Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) / Action-Sci Fi

MPAA Rated: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and some language
Running Time: 111 min.

Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Cailee Spaeny, Burn Gorman, Tian Jing, Jin Zhang, Adria Arjona, Rinko Kikuchi, Karan Brar
Director: Steven S. DeKnight
Screenplay: Steven S. DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin
Review published March 25, 2018

Set ten years after the events in the first entry, John Boyega (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) stars as Jake Pentecost, the son of Pacific Rim's hero, Stacker Pentecost, who sacrificed his life in the Battle of the Breach to save the world as a commander controlling the robotic Jaeger fighters.  Jake was once a hotshot Jaeger pilot himself, but without anymore monstrous Kaiju to battle, he's resorted to earning a living as a thief, scrounging and stealing junked Jaeger parts and selling them on the black market.  While scrapping through a Jaeger base, Jake meets an orphaned teenage Jaeger rebuilder and self-made pilot named Amara (Spaeny).

After they are capture in the middle of a Jaegar-jacking crime, Jake and Amara choose Jaeger service over prison, with Jake joining his former rival in Nate (Eastwood, The Fate of the Furious) by training new recruits in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, while Amara must go through that grueling training program to hone her raw skills, though flashback to a traumatic past begin to hamper her abilities to drift with success. Enter a powerful Chinese corporation who vow to take the human factor out of the Jaegar controls through their own line of Jaegar drones.  Working as a right-hand in the company is Dr. Newton 'Newt' Geiszler (Day, The Hollars), who may know more about the modus operandi of a rogue drone that is causing destruction of whatever and whoever may stand in its way.

The plot is a bit convoluted once you get through the basic setup, but the story does offer a couple of curveballs that allows it to find the occasional groove as the film enters into a second half that emphasizes action and destruction more so than anything else.  The theme of the film is the same as the first: there are things that threaten us all on this Earth, and it's up to all of us, regardless of our national, racial, or political divisions, to come together to fight against those common foes, primarily environmental, or we will lose everything.

TV producer and "Daredevil" showrunner Steven S. DeKnight takes his first turn at directing a feature film with Pacific Rim: Uprising, the big-budget follow-up to Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film that, while floundering in the United States, made its money back on the world market, particularly in China.  Not surprisingly, the film caters even more to its Chinese base of fans, putting in actors popular in that country and a substantial percentage of the film is spoken in Mandarin.

Characterizations are generic, only elevated somewhat by spirited performances from actors like Boyega and Charlie Day, the latter who reprises his twitchy role from the first film, albeit with more to play here than mere comic relief.  Characters are stock, derived from comic-book property boilerplates, leaving the lion's share of the entertainment to watching Jaeger vs. Kaiju action across very crumbly cityscapes in different parts of the world.

With the only returning cast members relegated to Day, Burn Gorman and Rinko Kikuchi, Pacific Rim: Uprising feels like a pilot to a TV spinoff by design, perhaps because of DeKnight's background in television, except given a huge budget for theater-shaking visual and sound effects.  Along those lines, the fluid physics involved in the size and movement of the robotic Jaegers does inspire awe, especially when viewed on the big screen, and the Kaiju, when they eventually appear, are a gnarly looking bunch of monsters.  The destruction of the cities are very well rendered and often realistic, except, being a PG-13 movie, Uprising lacks much of the palpable human terror that should surely occur if witnessing so much death and destruction around them.  With the exception of a few ground scenes involving some of the supporting characters, the feeling that the world hands in the balance seems remote tot he thrust of the movie, which is a liability when it comes to understanding the stakes at hand for the film's explosive climax.

What's missing from Uprising from the first film is a sense of quirky oddness that Guillermo del Toro, who remains as a producer, provided so well, reveling in the b-movie aspects from which it drew inspiration, making it a dark but fun movie to observe for its genre tinkerings and its underlying environmental commentary on the escalating natural disasters that have occurred due to rampant climate change.  In its best scenes, Uprising captures some of that tongue-in-cheek quality, and dabbles with relating something under the surface, but DeKnight's approach is less assured than Del Toro's, perhaps because he isn't as much a fanboy of the genre as Del Toro, and, as a writer, he isn't as interested in building upon themes with subtle metaphorical storytelling.  This sequel is more of interest as a bright-and-shiny visual effects-driven action movie first and foremost, and its appeal will likely be more limited to those audiences who only want to see eye-popping displays of dazzling speed and big-battle destruction peppered with comic book characterizations and dialogue.

Unfortunately, what that means is that Uprising is content to settle more for Transformers-style popcorn movie trappings than in layered commentary about genre or the world at large.  Given that the Transformers films also found a more welcome audience over time in China, it's no surprise that, given the first film's box office receipts there, as well as the market for robot destruction porn that evidently exists, the makers of this follow-up are just going to embrace those who made the sequel even possible by giving them more of what they want.  Alas, that means that audiences that like the 2013 original precisely because it was more than just a dumb rock-em-sock-em robot-vs.-monster battle royale will be disappointed that the series has already become just that.  As such, the film itself has become like the new drone Jaegars, pushing more toward technological achievements while far less humanity can be found within.

 Qwipster's rating:

©2018 Vince Leo