It’s kind of embarrassing how much I loved the first Pacific Rim. It’s the kind of movie that
I would’ve been all over as a kid, and watching it at 22 brought me back to
when I first watched Power Rangers when
I was 5. If it were just a special-effects heavy bonanza about giant robots fighting
giant monsters, that would’ve been enough. But the thing that elevated it
beyond just a group of Gundam knock-offs pitted against a bunch of Godzilla
rejects was that it was helmed by Guillermo De Toro, who, as I mentioned in my
review of The
Shape of Water, is an absolute master of making the best realized
version of geek ephemera whose unique touch can mean the difference between
something transcendent and something completely basic. Although I’m thankful that
a sequel exists (it wasn’t a bit hit in the US, but it did gangbusters in China,
which is the only reason it exists in the first place), the fact that Del Toro
isn’t there to add his special touch doesn’t bode well for it. Not to mention
that its ending was a close case, and they’d have to do some serious backflips
to make a sequel even possible. How do you follow something like that up? Short
answer, you don’t.
The story of the first Pacific
Rim is as simple as it gets. Giant alien monsters called kaiju came to
Earth through a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and started wreaking
havoc. The world governments pulled their resources together to build giant
piloted robots called Jaegers to fight back. The movie ends with the main
characters using the nuclear reactor in their Jaeger to seal the portal. Ten
years later, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the leader of the first
Jaeger program, is recruited by Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to train a new
generation of young pilots in case the kaiju return, including his old co-pilot
(Scott Eastwood) and an orphaned scavenger (Cailee Spaeny) who built her own
mini Jaeger from scrap. A Chinese tech corporation lead by Tiwen Shao (Tian
Jing) and Newt Geizler (Charlie Day) joins the effort with a fleet of drones
that can be piloted remotely. Their fears are somewhat confirmed when a rogue
Jaeger shows up out of nowhere and lays waste to Sydney, and suspicion rise
over who is behind the attack and why.
One of the goals for sequels is to raise the stakes and up
the ante on everything that worked the first time around, and to their credit, when
this movie works, it really works. The first Pacific Rim was essentially a checklist of Saturday morning anime clichés
bound by a threadbare plot with a surprisingly rich mythology for anyone who
pays attention, but it’s all just a ploy to get giant robots to punch giant
monsters in the face. There are more Jaegers this time and they each have their
own unique design. One is a hulking tank that swings around an enormous Morningstar
the size of a house, one looks like a human shaped hotrod and wields an
electrical whip, and Jake Pentecost’s Jaeger… okay, it’s basically a slimmed
down carbon copy of the Gipsy Danger. (Hey, you can’t win em all.) In contrast,
the rogue Jaeger and the new drone Jaegers have a more alien, biomechanical design
to them that resembles the EVAs from Neon
Genesis Evangelion. (Not sure if this constitutes a spoiler, but that was
probably on purpose.) There was a real sense of scale and enormity to these
behemoths in the first movie, and the decision to have the battles go from
lumbering brawls in the neon nightlights to weightless karate choreography in
broad daylight is striking if not off-putting shift.
But even the leanest cuts of beef can have a little bit of
fat on them. One of the movie’s biggest crimes is not further exploring some of
its best ideas. I know that sounds like a weird criticism for a movie whose
core appeal is giant robots punching giant monsters, but there are a lot of
intricacies and details that aren’t delved into that deeply or treated as an
afterthought. For example, the way Jaegers are piloted is through a neuro-transmitter,
but since the mental load needed to operate these colossal machines is too much
for one brain to handle, they need two pilots (sometimes even three) who are
mentally compatible, which they accomplish through a memory sharing process
called “the drift”. It’s brought up a few times as one character struggles with
the drifting process, but they get over it pretty quickly. There’s also an admittedly
clever plot twist at the midpoint revolving around the grand reveal on the main
villain, but once that happens all he really does in cackle and ham it up like Elizabeth
Banks in the Power Rangers movie. A
couple other plot points that are pretty boring and don’t add much to the story
such as Boyega and Eastwood’s rivalry and some Top Gun riffage with the new recruits, most of which are basically
Red Shirts. It’s all awkwardly structured, and whenever it seems like there’s a
struggle between story flow and action scene, the latter wins over nearly every
time.
Bottom line, Pacific
Rim: Uprising was an underwhelming follow-up that offers more of the high-scale
robot action of the original but isn’t as interested in its own world. Maybe I’m
judging this more on what I wanted it to be rather than what it is. Writing
this, I felt like I was criticizing a kid in a sandbox for not playing with his
toys the right way. But even then, there were avenues this movie could’ve taken
that would’ve lead to more fascinating places and a richer story. And for that,
I was left disappointed.
6/10, Rent It/Stream It
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