Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim Looks Like a Love Letter to All My Favorite Things

If you know anything about Guillermo del Toro, it's that he makes movies—and damn good ones. A geek and a gamer to the very core, his movies have been made from some of the best source material any geek director could ever hope to get their hands on. Best of all, that unlike Uwe Boll and a few other directors with an interest in sci-fi and fantasy, del Toro's movies and adaptations have been nothing short of stellar, especially in his work with Hellboy.

Pacific Rim is his latest piece of work and while it's still half a year from release, the production company has released its first ever trailer, showcasing an invasion from the deep by giant monsters and humanity's fight back with giant robots. The movie looks like del Toro's love letter to everything I love: Kaiju, giant robots, sci-fi, and what sounds like GlaDOS's voice from Portal. Because it is.

The addition of the last bit should come as a nice surprise to gamers, and Ellen Mclain's presence in the trailer as the voice of the human-allied AI is perfectly understandable because of del Toro's own interest in the Portal and Half-Life games. It's nice, considering that the writer of Half-Life, Mike Laidlaw, recently expressed his desire to see del Toro direct the film adaptations of their games.

"Guillermo del Toro has the horror vibe that I think a lot of people miss out on when thinking about a Half-Life movie," said Laidlaw. "Half-Life is essentially horror after all. The science in it barely passes as hand-waving, but when a headcrab jumps at your head, it's a precisely engineered jolt. There are probably a lot of good potential directors, but I think most of them are busy pursuing their own visions."

Ron Perlman and Idris Elba are set to star in Pacific Rim.