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Rating: 2 out of 5
The first Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro, was freakin awesome. You knew what to expect when watching the film. You were going to get big-ass monsters attacking cities. At the same time, humanity made equally big-ass robots to battle against them. The battles were extreme and over the top but fun to watch. Hell, even the acting was pretty good, with Idris Elba saying humanity was canceling the apocalypse. The film was everything you want in a monster/robot film. As you know, once any movie makes anything near doubling its profits over the budget, you are going to get a sequel.
Five years after the first film, Pacific Rim Uprising drops on the world. Yet, this time, the film was directed by Steven S. DeKnight, who decided to take the reigns from del Toro and his first feature-film debut along with a team of writers by Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S. Nowlin; the film dropped on the world. I guess the apocalypse wasn’t canceled this time, as new and improved Kajui monsters show up to destroy the world again.
Pacific Rim Uprising begins ten years after the Battle of the Breach. We are introduced to former Jaeger pilot Jake Pentecost (Boyega), the son of the deceased Mr. Canceling the Apocalypse war hero Stacker Pentecost. Jake bounced from the Jaeger program and now makes a living stealing and selling Jaeger parts on the black market in the Los Angeles area. With no more Kaiju rolling around, he needs to make that money. Many people build their own mini versions of Jaegers, but the prime item everyone wants to buy and get their hands on is the rare power cores.
One day, when Jake is out and finds a rare power core that he promised to sell to a black-market dealer, he finds out the core was stolen. The thief is a fifteen-year-old Jaeger enthusiast, Amara Namani (Spaeny). Amara has built her own Jaeger, which she calls Scrapper. Scrapper is small enough to run with a single pilot but has many tricks and defenses that make it a tough little shit to fight against. Both are soon arrested by the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC). Jake’s adoptive sister Mako Mori (Kikuchi) is now PPDC General Secretary and lets Jake know that he can go to prison or become an instructor at PPDC and have Amara as his recruit. It takes two seconds for Jake to decide to become an instructor.
Jake and Amara are sent to the Shatterdome in China, where Jake meets his former co-pilot, Nate Lambert (Eastwood). Nate and Mako let Jake know that the Jaeger program is about to be replaced by Shao Corp’s drone program, which has come up with a revolutionary Kaiju-Jaeger hybrid created by Liwen Shao (Tian) and Dr. Newton Geiszler (Day). Geiszler has moved up in the world and become head of research and development for Shao, but Geiszler is up to no good and doing some shady shit.
Nate is joined by Jules Reyes (Arjona) to train the cadets include Renata Gutierrez (Rodriguez), Ou-Yang Jinhai (Wong), Suresh Khuran (Brar), Viktoriya Malikova (Sakhno), Ryoichi Hatayama (Mackenyu), Meilin Gao (Ji), Tahima Shaheen (Adams), and Ilya Zaslavsky (Meaden). Jake notices how young the cadets are but is told that they have a strong bond as pilots when they are younger and go through some shit together.
Things pick up when Mako is killed in Sydney when, the Jaeger Obsidian Fury goes rogue, and the drone program goes wild. This sets off an event where shit goes down, and the plot of the Kaiju using Geiszler to do their dirty work is revealed. Why is Geiszler on the other side? He has drifted into the mind of a Kajui mind so many times that they took control.
I wasn’t surprised that this film was not as good as the original. It is tough to top the original movie; few sequels have pulled it off. One of the major downsides of this film was the story. It just wasn’t as interesting as the first film. It always seems like the story should be finished with the first film, and somehow, the portal opens again, and a somewhat new threat appears. I don’t know how the story could’ve been better, but it was missing something.
It was because we went from adults fighting and being partners in the Jaegers to kids now. Talk about child soldiers. It felt like I was watching a little bit of Ender’s Game again. Rather than having adults do some of the heavy lifting, we get a story with the kids being trained and you know they have their own issues they are dealing with. I couldn’t connect with them.
I think another reason the story didn’t work for me was that it went through the same process with one of the main characters being controlled by the aliens or Kaiju, and then when it is time to attack, they mess everything up because they are addicted to what the Kaiju brains are showing them. The ally soon becomes an enemy. I’ve seen the story before, and you probably have also seen it.
Even though the story is meh, the movie makes sure to keep up with the visual effects and action scenes. I will not hate on those areas because that is one of the main reasons you will watch a film like this. The scene where they are supposed to protect the city was one of the best scenes because we get the slow-motion effects, Kajui, which looks unstoppable, and WTF moments. When the training base gets attacked, the visuals show how big the Jaegers are compared to the humans in terms of scale.
As far as the acting goes, you shouldn’t expect much like in the first film, but I must admit that watching John Boyega as Jake Pentecost was fun. Boyega took a different approach to his role. Rather than being the hard ass like his father, Jake is cooler and more level-headed. Boyega also showed Jake as one who didn’t want to live in the shadow of his pops but rose to the occasion after his adoptive sister got killed and wanted to make sure that humanity kept surviving.
Pacific Rim Uprising is one of those sequels that is meh. It really doesn’t blow you away, but it will keep your attention because of the action and visual effects. Boyega was the best in his role as Jake, but he couldn’t carry this film above a meh level even with his talents. Hey, if you love monsters and robots fighting, this is one of the films for you.
