5. The World
When Guillermo del Toro signed on to make a robots vs. monsters movie called Pacific Rim, I was excited because if anyone could make me care about giant robots fighting monsters, it was him. He created such an amazing world in Pan's Labyrinth and did a great job of interweaving the real world along with fantasy sequences. With Pacific Rim, it's no different; as soon as the film starts, you are immersed in the history and world where the Kaiju are a real threat to humanity. While Star Trek 2 and Man of Steel featured aliens, you can't say that they had a real challenge in creating them. Give a guy weird eyes or blue skin and he's an alien; make Michael Shannon yell at us for an hour and he sure has become alien to us. In Pacific Rim, you can see that the Kaiju were drawn with painstaking detail and although there is tribute paid to the monsters in classic Japanese films, the Kaiju are wholly original creations. We see news reels, commercials, and game shows of a post-Kaiju world and we believe it because del Toro has taken time to get every detail right. Later on, we see the black market in Hong Kong, which is another detail that pulls double duty as it moves the story along and shows the audience just how deep this world goes. And each detail isn't in vain either, it sets us up for the big reveal. Once we see the Jaegers, we sit up straight and our eyes are glued to the screen because this incredible world that del Toro has enveloped us in just got a whole lot better.