It has been a tough week for Guillermo del Toro, his adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness was confirmed dead and, although there is still the possibility of seeing it somewhere down the line, he has moved on to Pacific Rim. Little is known about the project other than it will start shooting in September and audiences will get their look at it sometime in 2013. Today News in Film released a few plot details of the film after getting their hands on the script, this is straight from the site but looks to be a pretty thorough, and of course there will be spoilers.
This project will give the filmmaker the opportunity to create two worlds. The first is an alternate version of Earth in the near future, decades after a historic date in November 2012 when the first kaiju, a towering Godzilla-like beast, emerged from a hole in the Pacific Ocean and attacked the city of Osaka, Japan. The second is “The Anteverse,” another universe on the other side of that gaping portal, 5 miles below our ocean’s surface.
Since the first attack, the rim has been “spitting out” a variety of gigantic monsters at an increasing rate, which then stride out of the ocean and begin destroying sea-bordering cities, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. In order to combat these monstrous, otherworldly menaces, the military developed the “Jaeger” program, which trains teams of two pilots to jointly operate massive, building-sized mechanized suits of armor and high-tech weaponry.
The central character is Raleigh Antrobus, 23, a skilled Jaeger pilot still wrestling emotionally with the loss of his co-pilot and biological brother, Yance, during a mission a year earlier. The ordeal has wreaked havoc on his mind spirit, leaving him with ghostly nightmares of the battle from the shared “pons” experience. After the initial setup, the damaged hero is recruited to re-join the task force in Tokyo, where pilots are in demand, and team with a fellow “leftover,” 22-year-old female Japanese pilot Mako Mori. Naturally, the language barrier (among other things) presents an issue for the out-of-sync duo, meaning an even steeper learning curve for the unprecedented pairing.
Meanwhile, Felicity “Flick” Kincaid, a journalist and Yance’s former fiancée, circles the globe (ours) to discover answers about this mysterious rift and the origins of its intensifying threat… There are several different species of towering kaiju, each with their own unique characteristics, and the clashes between monster and machine are epic in scale.
It sounds like the movie is right up del Toro’s alley and I think he is the perfect fit for the project. The new about At The Mountains Of Madness is upsetting but this film definitely sounds promising.
What do you think?
