Real Life Mech Robots Prove 'Pacific Rim' And 'RoboCop' Are Closer To Reality Than You Think

Is there anything cooler than a robot? Seriously. Put a robot in a movie and you're half way to glory. From Metropolis and Star Wars, to RoboCop and Short Circuit all the way up to 2013's Pacific Rim, robots in movie are a tried and true geek staple. Unfortunately, the reality of robotics is far less exciting. Robots are either small and simple or big and complicated. The middle range, humanistic robot founds in those movies don't quite exist and if they do, they're less fun and more practical.

That's changing, though, thanks to a recent reveal at a festival in Tokyo. There, a company called Suidobashi Heavy Industries revealed their own rideable, hydraulic 13 foot, 4-ton fighting robot called Kuratas. Kuratas is expensive (over $1 million a piece) and bulky but he runs off an iPhone and has a gatling gun for maximum carnage. Check out some video and images after the jump.

Gigazine and Obvious Winner (via Laughing Squid) are to thank for a bunch of these images and info. Here's a gallery followed by a few videos.

If you head to the the Suidobashi Heavy Industry website, you can customize your own Kuratas, which would be even more fun if the cost of building it wasn't millions of dollars. Then again, what would you do with it anyway? It's almost certainly illegal for the gun alone.

But watching that and looking at those pictures, you'd be remiss if you didn't think of ED-209 from RoboCop, the Power Loader from Aliens, the suits of District 9 or the infinite possibilities of Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim. At the very least, if we need to fight some big monsters, Kuratas is on our side.