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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 previous options would hue closely to the first film’s style, but what if Del Toro and company tried something smaller, more intimate, and decidedly different in focus? Here’s just one idea: remember Otachi, the flying, acid-spitting Leatherman of a Kaiju that took down two Jaegers before getting a stomach-ectomy at 50,000 feet? Well, suppose there was one extra little quirk about him we weren’t aware of in the original film: as the Precursors continued to weaponize the Kaiju, one interesting omission in their strategy was the absence of a biological weapon (other than, you know, the giant monsters themselves).

Suppose then, that Otachi’s blood came packed with a secret ingredient designed to further incapacitate earth’s defenders, in the event that the vessel for said blood should fall. During the introductory montage, the Gatorade-coloured blood of a Kaiju is suggested to be toxic, something confirmed by the comics. Getting a case of the Kaiju Blue is made out to be something you want to avoid at all cost, but in attempting to slay Otachi, Gipsey Danger wasn’t really prioritizing the containment of arterial spray. There might have been entire blocks of Hong Kong that wound up looking like the aftermath of a pan-species orgy between The Smurfs, and Avatar’s Na’Vi, once all was said and done.

Due to a volatile mutagen contained in this particular Kaiju’s blood, those exposed begin to exhibit uncontrollable, violent behaviour, and before long, the streets are crawling with zombie-like infected. Who knows, maybe the mutagen even starts morphing people into horrible human-Kaiju hybrids. The ultimate point would be to take Pacific Rim’s titanic battles, and shrink them down to a human scale. Imagine a group of P.P.D.C. soldiers working their way through the Bone Slums, battling crazed Kaiju worshippers, rage-infected civilians, and all manner of horrible monstrosities –think Aliens meets The Raid: Redemption. It would mark a pretty big shift in terms of perspective and tone, but one that would allow for further inspection of just one corner of Pacific Rim’s greater world, and all with the added bonus of not having to break the bank.

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