I heard somebody describe Pacific Rim as something directly from the mind of a 12-year-old boy playing in his room, holding his dinosaur and robot figurines and bashing them into each other, along with grunting and growling noises to emphasize the action. It’s easy to see where this perspective could come from. Yet, it’s hard to write off Pacific Rim as just a mindlessly entertaining experience. Sure, it may be inconsistent, with questionable science and technology. And some of the characters may be flat and underdeveloped. But the people who take these points as flaws are completely missing the point: this is all intentional. Guillermo Del Toro is sitting back in his director’s chair, laughing at you. And I laughed right back at him.

Without a pause, or a lengthy, boring origin story, Pacific Rim throws us right into the action. In a series of flashbacks, our narrator and main protagonist Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) explains the stories of the kaijus. Nearly fifteen years prior, the first kaiju attacked us, emerging from a portal that opened within a crack in the Pacific Ocean. Six days and several thousand lives later, it was finally destroyed. And then more started to follow the first. So, as Becket explains: “In order to fight monsters, we created monsters of our own.” The result is the jaeger: a towering, 300-foot ass-kicking robot colossus, operated by two copilots stationed in the head, whose minds are linked in order to fight the aliens as one conjoint being. But, after years of success, even the jaegers are starting to fail. The aliens started to get stronger and more evolved. Now, it is up to Becket to lead the team on one final mission: destroy the portal between the two worlds.

If you came to see robots vs. aliens, you came to the right place. This is Del Toro’s complete homage to the monster movie, with influences shining through from many sources, especially the Japanese kaiju films of the 1950’s. At times, I was expecting chin-raised onlookers to stare up at the sky and scream “Godzilla!” And there are so many other references within the film. There is a speech that sounds suspiciously like the one from Independence Day; the appearance of the jaegers themselves, which are some cross between Voltron and the Transformers robots; a similar mind-linking method as that seen in Avatar; an organized team of heroes such as in The Avengers; and even the Power Rangers children’s series that I admittedly watched while growing up in the 90’s. At the same time, it is hard to call Pacific Rim a carbon copy of those that influenced it. This is Del Toro’s unique vision, and this is entirely his movie.

Surprisingly, there is more character development here than initially expected. Although our hero and his girl co-pilot Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori) may come off as somewhat unsympathetic, there are some great side-characters that really stand out. Idris Elba is particularly effective as the calm, cool-tempered Stacker Pentecoast, the leader of the jaeger team. It is hard not to feel pumped up during his “canceling the apocalypse!” speech. There is also a trio of hilarious comic-relief characters: you have the cooky, excitable Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day); the awkward, arrogant Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman); and the hot-headed, one-eyed black marketer Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman). The three play off each other perfectly, and they provide some much-needed breaks from the action.

And did I mention that there are robots fighting aliens? Maybe I did. But that’s only because the fight scenes are so epic, so grandiose, so incredibly adrenaline-pumping that I cannot under-emphasize it. Picture this: Gipsy Danger, our main jaeger, comes charging towards an approaching kaiju, running with the force and power of an impending hurricane. He leaps and dives, catching the kaiju through its mid-section and driving it backward with enough force to bust through several skyscrapers; while simultaneously the explosive soundtrack of our hero’s theme blasts through surround-sound speakers. And then, when it appears that our heroes are defeated, they come back wielding a full-sized ocean liner, and with the ease of a kid swinging a baseball bat slings it across the kaiju’s face, stepping aside just in time to avoid a blast of acidy spit. It was all I could do not to stand up and shout my boyish excitement, to the dismay of the audience around me.

Del Toro really has done something unique here. While providing solid family entertainment, he has also created a perfect homage to all the monster and robot movies that came before it. And, for just a few fleeting moments, he brought me back to my childhood; remembering the cartoons and bad B-movies that I used to indulge in on Saturday mornings. It may be ridiculous, excessive, and, at times, even cheesy. But this is my type of cheese.