With Pacific Rim: Uprising storming into theaters, now is the perfect time to rewatch Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 film, Pacific Rim. A film with the classic arthouse premise of giant robots fighting giant aliens, Pacific Rim may not be the most thematically profound, but it has a gigantic heart. And it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, a man known for injecting his personality into every inch of his films.
Del Toro’s visual acuity, love of monsters, and eye for detail are all legendary, and so it stands to reason that even a supposedly simple film like Pacific Rim would have its share of secrets, nods, and winks.
The first time you saw Pacific Rim, you were probably so focused on characters forming a mental link to pilot Jaegers and fight Kaiju that you didn’t notice much else. Not to worry! We’ve compiled a list of the best secrets and references in the film, so you can go back to watching Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori hit a Kaiju with an entire boat.
In its original run, Pacific Rim was a modest hit at the box office, but it attracted a loyal fan following. These diehards may know everything there is to know about the movie, but did you catch every Waster egg, every reference?
Find out by reading the 16 Things You Completely Missed In Pacific Rim.
Tendo Choi’s accessories say a lot about him
The head technician for the Jaeger Program, Ops Tendo Choi (played by Clifton Collins Jr.) doesn’t get a ton of dialogue that isn’t related to the mechanical workings of giant robots. His origins are thus somewhat hazy—his name is a mix of traditional Japanese and Chinese names, yet he’s played by a latinx actor, and according to writer Travis Beacham, he has roots in China, the Philippines, and Chile, and grew up in San Francisco.
Since we don’t learn much about him through words, it fell to the costume department to tell the audience more about him.
During the film, Choi is seen with a nicotine patch, a rosary, and a tattoo.
These accessories point to battles with addiction, an underlying belief in Christianity, and more. They are clearly meant to give the audience details about Choi they couldn’t have otherwise learned.
Max the bulldog is more important than you think
At its heart, Pacific Rim is about seemingly incompatible people coming together to do the impossible. This is true even for the side characters: Herc and Chuck Hanson, a father-son Jaeger pilot duo, communicate well when they’re punching aliens with a giant robot fist, but can't do so in real life.
Enter Max, the bulldog. Named after Max Martini (who portayed Herc), Max serves a surprisingly touching role for the Hansons. In interviews, Rob Kazinsky (who portrayed Chuck) said that Max was an “emotional conduit” between the two characters. This means that when the characters are showing Max affection, they’re really expressing the affection for one another that they have trouble vocalizing.
If that doesn’t make you teary-eyed, rewatch the celebration scene at the end.
While everyone at the Shatterdome cheers, Herc thinks about his son’s sacrifice, and looks at Max.
The post-credits homage
It’s no secret that Pacific Rim is a love letter to monster movies of years gone by. Guillermo del Toro is famous for his creature features, from Hellboy to The Shape of Water, and Pacific Rim is certainly the biggest of the bunch. Del Toro chose to honor his inspirations with the film’s dedication, which appears at the very end of the film, after the credits.
The film “is dedicated to the memory of monster masters Ray Harryhausen and Ishirō Honda.” Ray Harryhausen was a legendary visual effects artist who used stop-motion animation to create some of the most memorable monsters from the ‘40s to the ‘80s, with credits like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans to his name. Ishiro Honda, of course, wrote and directed Godzilla and several of its sequels.
The dedication in Pacific Rim is accompanied by a Kaiju’s growl, clearly meant as a sign of respect.
Mistranslations
The very first screen in Pacific Rim defines two terms: kaiju and jaeger. Jaeger is translated from German (correctly) as “hunter.” Kaiju, meanwhile, is translated as “giant beast,” when in actuality it means “strange beast.” This is forgivable, though, since even in Japan kaiju is colloquially used to refer to giant monsters like Godzilla and Mothra. Still, to be 100% accurate, huge monsters like those that appear in Pacific Rim would be called daikaiju.
Another potentially frustrating but intentional moment involving translation comes near the end of the film, when the female lead, Mako Mori, says her final words to her mentor and father figure, Stacker Pentecost. Mako says something in Japanese, and no subtitles are shown, so those unfamiliar with the language are left in the dark. Those with some knowledge of Japanese (or access to Google Translate) can tell she says, “Teacher, I love you.”
The scientists don’t know that much about science
Charlie Day and Burn Gorman play the pair of scientists who lead the Jaeger Program’s research division, Newt Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb. Both scientists are introduced as geniuses, but when it comes to actual science, they seem a bit shaky. Hermann says pseudoscientific nonsense, describing a rift between worlds as “atomic in nature,” which means nothing.
At one point Newt compares a Kaiju’s secondary brain to dinosaurs, which were once theorized to have two brains to control their large bodies. This theory was disproven a long time ago.
Of course, it’s always possible that in the world of Pacific Rim, dinosaurs actually did have two brains, since in this story, the dinosaurs were the first wave of colonizers sent by the alien invaders. If that’s the case, this could be a clever bit of worldbuilding, but until that’s confirmed, we’ll stick to assuming it was a mistake.
GLaDOS makes a cameo
Fans of the video game franchise Portal likely thought the voice of Gipsy Danger’s onboard computer sounded familiar, and they were right!
Guillermo del Toro is a huge fan of Valve’s Portal and Portal 2, having played the latter co-op with his daughter. When it came time to set a voice for the computer, del Toro went straight to Valve and asked permission to hire Ellen McLain as a voice actor, and they said yes.
The computer’s voice in the film isn’t exactly GLaDOS, as del Toro used slightly different vocal effects on McLain’s voice. But the similarity is both undeniable and deliberate, as the director used his sharp eye for detail to give a nod to one of his favorite video games.
Newton's cradles
As a Kaiju rampages through Hong Kong looking for Newt Geiszler, there’s a notorious joke where Gipsy Danger’s fist crashes through an office building. The joke is that the fist only gently taps one table in the building, which is just enough to set in motion one of those pendulum toys you’ve likely seen on desks or in physics class.
At first glance, it seems like a throwaway gag.
But did you know what those toys are called? They’re known as Newton’s Cradles, because they demonstrate one of Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion.
That it’s a Newton’s Cradle that gets set off is no coincidence, as it occurs while a Kaiju is hunting a character named Newton (it’s what Newt is short for!). It may be silly, and it definitely wouldn’t work, as Newton’s Cradles can’t be set in motion that way, but it’s still clever.
Rage Against The Machine
Tom Morello is an active guy. Known for his guitar work on multiple projects, from Rage Against the Machine to his own solo career, he gets around. When it came time for composer Ramin Djawadi to craft Pacific Rim’s main theme, he went straight to Morello to add in some guitar licks.
Morello had this to say: "When they asked me to put some giant robot riffs and screaming underwater monster licks on the film score, I was all in.” The theme went on to become one of the most memorable parts of the film’s score, injecting several sequences with a rock and roll flair that adds a sense of weight and rhythm to the giant robots.
The Bone Powder Man
When Newt Geiszler takes to the streets of Hong Kong to find Hannibal Chau and procure a living Kaiju brain, the first person he talks to after entering the shop is a genuinely creepy, greasy-looking character who is credited as nothing but the “Wizened Man.” This guy tries (unsuccessfully) to sell Newt Kaiju bone powder, to boost his “potency.”
The Wizened Man is one of Hannibal Chau’s employees, and he’s played by none other than Santiago Segura.
Segura is a personal friend of Guillermo del Toro, and he’s appeared in several of del Toro’s films, including the two Hellboy movies and Blade II. On top of that, Segura is actually a successful film producer in his native Spain, not to mention the writer, director, and star of the Torrente series of spy parodies, which has seen five installments.
Where "Tull St" and "Fong Road" come from
As Newt explores the Bone Slums of Hong Kong to find black market kingpin Hannibal Chau, he stops under two noticeable street signs labeled Tull Street and Fong Road. These street names are a tip of the hat to two men involved in the production of Pacific Rim: Thomas Tull and Henry Fong. Tull was the film’s producer (and has gone on to produce Pacific Rim: Uprising), and Fong was a visual concept artist on the film, working specifically on the visuals for the streets of Hong Kong.
Guillermo del Toro has always been fond of paying his respects to his colleagues, and this little Easter egg is no different. The details in his sets are planned out to the tiniest level, and that includes expressing gratitude to the people who helped make Pacific Rim possible in the first place.