If there’s one filmmaker alive today who probably deserves the label of genius it’s probably Mexican-born filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, that’s probably hyperbolic high praise, but then with each new film he releases he shows audiences and critics something rarely seen before that gradually knocks down any doubts as to why he deserves the praise.
In 2006, Del Toro released the Spanish-language dark fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth and people who had only known him as the guy who directed Blade II and Hellboy finally understood why critics both high and low were having such a major crush on the man’s work and talent. My favorite scene from this film was a major example why Guillermo Del Toro is such a genius. I’m talking about the scene with the “Pale Man” and Ofelia’s encounter with it during her second task given to her by the The Faun.
This sequence showed Del Toro not just juggling the dark fantasy aspect of the film, but also his talent for world-building and horror. This scene was the one which probably sold those still on the fence about the film as they watched it. It’s a scene which showed Del Toro’s love for monsters and he created one which has left an indelible mark on the film-going audience that still resonates to this day.
Ok, this is the final and most awesome trailer of Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming giant mechs vs. kaiju (giant monster) blockbuster spectacle, Pacific Rim.
While it might look like so many trailers and teasers about this film will spoil the film for those still to see it I must say that it doesn’t. This latest and last trailer from Warner Bros. still uses scenes from previous teasers and trailers, but just extends each sequences a second or two longer. We get some new images of the jaegers and kaiju fighting, but just extended versions of what we’ve already seen. In the end, this latest trailer still doesn’t give a chronology of how these scenes fit in the film.
I know people probably have their pitchforks and hater-hats on to tear Pacific Rim apart for being too CG, all-action and no brains despite not having seen it. Or worst yet…Looks like Transformers.
I say to these people they should just stay home and go watch their indie, arthouse film that only ten other people have seen and let those of us who enjoy spectacle of this magnitude to enjoy (or not) what Del Toro seem to have cooked up in his mad scientist brain of his.
I don’t go into this film thinking it’ll be a new standard in high art in cinema. I just want to see a giant rocket punch smash into some interdimensional giant monster face.
Pacific Rim will punch fans and detractors a like in the face this July 12, 2013.
Behold, Through the Shattered Lens’ own Jaeger contribution to the fight: Ferrus Mannus.
July 12, 2013 will be the date that will go down in otaku history when anime and live-action finally come together to prove that dreams of a live-action versions of some of the most beloved anime titles can work outside the animator’s studio. Guillermo Del Toro may not admit it but this Wonder-Con exclusive trailer for his upcoming Pacific Rim is chock full of anime influences.
Giant mecha aka Giant robots piloted by humans: CHECK
Giant monsters alien or interdimensional in origin: CHECK
Humanity brought to the brink of extinction and living in fortified cities: CHECK
It sounds like the basic outlines for anime of the past 30 or so years. There’s a bit of Neon Genesis Evangelion. There’s definitely a healthy dosage of the Mazinger Z DNA in this film. We can’t forget the classic Voltron that introduced many young people in the West in the 80’s to the joy of ultra-violent anime. Outside of anime there’s the Ultraman versus kaiju live-action Saturday serials that continues to be popular in Japan to this day and was a staple of any growing boy’s entertainment agenda on Saturday mornings.
Whether this film lives up to the hype it’s been gaining since the first teaser was shown late last year is still an unanswered question, but for fans of action anime this film looks like a love-letter to us and everyone else should just hang on for the ride whether they want to or not.
Plus, for those not steeped in otaku culture it has something for you as well: Jax Teller, Luther, Clay Morrow and Charlie “Kitten Mittens” Kelly.
On July 12, 2013 will be the date to cancel the apocalypse.
It’s still just a little over 3 months before we get the premiere of Guillermo Del Toro’s return to the big-screen. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost 5 years since he last made a film (Hellboy 2: The Golden Army). His time wandering the world of Middle-Earth for three years and the last two developing his upcoming film and we now just have 3 months to wait for what could either be one of the biggest films of 2013 or a colossal failure.
Pacific Rim looks to introduce the well-worn and popular concept of the giant robot vs. kaiju from Japan to the rest of the world. Fans of this very Japanese pop-culture phenomena have been excited over this film since it was first brought up by Del Toro a couple years ago and more since then. Some have nitpicked that the trailers and teasers have made the film look like an offspring of the Michael Bay Transformers series, but then again all we’ve seen so far have been the robots. There’s still the surprise of how the kaiju will end up looking.
One thing I’ve learned about Guillermo Del Toro’s films have been that whether one likes them or not they’re never lazy affairs. He gives everything to the project and makes sure that his overall vision never get compromised by studio interference (one reason why he seems to back out of doing his dream project At the Mountain of Madness).
So, below are some of the latest promotional posters that show the five giant robots from five Pacific Rim nations who have volunteered to help fight the kaiju.
In 2008 a young Argentine filmmaker made a 3-minute short film that caught the eye of one Guillermo Del Toro. The short film was titled Mama and it’s simple premise of ghostly mother chasing after two young girls in a darkened home was so well-received by Del Toro that he decided to produce a feature-length adaptation of the short film. He could’ve easily put himself in the director’s chair for the adaptation, but liking the work done by the short film’s original director the Mexican filmmaker gave the job to the original director, Andres Muschietti, and allowed him the freedom to make Mama the way it was meant to be made.
The feature-length version of the film works off of the screenplay written by the filmmaker Andres Muschietti and his sister Barbara Muschietti (with some help from Neil Cross) and expands on the brief sequence from the short film. We get a backstory as to the origins of the titular character and how she came to be throughout the film. We even get a much more detailed work up of the two young sisters who have become the obsession of the ghostly “Mama” and how they had gotten involved with her.
Mama opens up with a disturbing sequence where a father has murdered his partners in his company and his wife then taking his two young daughters out into the country where his grief at what he’s done leads him in an attempt to complete the cycle of becoming a family annihilator through the killing of his children then his own suicide. It’s only through the intervention of a shadowy figure in the abandoned cabin they’ve come across in the forest that this father’s plan fails. It’s a truly disturbing scene to see a father comforting his 3-year old daughter and at the same time hold a gun to her head. It’s almost a wonder that the audience feels both a sense of relief and horror at seeing “Mama” protect the young girls by killing the father.
We skip five years later as we find out that the father has a twin brother named Lucas (played by Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who has spent the intervening years using whatever money the dead brother had left in an attempt to find the two young girls. Victoria and Lilly do get found by the scouts sent out by Lucas in the very same cabin where their father had taken them earlier in the film, but what the scouts find look more like feral animals than children.
One would think that the film would be about “Mama” wreaking havoc on Lucas to try and get her young girls back, but this film is not about mother versus father but mother versus mother. We’ve already met “Mama” briefly in the start of the film. The other mama in this fight for the girls’ love and soul is Lucas’ rocker girlfriend whose attitude in the beginning doesn’t shout maternal at all. Annabelle (played by Jessica Chastain) doesn’t think it’s her job to have to raise the two girls. It’s her love for Lucas that keeps her from bolting and trying to find a common ground with the two young girls. As the film moves forward Annabelle begins to feel protective of the two young girls and begins to believe that “Mama” is real and that she has followed Victoria and Lilly back from the cabin.
To say that this film is a horror film would be understating things. While it does have some jump scare moments and some creepy and disturbing images the story itself plays out more like a dark fairy tale set in a modern setting. just like another Del Toro produced horror film from the last couple years in The Orphanage, this film uses a fairy tale template to tell the story of the maternal love mothers have for their children. It’s interesting to note that the two mothers vying for Victoria and Lilly are not their biological mother, but surrogates who have come to love and care for the two girls in their own way.
Mama doesn’t break new grounds in the field of horror. It’s liberal use of gothic horror cliches and tropes by the Andres and Barbara Muschietti detracts from some darkly beautiful visuals and imagery that the filmmaker seemed very adept in creating to build that very sense of the fairy tale. What could’ve been a “been there and done that” and “paint-by-the-numbers” ghost story gets elevated by the performances by Jessica Chastain and the two young girls (Megan Charpentier as the elder sister Victoria and Isabelle Nélisse as the younger Lilly). Chastain in particular shines in the role of Annabelle as we believe her growth from reluctant caretaker to loving mother figure to protective mama bear by the time film ends on a very un-Hollywood ending.
Mama will definitely lose some fans of the horror genre who expect gore (which the film doesn’t have a drop of) and tons of scary moments (the film has jump scares but not much). This film will attract audiences looking for something familiar but at the same time with the added visual flair of a young filmmaker who looks to have a future in the genre, if not the industry, as a new creative eye who can work with something unoriginal and give it his own spin.
While the film is not on the same creative and storytelling level as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage it is much better than Troy Nixey’s remake of the 1973 horror film Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. The film does continue Guillermo Del Toro’s streak of finding new and upcoming young filmmakers in the horror genre and giving them a chance to break into the industry with him mentoring them through the process. Mama might not be a perfect film but Andres Muschietti’s work as a director shows that he has repaid Del Toro’s faith in him. I, for one, can’t wait to see what this filmmaker has up next.
This weekend sees the release of the Guillermo Del Toro produced horror film Mama. It’s the full feature length film from a short film of the same name by Argentinean filmmaker Andres Muschietti who also directs the full film.
I’m pretty jaded when it comes to horror films purporting to scare the hell out of people, but after seeing this short I could easily believe why Guillermo Del Toro jumped at the chance to produce the feature length adaptation and put the short film’s director back in the chair to the the adaptation. It’s a short film that’s barely 3-minutes long and it’s a wonderful exercise in setting the appropriate mood and atmosphere before the money shot when we finally see the titular character of “Mama”.
Anyone who lives in a home with a second floor and stairs leading up it will definitely need to see this short film to get an idea of what to expect when they finally see Mama in the theaters.
I think Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming giant robots vs giant monsters summer film will either fail to live up to the hype it’s been gathering since the very first teasers and images were released or the film will blow people’s minds away. This looks to be a film that will not brook any middle-of-the-road reaction. Some will either love it and some will absolutely hate it. Already there’s people who have been dismissing it as nothing but a jumped-up-Michael Bay rip (like that’s even possible) or dismissing it just because it’s a summer blockbuster, special-effects heavy film and not a barely-funded, arthouse, indie foreign film about the meaning of life, existence and the ennui that befalls all.
I, for one, am hyping this film up to beyond what’s safe to hype a film up for (yeah that doesn’t make sense but still deal with it). I’ve been a fan of Del Toro since I first caught his imaginative and inventive take on the vampire myth with Cronos. While he’s earned geek cred for his genre projects he is also once of the few filmmakers who have also gained the respect of the arthouse indie crowd with such films as The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Enough gushing over the man. It’s all about the new trailer which premiered at this year’s CES over in Las Vegas. One wouldn’t think of CES as a place to premiere new footage about a summe rblockbuster, but as one can spy in this newest trailer it looks like Qualcomm paid some cash to get itself named in the film even if it’s just in the background. Also, just to show just how awesome this film will be there are also the design blueprints of five of the giant Jaegers that we’ve caught glimpses of in the trailer.
It’s hard to believe that’s it’s been 11 years since Peter Jackson released The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the masses in 2001. There were much trepidation from Tolkien fans that Jackson (who had been known mostly for low-budget splatter horror-comedies) wouldn’t be able to handle the monumental task of adapting what many consider the greatest novel ever written in the 20th century. Tolkien’s epic fantasy became the standard by which fnatasy epics would be compared to for decades to come and still do. To say that Jackson succeeded in this epic task would be an understatement. TheLord of the Rings trilogy would hoard awards from 2001 to 2003 and also box-office receipts to make any dwarf-lord green with envy.
It’s now 2012 and we finally have the release of Jackson’s next trip into Middle-Earth as he adapts another of Tolkien’s beloved novels. This time he tackles The Hobbit which for some Tolkien fans remains their favorite of the author’s works. It’s a novel that might not have the epic scope and breadth of The Lord of the Rings, but what it lacks in that department it more than makes up in being a fun, adventure tale of a curious hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, a wizard named Gandalf the Grey and a fellowship of twelve dwarfs led by one Thorin Oakenshield of Erebor.
The Hobbit was originally written as a children’s book, but in later years Tolkien would retcon some parts of the novel to better fit with his magnum opus in The Lord of the Rings.It’s this revised version of that children’s story that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo Del Toro would adapt for the big-screen. Initially a two-film set that would tell the story of Bilbo and his merry band of adventurers, but it has since been expanded to become a trilogy as Jackson and his writers take a page out of Tolkien’s bag of tricks and try to tie-in this latest trilogy to the Lord of the Rings which precedes it by a over a decade.
The first film in this new trilogy is called The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and we begin by returning to sometime before the beginning of the first trilogy’s first film. We see the aged Bilbo reminiscing of his adventures 60 years hence and deciding to put it to pen and paper as a sort of memoir of that adventure to reclaim the lost dwarf-hold of Erebor. It’s in this opening that we get to see Frodo once more (played once again by Elijah Wood who doesn’t seem to have aged) prior to him taking up the One Ring.
Bilbo recounts to Frodo the realm of Erebor deep inside the Lonely Mountain east of the Shire to Frodo and how it’s wealth in silver, mithril, gold and precious gems became well-known throughout Middle-Earth. Yet, as Bilbo warns, it’s the very sickness of avarice by Erebor’s Thror the King which seals the dwarf-hold’s doom. We learn that hoards of wealth does more than light up the dwarf king’s eyes with greed but also brings the attention of one of the very last dragon’s in Middle-Earth. The arrival of Smaug to Erebor signals the death of not just that dwarf realm, but the surrounding human town of Dale. The surviving dwarfs of Erebor flee in a massive diaspora towards any safe haven willing to take them in. What was once a proud and powerful realm has now been sundered and it’s afterwards that we get to the meat of the film’s story.
Martin Freeman as a younger Bilbo Baggins was more than just great casting but one which the film needed if one was to believe that this young Bilbo would grow old to be the Ian Holm one fans of the first trilogy have come to know well. His performance as Bilbo Baggins of Bag End becomes the anchor from which the rest of the company would revolve around. When we first meet Freeman as Bilbo he’s not the adventurer that he would become, but a hobbit that’s respectable and one not for doing anything foolish like going on adventures. Yet, his lot in life changes as Gandalf maneuvers the situation so that he becomes embroiled in the quest by Thorin Oakenshield (played by Richard Armitage) to retake his ancestral lands of Erebor and it’s massive wealth from Smaug who has taken it for his lair.
While many would think that a film called The Hobbit would focus on Bilbo I thought the way the film unfolded that this story was all about the dwarfs with extra focus on the single-minded Thorin who comes off initially as both condescending, superior and dismissive of poor old Bilbo. The film never fails to show how much Thorin thinks so less of Bilbo yet throughout the film’s two and a half and more running time we see cracks in Thorin’s ice-cold demeanor towards the young hobbit. By film’s end we see just how wrong Thorin has been of Bilbo’s worth and it makes for one of the film’s more emotional scenes when Thorin realizes this as well.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is not just about a brooding dwarf prince and his motley band of dwarfs getting into one trouble after the next once they’ve left the Shire with Bilbo. The film also brings on a parallel storyline which tries to lay down the foundation that would tie this new trilogy with the first one. It’s the storyline of the Great Necromancer that Gandalf and a fellow wizard, Radagast the Brown, suspect might be the Great Enemy returned. We learn soon enough during the White Council in Rivendell (attended by Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman the White) that this so-called Necromancer might be Sauron looking to regain his former strength and gather an army to him.
It’s this second storyline that get’s sandwiched within the Thorin Oakenshield Fellowship quest that comes off a bit awkward in the film’s overall narrative flow. Where the film is all about fun adventuring and camaraderie when the dwarfs and Bilbo are on the screen, when they’re not and the film tries to tell us about Sauron’s eventual return the film slows down. These scenes are not uninteresting. On it’s own these sequences bring back the epic tone of the original trilogy and brings it into this film, but it’s that very grandiose theme that seems out of place in what is simply a “men on a mission” story.
Fortunately, we don’t spend too much time dwelling on this side-story. The final third of the film is all about Thorin and company needing to escape from one goblin lair and orc ambush to another. The last 45 minutes or so flies back swiftly after a very uneven first two hours that would make more than a few theater-goers look at their watch. The wait is worth it as we see that Jackson hasn’t forgotten how to choreograph and stage fantasy action scenes. While the use of CGI might be more evident this time around than the previous three films they’re still small compared to other blockbuster films of it’s type. It’s still all about WETA practical effects, make-up and costumes that combine to create a world that’s become familiar yet still have a sense of newness to them as we see new areas of Middle-Earth only mentioned in brief passing in the original trilogy.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a wonderful return to the world of Middle-Earth. It is not without it’s missteps and flaws, but it also gets saved by some great performances from the ensemble cast which makes up the dwarfs. The aerial shots of the New Zealand’s eclectic geography shows just how much cinematographer Andrew Lesnie has become such a major component of making Middle-Earth come alive. Even the return of Howard Shore as the film’s composer was a welcome that brought more than a few smiles.
There’s no way of talking about The Hobbit without bringing up the stylistic gamble Peter Jackson has taken in filming this film and the rest of the trilogy in 48fps instead of the traditional 24fps (frames per second) that filmmakers have been using for almost a hundred years now. It’s an aesthetic choice that gives the film a overly realistic look akin to watching a stage production live. Everything looks too perfect and the High-Frame Rate (HFR) takes away some of the cinematic look which many have grown up seeing every time they watch a film. This new filming style works in certain areas like wide shots of the outdoor scenes. Whether it’s the emerald green rolling hills of the Shire to the snowcapped Alpine peaks of the Misty Mountains, these scenes in HFR came out beautiful. It’s when the film switches over to a much more enclosed and personal space within rooms and halls that we get the unusual “soap opera” look some have complained about. It takes a bit of getting used to, but some make the adjustment quickly enough while others may never make the adjustment.
Yet, it is when the film shows a CGI-created sequence that the HFR fails. While the doubling of the frame rate during filming has made the 3D in the film come off smoothly it did make some of the CG-effects come off as too video game-like. A sequence earlier in the film where we see a flashback of Thorin and the dwarfs of Erebor trying to retake another fallen dwarf hold in Moria (Khazadum in dwarfish) looks like a cinematic cutscene as a dwarf army charges and battles it out with an orc and goblin force which had taken Moria as it’s own.
All the scenes where HFR fails to come off as believable turn out better when The Hobbit was seen in traditional 24fps. I actually think that downscaling the film from it’s original HFR to a more traditional film frame speed of 24fps gave the film an even more magical look than the original trilogy. Jackson and his team of filmmakers have two more films to release and hopefully take some of the criticism this first film has received about HFR that they tweak and work on making the new style much more believable instead of taking the audience out of the film’s narrative.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey doesn’t come off as grandiose as the original trilogy and for some that might come as a disappointment. Yet, as an adventure film it more than does it’s job to fully entertain it’s audience while, at the same, time reminding it’s audience how much this film and this trilogy will lead into The Lord of the Rings. I recommend that people just see the film and decide on their own whether it’s a worthy addition to the Middle-Earth saga as seen through the eyes of Peter Jackson. I, for one, think it is and with two more films left we shall see whether Jackson’s return to Middle-Earth has been a triumphant one or not.
I think I may have just found my No. 1 most-anticipated film of 2013. It’s a no-brainer really considering my taste in pure, surefire entertainment. Let’s go through the check-list shall we….
Summer blockbuster: CHECK
Guillermo Del Toro directing: CHECK
Live-Action Mecha goodness: CHECK
Kaiju roaring and fighting: CHECK
Giant Mecha fighting and rocket punching: CHECK
GLaDOS doing voice-over work: CHECK and CHECK.
Guillermo Del Toro has been the champion of genre fans and even though the multitude of projects he gets his name attached to never even make it past the concept stage when they do he always goes full-bore, balls-to-the-wall and damn the torpedo forward with his vision. It looks like Pacific Rim he gets to give his fans and those who just want some crack-a-lacka, eyes-going-to-bleed action a chance to watch his vision of giant robots fighting giant monster for the fate of the planet. This film brings me back to my days as a youngling staring wide-eyed in front of the TV watching such classic anime as Mazinger Z and Voltron.
It helps to have GLaDOS providing the voice of the giant “Jaeger” mechas and current badass Jax Teller aka Charlie Hunnam be one of the two main Jaeger pilots. We even get to see Idris Elba acting in hia natural voice. This looks to be a film that just wants to give and give and give. It’s a giver.
Pacific Rim punches everyone in the groin and we’ll love it for doing so on July 12, 2013.
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 summer blockbuster film Pacific Rim is already becoming one of the film genre fans are eagerly awaiting to see and we’re still a at least 7 months away from it’s premiere.
Pacific Rim is as simple a story as one can find nowadays. Set in a future devastated by an apocalyptic war involving hundred-foot tall monsters rising out of the sea (called kaiju in the film), Pacific Rim is a giant robot vs. giant monsters film. It harkens back to the classic Godzilla and kaiju films of the 60’s and 70’s. With Guillermo Del Toro on board as the film’s director the film already has the geek cred to bring in Comic-Con crowd. The question now is whether the rest of the film-going masses will flock to see Jaegers (what the giant robots humanity uses are called) duke it out with Kaiju on a devastated Earth.
We get what looks like the first viral video marketing set-up for the film. It shows snippets of a news report of San Francisco being attacked by one of these Kaiju. The video looks to be inspired by Cloverfield from a few years back. Near the end of the video we get to see quick glimpses of the dead Kaiju sprawled atop the deck of an aircraft carrier looking like a 1000-foot land shark. Whatever it is that is in San Francisco it seems like its catnip to giant monsters.
Pacific Rim stars Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day and Ron Perlman and set for a July 12, 2013 release date.
