But a movie that has a lot of kaijus? Pacific Rim. The sequel is pretty... the best thing I could say about it is that it's an all right action movie that doesn't feel like the sequel this movie deserves? If it even needs a sequel? Anyway. Pacific Rim is a movie from 2013, it's pretty fun CGI punch-em-up stuff with a surprisingly interestingly well-done world-building that I don't see a lot in these newer standalone sci-fi movies. The basic concept is that it's essentially any given mecha series. Giant-ass kaiju monsters who defy the laws of physics on how big an organic creature can be start appearing and smashing shit up. Humanity makes gigantic Gundam Evangelion Transformer Jaegers in order to fight them. It's shameless sci-fi fun, there's not even any sort of attempt to massage this to be 'realistic'. It's just an excuse to have mecha-vs-kaiju, and I am all for it.
The robots are cool, but I tried doing a 'reviewing robots' for Gundam or Transformers or Iron Man armours and I can't really form much of a coherent thought beyond "ROBOTS ARE COOL AND I LOVE WHEN THEY GO PSSSH-BOOM-SMASH". Pacific Rim's plot doesn't feature my two favourite ones (Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon) too much beyond the middle action scene, mostly featuring on the two more (IMO) boring robots, Gypsy Danger and Striker Eureka. But the monsters? I can talk monsters.
Trespasser / Axehead: I'm not going to exhaustively go through all the monsters in the movie, because some only show up in background news-clips and not even the Wiki have clear shots of them. And some only show up as skeletons, or mentioned off-handedly by the characters, or whatnot, so I'm just going to talk about the kaiju that have a relatively major role or scene. In Trespasser's case here (alternatively called as 'Axehead' in the Wiki) his major role is being the first kaiju to show up, being the one featured in a lot of the real-life trailers, and getting a very cool scene of it rising up from the ocean, smashing a giant bridge and shrugging off fighter jets flying around it like flies. Its design is pretty honestly basic; a scarier, more skull-like take on the quintessential kaiju Godzilla. But, with a gigantic axe jutting out of his forehead. Simple, effective, and pretty neat-looking to our first introduction to a Pacific Rim kaiju. (We also briefly see the second Kaiju to 'breach' into our world, Hundun, but that dude shows up only as part of a montage of Kaiju attacks)
Knifehead: I'm going to use a mixture of concept art and actual screencaps of the movie, because, well, the kaiju don't really like staying still for the camera, and they tend to move around a lot. Or if we get a good shot of them, we only get it of their face. Like Trespasser, Knifehead here is basically kind of a pretty basic giant theropod, but with a giant knife for a head! It does make this guy look like some sort of deep-sea fish, like a goblin shark or a sawshark or something, which makes sense since a lot of these kaiju burst out of the depths of the ocean and fight the giant robots near the sea. I love how knobbled the anatomy of Knifehead is, particularly its larger arms -- Knifehead's got two sets of arms! Knifey here is the subject of the first Jaeger-vs-Kaiju fight in the movie, which, again, is a neat showcase of the general concept of this setting.
Mutavore: One we saw from afar when it exploded through a giant wall meant to keep Kaiju out and attacked Sydney, Mutavore could just be handwaved away as just being another generic 'theropod with extra parts slapped on' monster like Trespasser and Knifehead, but I've always loved just how weird Mutavore is, something I am glad to pick out even when I first watched this movie in 2013. It's got a bunch of extra limbs -- two scythe-like arms protruding out of its chest, seen more clearly in the concept art; plus two vestigial-looking wings. But the most memorable part about this monster is its head. It appears to not have any obvious eyes on its curved head... and then you see its long, almost mustache-like lower jaw, and you see that there's a row of eyeballs there. It's a small detail, but one that made Mutavore extra memorable to me!
Onibaba: Seen pretty prominently in a character's flashback, we see Onibaba rampaging around Tokyo from a street-level view. As the movie later reveals, the monsters that start to appear are slowly changing to adapt to humanity's own weapons, although we don't actually see a lot of what happened in the interim between Trespasser and Knifehead (which are just giant T-rexes with extra spikes) to the ones featured in the main plot of the movie. Onibaba ('oni grandma', I guess?) here is a very fun looking monster, though. It's a giant crab monster, but it's also got a vaguely humanoid vibe to it, like someone designed this thing to maybe be piloted by either a suit actor or a team of puppeteers in a tokusatsu show. As you can probably tell by the very splayed-out crab legs and the fact that this is a Hollywood movie, Onibaba is entirely CGI, but I loved that it gives me that fun little quality. I like that it's not just a giant crab monster either. Its face looks pretty bizarrely alien, and I love that it's nestled into that giant... weird... two-pronged tower-thing? It's also got a second pair of smaller crab arms nesetled in her chest. I like this monster crab, and its short scene of scuttling around bowling over buildings and stuff is pretty memorable.
Leatherback: So it was a huge, huge event when the movie's second act ratchets up and (well, mild spoilers for the movie, I guess) and two Kaiju burst out of the water simultaneously, leading to a 2-versus-4 battle. It's this guy and the next one after it, and the Leatherback/Otachi fight is, I believe, the highlight of the entire movie as they battle with the four giant mechas in the coast of Hong Kong before the fight gets into the city itself. Design-wise, Leatherback isn't my favourite type of monster -- I've always never quite liked the giant, gorilla-ogre style of brutish monsters, but they're important to have in any setting. If nothing else to contrast Leatherback with his far sleeker and creepier-looking buddy Otachi below. Leatherback is still fast, though, leaping and jumping around like... well, a gorilla.
Leatherback's not just a giant monkey, though, I do like how alien all of the heads of these kaiju look, and Leatherback's brutish-but-simple form does end up actually causing all the humans to underestimate it, because it actually has been modified with an organic EMP blast that disables all of the newer-model Jaegers, causing the necessity of our heroes pulling out the old nuclear-powered Gypsy Danger out of storage. Again, it's later revealed that the alien race sending these kaiju to Earth has been observing and modifying them, making each successive Kaiju more and more powerful, and Leatherback is just the latest in a series of anti-Jaeger precautions. Neat!
Otachi: Otachi (roughly 'great sword', although I know it as the Japanese name of the Pokemon Sentret) is the other monster that emerged alongside Leatherback, and for a huge chunk of the fight it looks like it's just a weird-looking dinosaur thing with a giant scorpion tail, the titular 'Otachi'. And there was a shot in the movie as it crushes walls while it stalks around Hong Kong explicitly looking for a specific human being (long story). It's also got a very, very neat head -- it's got a pretty regular dinosaur-dragon monster head, but with a giant frog-esque inflatable chin-sac (it shoots metal-destroying acid out of it), and I've always seen those two pairs of dots on its horns to be extra eyes. Of course, after a long battle against Otachi on the ground, turns out that... it's actually a giant wyvern-style monster! Which is actually something I kicked myself for not recognizing, considering its front arms look utterly identical to bats when they crawl around -- something that I know damn well how they look, damn it! It's pretty cool and Otachi doesn't really last too long after being sliced up, but I honestly really like this guy. Everything about the design works, but it's the head that really sells this design to me and not just makes it feel like a generic Rodan poser or something.
Also, again, another mild spoiler for what happens later on in the movie, a bunch of secondary characters dig into Otachi's body to dig for... something or other, and turns out that Otachi's got a Baby Otachi inside it! It's a mommy! Whether "Otachi Junior" is actually something that these Kaiju's creators intended as a weapon to be used against humanity, or if it's something else entirely, I'm not sure. Pretty fun little scene, though!
Raiju: The final battle of Pacific Rim takes place in the, well, depths of the pacific rim. And when I looked up this guy on the wiki, I was baffled because I don't remember a giant crocodile kaiju in the movie. And then I realized it's because I remembered that second picture a lot more -- see, Raiju looked pretty generic, just swimming around the depths of the ocean... until it opens its crocodile mouth. Which opens up like a flower, and inside that mouth is a second head with four creepy-looking eyes and a more regular mouth. It's just so bafflingly impractical and yet also so cool. The fact that the Pacific Rim Kaiju are canonically constructed as organic weapons makes it far, far more believable that things like this exist when they'd be a lot harder to swallow if they're supposed to be naturally occurring in-universe.
Scunner: The more interesting-looking one out of the pair that seemed to serve as the 'final boss' (at least until Raiju opens his mouth), Scunner has a very, very cool-looking head, yeah? I'm not sure how to describe it. It's like someone took a hammerhead shark, giant bull horns and a human skull and grafted them all together. The wide, flat horns on the side of the heads; the thin hammerhead-shark-looking horns ending with beady eyes, and the creepy mouth... and Scunner's got a bunch of arms, too! Four in total, but I love that very bony quality of the lower parts of his primary arms.
Both Scunner and Raiju don't actually do much after fighting around for a bit, because turns out that, borrowing a video game lingo, they are merely 'adds' for...
Slattern: Or, as the movie itself calls it, the 'Category Five'. All the other Kaiju in Pacific Rim so far have been identified by the humans as being either category three and four, and our heroes have been utterly gobsmacked by merely two of those things. It's a neat sense of helplessness, where our heroes genuinely feel utterly helpless against not only two more monsters that are theoretically as powerful as Otachi and Leatherback... but a third one that's larger and more powerful. Slattern's concept art shows us the most clear look of its anatomy, because, well, the movie never actually shows us a proper full-body shot of Slattern, mostly panning around its anatomy, or only showing its head (which, admittedly, feels pretty similar to Scunner, just more hammerhead-shark-esque). What is pretty fun is that it's got a whole ton of tentacles (or, well, thorned tails, as that concept art more clearly shows), making it feel like some sort of fusion between a giant squid and a dinosaur.
Ultimately I don't have a whole ton to say about Slattern, it does really feel like the other kaiju, just bigger and scarier. Ultimately, I think Pacific Rim's monster roster is actually pretty fun and varied for a movie that is a neat little love letter to the kaiju genre, while keeping most of its monsters feel believably like, well, something that Ultraman or Godzilla would fight. I also do really like there's a neat sense of making these monsters have a somewhat vague theme of being "giant Godzilla-style monsters with aquatic animal parts grafted on" aesthetic.
It's just kind of a shame that, at least to me, the sequel misses on what made the first movie so much more enjoyable, and reduces its plot to... well, not the kaiju. The plot mostly revolves around what the humans are doing and some Kaiju-Jaeger hybrids, and the Kaiju itself feel like an afterthought with a rather bland 'oh, the three Kaiju that show up combine into one' that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. Raijin has a pretty cool head design, and Hakuja is an all right armoured monster, but Strikethorn and especially the Megakaiju feel pretty bland compared to what we get in the movie. And since neither the three 'component' kaiju in that movie actually get much screentime, yeah, I'm not really going to be covering them.
Anyway, this has been a blast. I'll try looking at any movies (or movie franchises) where I can talk about the monsters. Alien? The 'Monsterverse'? I do want to do a couple of these shorter articles before I actually go into "all monsters from X tokusatsu series".
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