Decided to watch Pacific Rim. I heard it described as a very good asylum film and that's pretty accurate. The monster fighting is great, really well choreographed and easy to read, the robots are very believable (within the logic of the universe at least) compared to something like transformers, you can see the joints and actuators and stuff moving and their designs are nice and coherent. You can always tell what's going on in a fight, which is unfortunately a rare thing in the big blockbuster movies (again, compare to transformers, where you can't even tell where one robot ends and the other begins).
Characters are really thin and the writing feels rote. They're hitting all the stock story beats for a movie like this but they feel suspended in the ether, a lot of the character "arc" moments aren't earned and don't feel grounded in the events of the story. It's distracting, but considering the concept it gives the movie an almost pleasant throwback feel, very cheesy and old-fashioned in the characters and the writing. Hence the asylum comparison. It almost feels like a B-movie with a big budget. That being said, I liked it a lot. It's earnest. You can tell everybody had their heart in the movie, even if it's cheesy it's earnestly cheesy.