Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim has a new trailer out, and, as Del Toro told the audience at the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival where he premiered it over the weekend:

If I showed you all the money shots [in Pacific Rim], you’d have a 70 minute orgasm.

That’s right, a 70-minute orgasm. Or as Sting calls it, “the kind of pathetic, unfulfilling sex I was having back in grade school.”

You can watch the new trailer below, which is basically more of the same. Not that I can complain when “the same” includes giant robots smashing pterodactyl monsters in the face with a battleship. This trailer provides a little more exposition, including the mind-meld link between the robot jox… er, jaeger pilots… and the new tagline, “GO BIG… OR GO EXTINCT.” I would’ve gone with “THIS SUMMER… PUNCH YOUR PROBLEMS IN THE FACE”, but what do I know.

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I’ve mostly been bored with Guillermo Del Toro’s post-Pan’s Labyrinth output, and the guy makes like 12 movies a year so it can be hard to keep up (he has EIGHTEEN in development credits on IMDB)… BUT, having seen this latest trailer for Pacific Rim… well, I’m listening. I’d sort of tuned out all the viral marketing crap for it (because viral marketing always feels like two ad guys jerking each other off), but things might have been different if they’d simply told me it was about ROBOT JOX FIGHTING GODZILLA. (Man, who knew Robot Jox would go on to become so influential, huh?) It’s hard to impress people with scale anymore, now that we’ve all seen the Eiffel Tower get destroyed in six trillion Roland Emmerich trailers, but I must say, I was impressed by the scale of this one. Or maybe it was the robots fighting sea monsters that did it. You know what? I might be overthinking this. Opens July 12.

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We’ve heard all about the Blu-Ray release of The Avengers, now it’s hype time for that other big summer movie, Prometheus. It hits DVD October 11th, and LatinoReview (via PrometheusNews) has a cut of some of the deleted scenes. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can see what all the fuss was about over Idris Elba’s Southern accent. Worse than Keanu’s British? Than Connery’s Irish? Than Snow’s Jamaican? You decide. There’s also quite a bit more of Charlize Theron’s Miss Vickers, who I can only assume was an attempt to test out the merits of the Supreme Court’s corporations-are-people decision. “I minimize risk, and maximize profits, you see! It is my only personality trait!”

I guess what I’m saying is, I really wish there was a rom-com subplot where she and free-spirit Elba fall in love where he throws her space Blackberry in the ocean to teach her a valuable lesson about not being such a workaholic. “My whole life was in there!” “No, darling. Your whole life is out here. With me. Living in the moment.” (*montage set to Coldplay*)

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"Well hello. I'm here to pick up your space daughter."

My, my, that is a handsome black man.

Thank God Frotcast Brendan isn’t here, because that’s a picture of Elba in costume for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, and Brendan’s been floating “Pacific Rim Job” as his idea for an Asian-themed porn for like five years now, and probably wouldn’t be able to shut up about this. This, unfortunately, is more along the lines of “robot-piloting humans in battle against interplanetary monsters.” I imagined Zack Snyder and Michael Bay locking eyes over a milkshake with two straws as I read that.

Says Del Toro:

“When we’re talking about the physicality of the fight, we ended up building several blocks of Hong Kong. And literally demolished them. We built a building and then we took down the buildings.

We built command centres of the robots that were the size of the house. We started them on hydraulic rigs that shoot and elevated them and moved them round so you could really get a sense of the physical nature driving a robot like this.” [Total Film via Movieline]

Once upon a time I would’ve been super excited about this, but something about constantly reading Guillermo Del Toro’s name makes me less excited about him directing something. Can you believe this will be the first thing he’s directed since Hellboy II? It seems like he’s attached to a new project every other week (sixteen in-development credits on IMDB). He’s like a Mexican Ridley Scott. And so far, all I’ve really liked of his was Pan’s Labyrinth. But Pan’s Labyrinth was pretty bitchin’, so I guess I can kick the football a few more times before I give up. I can’t quit you, Pale Man.

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"Yes, Dave, my penis is huge. Would you like to see it?"

I read a piece on David Fincher recently where he described a distinction between “films” and “movies.” He says The Game is a movie, Fight Club is a film. “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for an audience and the filmmakers,” he explained. The way I extrapolate that statement is that I imagine a film as something that asks and attempts to answer the big questions, whereas a movie just sort of references them to use as playthings. You could say it’s the difference between art and entertainment, but let’s not, because I’d rather piss hot thumb tacks than get hung up arguing the semantics of “art.” Point being, what I found most compelling about Prometheus was they way it keeps you wondering whether you’re watching a “movie” or a “film,” schlock or philosophy.

It starts off as your basic, rag-tag-team-of-scientists plot. Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green play a husband-and-wife team researching similarities between ancient civilizations’ depiction of aliens. I could go into more detail, but long story short, as Rapace says, “I think they want us to come and find them!” Yeah, totally, that’s why they got some cavemen to draw their planetary system in wooly mammoth dung and hid it inside a cave 2,000 years ago. “The humans are sure to figure this one out!” they were probably thinking. But Rapace and Green are convinced that the aliens are some kind of race of “engineers,” who created humans.

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