Your giant robots are good. Just a compliment about your giant robots being good.

I saw Pacific Rim in IMAX 3D at 4.30pm on opening day and I was with a friend who’d already seen it in IMAX 3D. If that’s not an endorsement of the entertainment value of the movie, I don’t know what is.

I loved it. I mean, I tend not to talk too much on my blog about movies I don’t like so maybe I sound gushing anytime I write about a movie here. But yes, it’s awesome. As Wired points out in their article “Pacific Rim Is Literally the Most Awesome Movie of the Summer”: it’s an original story. That’s a huge thing in a summer movie. If you’ve somehow missed the plot, it’s about giant alien monsters who travel to Earth via an inter-dimensional tunnel under the Pacific ocean. Mankind builds giant mecha robots to fight them. The movie joins the war 5 years in.

Guillermo Del Toro obviously made the movie he would want to see as a fan and it pays huge dividends. It moves quickly from scene to scene. There’s never too much of a tempo change for exposition. The characters somewhat fill archetypes we’ve seen before but the way he crafts their backstory makes it worthwhile.

But at its core, Pacific Rim is a movie about giant robots (Jaegers) pounding giant monsters (Kaiju) and it’s awesome. The robots are articulated enough to look real (the effects are incredible) but fluid enough that their fights aren’t a confusing mess of digital gears (I’m looking at you Transformers). As my friend Justin noticed, Del Toro does an amazing job showing the scale. When a Jaeger moves next to a human, you get a real sense of how big it is and how it moves. But when it’s fighting a Kaiju, you don’t worry about all the mechanics, you just enjoy the spectacle.

I loved it in IMAX. I wish there were a 2D IMAX release, not because I don’t like 3D but because I know it was shot in 2D and I’d like to see it in the biggest possible scale in 2D. The 3D worked really well. There were some confusing shots in the beginning but like the high framerate in The Hobbit, it just took some getting used to before it all fit. The 3D probably improved the scale of the film, giving the Jaegers real depth when interacting in a human world.

So yeh, go see it. I’m going again.