Here’s the first trailer for Guillermo del Toro‘s “giant monsters versus giant robots” film Pacific Rim. We’ve seen blueprints of the robots, and an early bit of video showing a monster attack, but unless you were at Comic Con you haven’t seen anything like this footage yet.

While I wasn’t as bowled over at Comic Con as some other people were, this is pushing every button for me right now. The scope, the details, even the GLaDOS appearance/homage. (I can see why people might not like that detail, as it creates a distracting intersection with Portal, but right now I love it.)

Pacific Rim looks like the movie that many others have tried and failed to make, from Emmerich’s Godzilla (a big failure) to Bay’s Transformers series, which got closer. I hope Guillermo del Toro’s effort works as well as a whole, as this trailer does in a couple minutes.

Here’s the UK version, if the iTunes embed above is acting wonky.

Big question: who’s the “they” mentioned by Idris Elba in the voiceover? Should we read that as implying that the monsters are more intelligent than they seem? Or is there a controlling force of some sort? Are the monsters just the first wave of attack?

Apple has the trailer. Pacific Rim stars Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, and Charlie Day, and will be released in 2D and 3D on July 12, 2013.

When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity’s resources for years on end. To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge. But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes—a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi)—who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past. Together, they stand as mankind’s last hope against the mounting apocalypse.

[above via the LA Times]