First trailer arrives for Pacific Rim

The first hotly-anticipated trailer for Guillermo Del Toro's forthcoming sci-fi action movie 'Pacific Rim' has smashed its way onto the internet.

Watch it below...

Some cryptic marketing materials had emerged online, but now a peak at the dizzying action has finally arrived.

Some highlights from the action packed trailer include a stirring speech from Idris Elba - "Today we cancel the apocalypse!" - and the tag line: 'To fight monsters, we created monsters".

The plot is simple - reptilian creatures from a portal in the depths of the Pacific Ocean rise up to try and destroy the human race.

But, as is often the case in such situations, the human race is underestimated by these freakishly large lizards, and using gigantic robots called Jaegers piloted by humans — in an 'Avatar'-esque remote fashion — the creatures, known as Kaiju, might just get themselves a pasting.

Del Toro has said that the film is intended to be 'a beautiful poem to giant monsters' and with his track record — 'Pan's Labyrinth', 'Hellboy' and 'The Devil's Backbone' - we're rather excited about this.

It's taken more than four years for del Toro to get the film made - 'Pacific Rim' is his first film since 2008's 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army'.

In the intervening years, the director spent more than year working on pre-production for 'The Hobbit' before quitting the franchise when MGM couldn't sort their finances out.

He then tried to adapt HP Lovecraft's 'In the Mountains of Madness', but the project also collapsed when studio Warner Bros. got the jitters over the £92 million budget and 'R' rating.

Instead they gave him 'Pacific Rim', a more straightforward genre piece than 'Mountains', but still a risky proposition from a financial perspective.

The budget is estimated at £123 million - a huge amount for a project that is not a sequel, not based on an established franchise and with no A-list talent attached.

Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman and Rinko Kikuchi flesh out the low-key cast, but Guillermo del Toro is not worried, telling Empire earlier this year:

"I think the stars are the robots and the monsters, but everybody that we're casting is a star in my book. They're all actors I want to work with. They're the most solid group of actors I can gather, and I think they will be stars!"

The trailer for the film has already trended on Twitter, and interest in the film is steadily building in time for its release in July 2013.

And so confident is producer Legendary Pictures, it's already commissioned a sequel... impressive.

Update: As several of you have noted in the comments, the AI in the film sounds rather similar to GlaDOS, the terrifying antagonist from the 'Portal' games.

Make that identical, because not only is it the same actress - Ellen McLain — but del Toro also applied the same filter and effects.

Del Toro is such a fan of the games that he called studio Valve to ask if he could borrow McLain for the film. In an interview with The Escapist, he said: I'm a big fan of Valve, 'Portal' and 'Left 4 Dead' have been instrumental family experiences at my house."