Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures have taken over Hall H for the next two hours and change for a celebration of their upcoming slate, including Man of Steel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Pacific Rim, all of which have had a huge representation here at Comic-Con, with props, posters and buzz on the floor and at other panels. ComicBook.com will be liveblogging it to bring you up-to-the-minute coverage of the story.They’ve started already, showing some CGI test footage from Pacific Rim. It’s simple, but it looks pretty awesome showing on the gigantic screen that’s been revealed behind the Hall H curtain. It’s a bit like the Star Wars ride at Disney, where it’s designed to look like a control console through which you can view wahtever else is projected for the panel.Director Guillermo del Toro is taking the stage to a huge response from the crowd. He’s not unfamiliar to Comic-Con guests, of course, having worked on films like Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth before. As he gets settled in, we’re seeing mech-suits like the ones we’ve seen on the floor of the convention moving and shooting and fighting over sci-fi landscapes. They seem to have resolved the Judge Dredd problem by having helmets with transparent faceplates so that big-name actors’ familiar faces aren’t “wasted” on the film. The suits are fighting in the rain and in spite of clearly a lot of CG, the way the characters are moving makes it look like this is mostly the actors’ performances and not fully CG characters and the like.A Navy ship is overtaken by a wave, which is less impressive than it could be only becuase the effects aren’t final.The cast is taking the stage as the footage starts to loop, and it’s a good-sized group. Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi all show up, and they’re almost immediately into talking about Perlman’s dramatic Make-A-Wish performance earlier in the week as Hellboy. Rinko is jittery about attending his first Comic-Con….And we’re off with the first clip being played right now!Del Toro says it’s a trailer, so it’s likely to be released later today. The director says that in the context of the film, pilots are being used to control giant robots who look like monsters and were having a pretty brutal battle in the clip. The robots, called Jaegers, are controlled by two pilots each, and the pilots each take a side of the robot, so that if one guy dies, the other side of the robot can keep fighting. But he oughtn’t try, becuase the whole reason there are two is that one guy would be incinerated by the energy surge from the machine. Del Toro says that we’ll get to see that in the film.The pilots, using some kind of metal detector or radiation meter, come across a small item that looks like a statue and one looks off to the horizon, looking scared. A Jaegar is heading toward them until it collapses; a monster is seen attacking a bridge, and it’s a horrible six-armed monster that we don’t really get a good look at.There’s a definitely animated quality to the film, and Del Toro calls it “robot porn with lots of robot on kaiju action.” “To fight monsters,” says the ad, “we created monsters,” and to that end there will be nine monsters and seven robots in the movie.Idris Elba, familiar to this kind of thing from his recent turn in Prometheus, delivers a rousing speech to the troops, presumably before they head out to do battle with the kaiju. It ends with “today, we cancel the apocalypse!”, which just seems like a great, quotable line if the movie becomes a big hit.The lights come up and it’s apparent that the footage is hot off the presses, since the actors say they haven’t seen any of the movie actually edited and ready to go yet, so they’re as excited for it as everyone else is.Del Toro was going for a realistic feel with the film, in spite of the CG look to some shots. He says he intentionally set up the shots so that there wasn’t a really great view of the robot, making it look cramped and awkward and imposing. He also says that there’s no breaks in the movie; if a monster is onscreen, it’s attacking. It’ll also be a more realistic kind of combat; “f–k that s–t,” says Del Toro about movies where one action hero can take down an advancing army becuase they all go after him one at a time.He also says, “we have monsters up the wazoo,” including three sea monsters and at least one flier. But they aren’t his takes on classic legends; when asked by a fan if there were any “classic” monsters, the director indicated that there was only Perlman.That concludes the official Pacific Rim portion of the panel; odd that the cast didn’t really have more to say, but maybe it was the Q&A nature of things, things were directed at Del Toro.I didn’t catch who, but someone is introducing Man of Steel as “If Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan had a baby and named it Kal-El.”
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