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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 Character Study

The most consistent knock viewers and critics have had against Pacific Rim is that the film isn’t as enjoyable as it should be, because the characters are wafer thin. I disagree with that notion (not in terms of how rich the characters are, but in whether that inhibits the story being told), but won’t argue that you can base an entire movie around a character whose most interesting feature is their name. Most will agree, however, that at least one performance stood out from among the rest, and that was the one belonging to Del Toro veteran Ron Perlman, as the greasy Kaiju War-profiteer Hannibal Chau.

From his badly scarred tip, to his gold-plated toes, Hannibal makes for an intriguing presence, particularly for the niche profession he’s carved out for himself in a Kaiju-infested world. How does one come to be the kingpin of an underground market that not only sells the body parts of deceased behemoths, but has the infrastructure to dismantle freshly Jaeger-bombed corpses like militarized vultures? How did he, and Stacker Pentecost first come into one another’s orbit, and what was the foundation of their untrusting, but necessary relationship? And how desperate is the world for “male potency” drugs if Hannibal can charge $500 a pound for Kaiju bone powder?

The drift offers up an interesting alternative to telling Hannibal’s story through a traditional flashback narrative, but it might be more exciting to just continue his story where it leaves off, and see what he does once his black market empire has been shutdown, along with the rift in the Pacific Ocean. Would he actively pursue opening a new portal to the Precursors’ world, or are there other dimensions out there with valuable viscera to plunder? Maybe the spinoff can just go completely off the deep end, and have Hannibal wind up falling through a breach that’s connected to the Hellboy universe. It’d be twice the Perlman, and twice the fun (and, let’s face it, is probably the only way that a Hellboy 3 ever sees the light of day).

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