Pacific Rim is a kaiju film made in Hollywood by a director who has been explicit about the debt, and the word it uses for its monsters is the Japanese one the 1954 film's genre is named after. What it takes from Honda's film is the scale and how the scale is staged: creatures large enough that cities are the terrain rather than the setting, destruction shot from street level, and an emergency answered by an institution rather than by a hero. What it does not take is the 1954 film's subject, which is the bomb and the fallout, and that difference is the honest limit on the claim.