepticism when assessing these findings. The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps does not permit external physicians or clinical staff to examine active Rangers, further limiting the available data. Nevertheless, it appears highly probable that the neural handshake causes persistent and perhaps permanent changes to the perceptual systems of the participants.

Also perhaps worthy of further investigation, though likely beyond the purview of this journal, are the claims of certain Rangers that they remained connected to their Jaegers even after the neural handshake and the Drift were terminated. Numerous anecdotal reports of exist of Jaegers shifting with no Ranger in control of them, with attendant claims that these motions replicated the sleeping motions of the Rangers assigned to that particular Jaeger.

If substantiated, these claims would characterize the nature of the neural handshake in a profoundly different light. They would also raise the specter of a sort of imprinted simulacrum of consciousness in the Jaegers themselves … *

drift partners often experience a phenomenon called ghost drifting after their drift, in which their link remains active despite being disconnected from the pons system and the jaeger. when pilots drift with each other repeatedly, they often adopt character traits of their partners, and are able to predict their partners' thoughts and emotions.

boypanadol on tumblr:

thinking abt when pacrim said there are people out there who will have the capacity to know you completely and love you in a way where you genuinely complete each other, VERY much a metaphor for platos concept of two souls splitting from one and then said this is important because you can pilot a huge robot and beat up giant aliens together *

manywinged on tumblr:

pacific rim was really like "our giant monster-killing robots are powered by the tender, intimate, powerful connection of soulmates - romantic, platonic, or familial" and i've never recovered from how the sheer brilliance of that concept made me feel

like i'm sorry but these enormous metal robots so vast and powerful that they run on nuclear reactor cores welded into their chests can only be moved and controlled by the power of love??? how does that not drive you utterly insane just thinking about it??? *

music

the soundtrack to pacific rim absolutely fucks. if you've seen the movie, you know this already; if you haven't seen the movie, you should go fix that. either way, you should listen to the soundtrack. here's a link to a playlist, since youtube won't let me embed soundtrack videos.

there's also some really amazing fan music made for pacific rim. the superconducting supercolliders were a pacific rim fan band that was active from 2014-2015 and wrote songs mostly from the perspective of newt geiszler, based off newt's pre-ppdc band from the fic designations congruent with things. the band is no longer active, but i really enjoy their music. here's some of my favorite of their songs.

the song jet pack blues by fall out boy was also inspired by pacific rim — specifically, the scene where we're introduced to mako mori.

graphics

memes