Del Toro: Pacific Rim (2013)

If Avatar heralded a revolution in 3D filmmaking, then Pacific Rim heralds a revolution in 3D IMAX filmmaking. Essentially an update of the kaiju and mecha genres for a post-cinematic era, it’s driven by a series of battles between giant reptilian aliens that emerge from an interdimensional portal beneath the Pacific Ocean and the enormous robots mankind creates to combat them. The sense of scale is staggering – the aliens are so big that they can’t even really be conceptualised, let alone visualised - meaning that it’s a perceptual as much as a physical battle, especially since the aliens are equipped with a fully-functioning hive mind. It’s not enough, then, for the pilots to simply maneouvre these robots – they’ve had to learn how to “drift” into each others’ minds as well, pooling neurological and perceptual resources as the aliens get larger and emerge more frequently. While 3D glasses go some way towards drifting the audience into four eyes as well, we’re still in a considerably more impoverished position, perceptually, than the pilots, making for a masterpiece of peripheral vision, a drift of immensities that can only be glimpsed at the corner of your eye, or imagined at the corner of your brain. What’s perhaps even more extraordinary is that del Toro not only makes room for a wonderfully eccentric human narrative, but for all the kitsch detritus and residue that the aliens leave in their wake. In fact, as the prologue explains, although it’s set in 2025, all the technology dates from 2013, when the aliens first emerged, embroidering it with the retro-futuristic minutiae that del Toro does so well. And the world that he evokes is on the same scale as his monsters, big enough to defeat them – for all its mega-spectacle, it leaves nearly everything to the imagination, barraging you with a wealth of detail that never feels like more than the tip of a tantalising iceberg.