PACIFIC RIM is the next "Big Thing."

I was pretty sure of this when the curtain was pulled back from this one prior to San Diego Comic-Con. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labryinth) making a movie about giant robots built to fight giant monsters? Huge budget and marketing push from WB prior to a prime mid-July 2013 release? That got me excited on a level usually reserved for stuff like "Someone's making The Lord of the Rings as a live-action trilogy."

And now it's on the horizon, and IT. LOOKS. AMAZING.



Oh, and when I say "giant robots" I do mean GIANT.

Yeah, you think that looks cool? Here's the trailer.

Two words: ROCKET FIST. I don't know about anyone else but I want this movie inside my eyeballs now.

The trailer makes a game attempt and getting all this info across, but aside from the obvious "Robots vs. Monsters" angle, the "hook" of this film is that the Jaegers (those would be the mechs) are piloted by two people who each control half of the construct's "brain." It's a remarkably elegant approach to giving human stakes to such a superhuman setting. Two pilots with different personalities + necessity for incredibly close cooperation = instant drama.

And for those of you who asked, yes, that is Ellen McLain. Del Toro and Valve apparently have a real yen for each other, so GLaDOS gets a big-screen appearance. So to speak.

I know that this plays well to a certain "audience" (of which I'm a lifetime member), but even the fact that this movie is getting made at all gets me giddy. After a summer packed to the gills with prequels, sequels, and spin-offs, and looking at ANOTHER summer next year full of similar fare, I can't help but LOVE the fact that someone ponied up a $200+ million budget for an original idea, let alone one that's so unabashedly crazy.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to watch that a couple dozen more times...