Pacific Rim

While this movie looks like a 16-year-old boy's dream come true (and it really is) this movie is a love letter to action summer blockbusters the way they once were.

I enjoyed many of the summer blockbusters the last few years (The Dark Knight Trilogy, The Avengers), but these are superhero movie, and thanks to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, they are all brooding and serious. Man of Steel didn't quite get the formula right, even though it did have Nolan as a producer.

The best way to describe this film is that it is a better Independence Day; the films aren't similar (minus the whole saving humanity from aliens thing) in style, but they both feature the heavy pomp and candid attitude that made '80s summer blockbusters so damn entertaining. Pacific Rim is a turn-off-you-brain-and-enjoy kind of movie, but it isn't crude or stupid (think Transformers). On a technical level the film will be a satisfying treat, and had there been time to develop more story and characterization, the film could have been deep and insightful, too.

Guillermo Del Toro loves film, and it's obvious in the work he put in to make this film appeal to everyone while also satisfying his own desires in a film industry that critically lacks any semblance of originality. Pacific Rim is a love letter and pure comic book movie that strikes as hard as a Jaeger's fist.