You can find my spoiler-free review of Pacific Rim over here. After the trailer, I'm going to post some random, spoiler-y thoughts. If you have already seen Pacific Rim or if you don't give a shit about spoilers, join me after the jump.

After this sentence, it's spoilers all the way down:

• I really appreciated the level of thoughtfulness behind Pacific Rim. The themes were really well-developed, especially the idea of pairing together to face adversity. (All the shoe imagery was a bit much—on our own, we're like a shoe without a mate!—but subtlety has no place in Pacific Rim, really.) It was nice to see a movie promote teamwork, after what feels like a solid decade's worth of movies about individual heroes who are destined through their specialness to save us all. There's one scene toward the end when Charlie Hunnam shouts something like "We can do this together!" that felt cheesy, like a line lifted from Pokemon, but it really worked in the context of the film.

• Tom Cruise was initially cast as Stacker Pentecost, only to be replaced along the way by Idris Elba. Can you imagine how terrible Tom Cruise would have been in this movie? I would have been cheering at his death scene. It makes me mad just to think about it. Elba was the only actor in the mix. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman were funny, but Day was just doing his Day schtick and Gorman was a marvelous buffet line of cliches.

• I get the impression that the one scene in 3D that Guillermo del Toro really cared about was the scene where the bulldog was walking in front of the camera and his little balls were bouncing around. That testicle scene was some of the best 3D I've ever seen. The rest of the 3D was all right, and the other effects were excellent. I would've liked to see a lot more wide-angle shots of the fights, so we could actually appreciate the action. I suspect that the fights were blocked well, but the cinematographer was so enamored with fight-scene close-ups that I couldn't say for sure.

• I really wish there was at least one other female role. Rinko Kikuchi's character had to carry so much weight—protagonist, majordomo, victim, possible love interest—that she couldn't really become well-rounded. I read that del Toro filmed three endings for the film: One where Hunnam and Kikuchi kissed, one where they just smiled at each other, and one where they hugged. I think he made the right choice with the hug, because I preferred those characters as friends.

• In the same interview, del Toro says he told Hunnam not to overthink his character, that he wanted Becket to be fairly one-dimensional. So maybe my belief that Hunnam isn't a good actor is misplaced. But man, he sure didn't do anything in this movie that made me want to see him in another movie anytime soon.