When monstrous, building-sized creatures (dubbed "kaiju") hell-bent on destruction begin pouring out of an extra-dimensional fissure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, humanity bands together to build titanic mechas called jaegers, each controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are linked through a neural bond called "The Drift." As the kaiju get stronger and the signs point to an all-out flood of the beasts, the fate of humanity looks bleak, and the surviving jaegers are brought together for one last-ditch attempt at saving the world.

After an agonizingly long five-year wait, filled with some heartbreaking starts and stops (like the almost-weres of The Hobbit and At the Mountains of Madness), Guillermo del Toro has finally returned with his biggest budget and story yet. The Mexican master of fantasy returns to the toybox of his youth, drawing from the kaiju films of old (Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra, and the like) and anime to create the modern-day monster movie we didn't even know we wanted.

I am a genre man through and through, and del Toro's films are filled with both the intelligence of the best of science fiction, fantasy, and horror and a flawlessly-rendered vision unique to him. His innate knowledge of what makes those outlandish stories truly matter to us is the backbone of his work as a writer and director, and his visual style is one that invokes true wonder.

It's that wonder, that childlike glee that makes Pacific Rim work so well, and well it does work. This is a brawny, massive film made by a true artist and auteur at the top of his game, but while the technicals of this film could have been mounted by any number of working directors, the magic of Guillermo del Toro is that he infuses every film with himself. His love of the material, whatever it may be, shines brightly through every frame. It is this complete sincerity that makes his films such a joy to experience, and even when there are 250-foot behemoths slugging it out on the screen, there's not a trace of the disastrous irony or cynicism so readily supplied by other blockbusters anywhere to be found.

The cast gamely comes to play, with Idris Elba (TV’s Luther) as Stacker Pentecost (one of my favorite character names of all time) as the stoic leader of the jaeger program, Charlie Hunnam (TV’s Sons of Anarchy) as former pilot Raleigh Becket, who suffered a tragic loss and has to be convinced to return to jaeger service, and Oscar-nominated Rinko Kinkuchi (Babel) as Mako Mori, another life touched by the kaiju and ready to serve up some righteous fury. If these sound like tried-and-true archetypes, it’s because they are. This is a grand, epic war film on a bigger scale than anything ever attempted before in that genre, and one of the strokes of genius from del Toro and original writer Travis Beacham is that we instantly establish and identify with the characters onscreen. There are so many ideas flying around (monsters, mechas, neural bonding, kaiju culture, and many, many more) that the broadly-drawn characters serve as a perfect anchor for the audience, immediately relatable in their inherent humanity.

It seems that the mission statment of this movie was, in a word, “texture.” Del Toro delivered a visual feast unlike any other big spectacle films, with his insistence on it not looking like a “glossy car commercial.” Instead, every frame is filled with rain, snow, scuffs, smoke, debris, and other visual elements that reflect the weight and dimension of these cyclopean combatants. Unlike the ultra-glossy (and emotionally irrelevant) Transformers films, or virtually any other modern big-budget actioner, this universe feels dirty, grungy, and lived-in, like the original Star Wars trilogy.

In fact, dubbing a film “this generation’s Star Wars” has been overused to the point of robbing the phrase of all meaning. But Pacific Rim feels just like that. It invokes those most elusive of emotions in the modern studio film: wonder, awe, and sheer enjoyment. Do you remember the awe you felt upon seeing a Star Destroyer creep onto the screen? Discovering a brachiosaurus on Isla Nublar? Laying eyes on the verdant fields of Middle Earth? This film has that. No one builds worlds like del Toro, and here he is, the master, inviting you to play in his sandbox with him. Grab your favorite action figure and hop in.