Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim is Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to mecha anime and kaiju films, and it is the most joyful big-budget action film of the 2010s. Giant monsters (Kaiju) emerge from an interdimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean, and humanity builds equally giant robots (Jaegers) to punch them in the face. The premise is gloriously simple, and del Toro executes it with the enthusiasm of a child smashing action figures together — except with a $190 million budget and ILM’s best visual effects. Idris Elba’s ‘We are canceling the apocalypse!’ speech is the most rousing battle cry of the decade, and the Hong Kong harbor fight — a Jaeger using a container ship as a baseball bat — is the most creative giant-scale action sequence ever filmed.