Guillermo del Toro has been chatting about his ambitious plans for Pacific Rim 2, that never came to be.
This piece contains a mild spoiler for Pacific Rim 2
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is an ideas fountain, having created some of the most original and compelling story ideas in cinema over the last two decades, from Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape Of Water. But still: we weren’t prepared for this one. Whilst chatting with The Wrap, the filmmaker has revealed his original idea for Pacific Rim 2, and it’s quite the leap of imagination. Of course, del Toro wouldn’t make the sequel to his giant mech/kaiju face off blockbuster, eventually being replaced by Steven S DeKnight, who scrapped del Toro’s script.
It’s a shame because Pacific Rim 2, whilst enjoyable, certainly lacked the sort of mind-bending twist that del Toro originally wanted to include. As well as wanting to make fan-favourite Mako the main character in the sequel (she ultimately became a minor character who was killed off-screen), the filmmaker had a head-spinning twist planned for the origin of the precursors, the spindly creatures who control the giant kaiju monsters.
As he explained, “the villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. And then they realised that all his patents came to him one morning. And so little by little, they started putting together this and they said, ‘oh, he got them from the precursors.’ The guys that control the kaiju. And then we found out that the precursors are us thousands of years in the future. They’re trying to terraform, trying to re-harvest the earth to survive. Wow. And that we were in exo-bio-suits that looked alien, but they were not. We were inside. And it was a really interesting paradox.”
That idea certainly would have worked wonders on us in the cinema, a kind of Planet Of The Apes level twist that would have elevated the story far beyond what it ultimately became. That’s the rarefied plane that del Toro exists upon as a storyteller, we suppose. You can next see his mind at work in Nightmare Alley, which releases in UK cinemas on 21st January 2022.
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