How did these giant monsters get on Earth?
Through a portal. The whole backstory (which is lightly touched upon in the trailers) centers on a mysterious portal that opens up in the Pacific Ocean in the year 2013. Pacific Rim is set 12 years in the future, after most of humanity has banded together to try and figure out a way to fight the swarms of monsters that are popping out of this portal. Thus creating the 250-foot to 280-foot-tall Jaegar robots.
So why set the film 12 years after the monsters arrive?
Guillermo del Toro explains:
GDT: "The part that I was interested in was the part where things are hard. I cannot tell you how much I didn't want to make it a war movie. I wanted to make an adventure movie. I wanted to contrast the moment when it was going well but you were deep into it. If you start with the origin [of the problem], then you have to go with investigative characters, which are hard for me to relate to. Like a reporter, or military forensics. If it doesn't come from a point of view that I can relate to. For me it has to be a character that has something against him or her, from the get-go. A character that starts already oppressed or down on his/her luck, for me to be interested in them."
Will this be the typical Guillermo del Toro "sympathetic monster" movie?
NO! Guillermo GETS Kaiju. There won't be a small boy cuddling the fallen giant face of a monster ? Kaijus are Kaijus, and they **** **** up. Just take it from del Toro himself:
GDT: "I have used monsters in a identifiable, sympathetic ways, and the Kaiju are like an earthquake, or a tornado, or a hurricane...a force of nature. They are essentially blind to any moral or ethical circumstances, their path is their path. If there's a city or a highway, they just move. That is a big difference."
How many Kaijus are we going to see stomping around our cities?
The audience will witness about eight to 10 monsters in battle. But they will also see Kaiju carcasses, and a closer look at Kaiju brains and intestines and skulls. There are A LOT of monsters, and when the Jaegers win, the body of the Kaiju falls where it died. Leaving a giant rotting carcass. The future humans have found away to make these dead things work. We even saw a bit of concept art where the skeletal remains of a Kaiju had been turned into a church, worshiping the monsters. No clue if that art made it into the movie, but it stuck with us.
Why is Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny in this movie?
We were shocked (but also stoked) that Charlie Day was cast as Newt, the obligatory monster science guy. Why was he cast? Because GDT is a HUGE It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan.
GDT: "I'm a huge fan of Philadelphia, and I'm a huge fan of Charlie without thinking of anything. One day in one of the episodes of Philadelphia, he has a monologue about rats. He comes out with a stick, and he has a monologue about what it is to hunt a rat in the basement, and he was very funny, but coming from character. He was really mourning and lamenting job, how inhuman it is, and I thought this guy is really great at shading, and is great at comedy, and there are moments in the movie where he delivers them both. I'm extremely happy with that. I didn't know any movies he had done, I had only followed Philadelphia from the beginning until now. I'm addicted to that show."