When the Internet first whispered the words Pacific Rim to me, it was around ComicCon time last year. Then the Internet started screaming about “giant aliens,” “giant robots,” and “Guillermo del Toro.” Then the Internet gasped something about Ron Pearlman, passed out, and I was left in a state of confused excitement for months on end.

The confusion remained after I saw the first trailer—I got the robots, aliens, and Ron Pearlman bits, but there were still a lot of things that didn’t make sense. I never let this seemingly important fact sway my conviction that this movie would be awesome and the reason is simple: del Toro.

Who is Guillermo del Toro? He is the bizarro world nightmare version of Santa, down to the dark facial hair, his warm Iberian origins, and his penchant for making children cry on camera. He is the weird visionary behind the incredible Pan’s Labyrinth and both of the Hellboy movies. Someone watched both Hellboy movies and then said “Yeah. This guy says he wants to make this movie that sounds completely insane. Let’s give him a zillion dollars.”

And thank God they did. Pacific Rim begins in medias res, like all great works of art. It’s like del Toro knew how sick we’d be of origin stories at this point in the summer and condensed his into a couple-minute-long flashback before the title card even pops up. Then it’s down to business. The movie instantly makes way more sense than every trailer you’ve seen with the explanation that at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean an inter-dimensional portal has opened, allowing giant alien things, the Kaiju, to wade out of the water and go classic Godzilla on any number of costal cities. After years of decimation the humans realize they need to work together to build enormous robots, Jaegers, to fight the Kaiju.

You want to know what a portal is and how it opened and why? Shut up. Do you have any idea how good this movie looks? You don’t because you’re whining about the fact that you already saw Transformers. You’re wrong. Transformers and Iron Man are two examples of some pretty great mechanical special effects but Pacific Rim blows them away. Whereas the Iron Man suits are new and clearly ready to star in any video game, by the time you’re watching Charlie Hunnam get strapped into the copilot rigging of a ginormous Jaeger head they’re already weathered beasts clearly influenced by WW2 fighter planes and the original X-Wings. The Jaegers get moved around like hulking military equipment and then when they move on their own it’s with a real sense of volume and visceral texture. The water pouring over everything all the time enhances the feel of real. Then there are the giant hangers where they keep these things, the machines they use to work on them, the support cars driving around in the hangers, and the thousands and thousands of people working in the installation: all legit. Far more than most things I’ve ever seen. And I haven’t even talked about any of the holographic displays.

You’re tired of disaster porn and you don’t have any desire to watch buildings get crushed? Me too. But the thing is the Kaiju and the Jaegers are so effing big that when they do fight on land little of it looks like your average disaster porn because the buildings are so small in comparison. It’s just. So. Cool.

The biggest surprise about the movie for me though was its biggest selling point. Not that far into the film this action, combat, Godzilla homage melange turns into a Guillermo del Toro movie. By which I mean Charlie Day and Burn Gorman show up as two ridiculously over-the-top scientists and shit gets wacky. By the time Ron Pearlman finally shows up in what I can only imagine is the outfit that del Toro stores him in his office wearing you don’t even blink at how bonkers the movie has gotten. If you dislodge your brain from the movie long enough to think, “I’ve seen every single tired action cliché ever in the last 30 minutes, this is clearly going to happen next,” that thing you thought of happens and then something even weirder, stupider, and more gloriously ludicrous happens. Remember when they fought with staffs earlier in the movie? It would be a shame to waste some Jackie Chan moves so Charlie Hunnam hits the “SWORD” button in the cockpit and suddenly the gargantuan robot is fighting the colossal sea alien WITH A GIANT SWORD. Does it makes any sense? No. Does something even more ridiculous happen with the giant robot sword later? YES.

What I’m saying is that even though I saw the movie 48 hours ago that I have worked myself into such a state of excitement just writing this that I want to go see it again this weekend. I don’t know if I can tell you what it is that makes this cheesy, silly, obscene, borderline stupid movie the joyful, bombastic thing that it is, but I can tell you that I haven’t been so instantly in love with a world and an aesthetic since The Matrix or the first time I saw Star Wars as a kid. I will not overextend myself with my usual quest to find something meaningful in these nerd extravaganzas, but instead end with what my friend Marcus said to me right after the movie ended: “If I’d seen this when I was eight years old I would have told my mom I couldn’t go to Sunday School anymore because this is what I believe in now.”

– Lisa Olson