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5 Ideas For A Pacific Rim 2 Or A Spinoff

I love Pacific Rim. Like, really love it. Its flaws are as easy to spot as any of the film's lumbering, gargantuan beasties (Kaiju, to the uninitiated), but that hasn’t stopped it from being my favorite blockbuster released since The Dark Knight. At a time when the summer movie season means you can expect plenty of remakes, comic book movies, and a nasty undercurrent of cynicism waiting for you in theaters, for Pacific Rim to not just exist, but be as overwhelmingly entertaining as it is, is to have a grand blue bolt of joy strike an otherwise barren big-budget landscape. Here’s a film that offers the same big, loud, dumb spectacle every other summer blockbuster has been trying to sell you for years, but actually understands the restraint required to make being big feel as such, the cadence of loud that turns noise into Rock & Roll, and that entertainment can be dumb, without being stupid. It took Marvel five movies and two-thirds of an Avengers to get the kind of slack-jawed, silly grin out of me Pacific Rim managed in an hour, and then maintained through multiple viewings.

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  • The Prequel

This is where classification gets a little squiffy, because technically, this would be both a prequel, and a sidequel. The opening 5-minute montage Pacific Rim uses to bring the viewer up to speed on what’s happened since the first Kaiju attack, and the end of the Jaeger program, covers more history than most franchises can handle in a trilogy. The very first Kaiju appearing out of the cosmic ether, tearing its way from San Francisco to Oakland? That’s an entire movie Pacific Rim blows passed in seconds, because it’s got bigger fish to fry. But just because we know how the overarching conflict ends in 2025, doesn’t mean the first days of the Kaiju War aren’t worthy of exploring more thoroughly.

In fact, they already have been in comic book form, in the Beacham-written graphic novel, Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero. Told through flashbacks, you get a glimpse at how many of the film’s main characters reacted when the first Kaiju made landfall: most were helpless spectators watching from halfway across the globe, but a few others acted as near-equally helpless participants in the opening salvo to humanity’s first cross-species war. Like the movie though, the real story doesn’t start until after we’ve exhausted all non-nuclear options in fighting one Kaiju, only to realize it was just a 2200-ton appetizer.

Whether sticking to the comics or deviating entirely, the early days of the Kaiju War have plenty of material worth exploring. Imagine a Contagion-style series of vignettes, showing the war effort from all sides: politicians scrambling to form a united front, military scientists developing different anti-Kaiju technology, early Jaeger pilots experiencing drifting for the first time, and coastal civilians struggling to make ends meet, after their insurance provider chooses not to cover Kaiju-related damages. The timespan over which the Kaiju War takes place would have major impacts on everyday life across the globes, and seeing the way people adapt, and grow accustomed to skyscraper-sized monsters rearing their heads every few weeks provides plenty of room for exploration of social and cultural dynamics.

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