Twenty years as an action hero and Jason Statham hasn’t changed a bit. Probably the only actor who could fill the shoes of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis, he’s back to open this summer after a year without movie theaters in what’s bound to be another hit, a revenge flick called Wrath of Man. Revenge is a dish best served by Statham? In the first trailer for Wrath of Man, Statham plays a guy known only as H. And he leaves no one standing. Check out the trailer below.
We first noticed Statham’s cool and cocky bravado under the direction of one of the all-time genre greats, John Carpenter, in Ghosts of Mars, playing opposite Pam Grier and Joanna Cassidy. He quickly led the first of his three Transporter movies beginning in 2002, then he co-starred in one of the best heist movies of all time with an all-star cast in 2003’s The Italian Job, followed five years later in one of the best heist movies of all time without an all-star cast in The Bank Job. He’s co-starred in both The Fast and the Furious franchise and The Expendables, played Donald E. Westlake’s well-known crime lead in Parker, and starred in the summer hit The Meg and a dozen other single-word action flicks, including Collateral, Cellular, Revolver, Snatch, Crank, Safe, and Redemption. This trailer leaves the impression H could be a combination of all Statham’s past tough guys.
Director Guillermo del Toro’s ode to Godzilla and the mecha genre in 2013’s Pacific Rim continues with del Toro producing the sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising, directed by Steven S. DeKnight. As you’d expect, that means bigger and better Jaegers–those enormous fighting, armored machines initially only manned and newly created as flying drones to defend Earth–and some bigger and more terrifying Kaiju–humanity’s nemeses in the form of terrifying, alien, Godzilla-inspired monsters. Fans of the franchise can see the development of the next generation of both creations, and how their development relied upon getting the right look and sound effects together, in the new bookThe Art and Making of Pacific Rim: Uprising.
Director DeKnight, showrunner of Marvel’s Daredevil, and producer of genre favorites Smallville, Angel, and Dollhouse, provides a foreword to the book and takes readers through each step of the development of the film from idea to fleshing out the look of the film’s giant-sized spectacles and its several new human characters. Screenwriters T.S. Nowlin and Travis Beacham provide insight into the direction of the story, and DeKnight and visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang (Star Trek Beyond, Godzilla, Total Recall, John Carter, The Chronicles of Riddick, Labyrinth, Highlander, Krull) explain the look and rationale for each element of the film. Author Daniel Wallace incorporates interviews with cast members John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian, Cailee Spaeny, Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, Adria Arjona, Charlie Day, and others, plus costume designer Lizz Wolf describes her concepts behind the signature look of each character. We also meet the next generation of cadets, with a young slate of international performers: Wesley Wong, Rahart Adams, Karan Brar, Lily Ji, Shyrley Rodriguez, Ivanna Sakhno, and Levi Meaden–a group of up-and-coming actors that will be fun to watch emerge in films in the next few years.
But for most fans it will be the concept art for the Jaegers that are of key importance for a book like this, and they should be happy as most of the content is devoted to these designs, including discarded concepts and rejected variants. Production designer Stefan Dechant (Kong: Skull Island, Alice in Wonderland, Minority Report) talks about his influences for design elements of each Jaeger (like F-16 Fighters for Guardian Bravo, the Millennium Falcon for Bracer Phoenix) and how the massive weaponry was developed. Color was a key design factor for the Jaegers and the Kaiju, and the large icons were also defined by their sounds. More so than most behind-the-scenes looks into films, The Art and Making of Pacific Rim: Uprising may provide the most attention to the incorporation of sound effects. Supervising sound designer and editor Erik Aadahl (Transformers, Godzilla, Terminator Genisys, G.I. Joe: Retaliation) shares many of his secrets to help create the foreboding presence of the monsters and machines.
Key for fans of the franchise will be the book’s incorporation of tipped-in scrapbook materials, reproductions of original artwork like unused Jaeger concept art, storyboards, a monster/machine size comparison chart, a glossy, full-color pull-out blueprint of Romeo Blue, and several other reproductions of the designers’ concept art.
Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost is gone, but in the sequel to the 2013 surprise hit sci-fi-monster flick Pacific Rim, titled Pacific Rim: Uprising, the latest Star Wars trilogy star John Boyega takes on the role of his son. Boyega teams up and reunites with Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) from the original film and is joined by The Great Wall star Tian Jing, leading a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert (Scott Eastwood) and 15-year-old hacker Amara (Cailee Spaeny), against a new Kaiju threat.
In what looks like it could also be a sequel to Boyega’s Attack the Block, Boyega faces off against monsters again, just bigger ones, and he keeps his British accent.And Tian Jing faces monsters again, too–she was the general that bested the ancient monsters at the great Wall of China earlier this year in The Great Wall. Torchwood star and fan favorite Burn Gorman (Forever, Crimson Peak, The Dark Knight Rises) is back again as Dr. Herman Gottlieb along with Charlie Day (The LEGO Movie, Monsters University) as Dr. Newton Geiszler.
Starship Troopers meets The Transformers and Godzilla yet again in a second giant-scale Rock ’em Sock ‘Em Robots for the next generation.
Here’s the first full trailer for Pacific Rim: Uprising:
