When I first saw the trailer for Pacific Rim, I only had one thought on my mind:

What the hell is GLaDOS doing in this movie?

Once that thought subsided, I watched the rest of the trailer and thought, “This looks like one of the shittiest films of all time.”

Still, after further thought, I figured it’s written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, and I enjoy pretty much all of his movies. There has to be something more here. Turns out, there is and there isn’t.

Pacific Rim is the type of movie that would be created by someone who was incredibly disappointed by the Transformers movies. See, everyone hated Transformers because they wanted to see giant robots beating the shit out of other giant robots, and instead they got Shia LaBeouf playing Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox playing a mannequin, and about three and a half minutes of hardcore robot on robot action. It sucked and everyone hated it and the trilogy made over two and half billion dollars worldwide. (Which reminds me: fuck the Transformers. Okay. Sidebar over)

Pacific Rim, despite sounding like an oddly specific sexual maneuver, tries to answer the fundamental question: How awesome would it be if enormous alien monsters came out of a portal (hey! GLaDOS tie-in) at the bottom of the ocean and instead of killing them with our marvelously effective yet suddenly ineffective engines of death, we had to build enormous skyscraper-sized physics-defying robots to beat the ever-living shit out of them in hand-to-claw combat?

The answer: pretty awesome.

I’m not going to deny it: at no point does Pacific Rim try to be anything more than it sets out to be, which is a glorious combination of robot on monster violence with a high level of disaster porn. And it actually works surprisingly well. It’s designed to be a fun popcorn flick and it succeeds brilliantly at doing just that.

The movie features solid performances by Charlie Hunnam and Charlie Day – or about as solid performances as you can get in a movie that is 85% CGI – and excellent work from the always brilliant Idris Elba.

I could easily see the myriad ways this movie could fail, and expected to see many of them: a gratuitiously shoehorned love story, boring backstory about the monsters revealed by a quirky scientist typing quickly on a Macbook Air, or racial stereotypes exploited for comedic purposes. There were none of these. Del Toro wanted to make a movie about giant robots fighting giant sea monsters and that is exactly what you get.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. There are certainly some dumb moments throughout the film, like the fact that most of the ocean seems to be exactly fifty feet deep, or the fact that the single most effective weapon the robots use against the monsters is the Sword extention. Which is a sword. A sharpened piece of metal. That’s it. It can cleave one of these sea monsters in twain with a single strike from their amped-up robot fist, but we’re supposed to believe that sharp metal is more effective than, say, an AGM-65 Maverick tactical missile delivered via F-15? And yeah, I could complain about the general lack of competent female characters in the movie, but I’m really trying not to bitch too much about this movie, because it’s not half bad.

Speaking of bitching, the 3D is absoutely atrocious. I generally hate anything in 3D because it’s a curse from Satan to corrupt the minds of the weak and innocent, but if I am forced to go see a movie in 3D, as I was today, I want to see a movie that actually makes use of the 3D. I want to see tentacles shoot out towards my popcorn, I want to see shattered monster teeth spray down into the front-row seats. I didn’t. It was, hands-down, the absolute worst 2D to 3D conversion I’ve ever seen in my life. It made absolutely no use of the 3D feature and was only present so some studio executives could rape us out of a few extra bucks.

Should you go see it? Entirely up to you. There hasn’t been a better film about giant robots fighting alien sea monsters released recently, and if that kind of thing is up your alley, you probably will enjoy yourself. Avoid the 3D at all costs