Ten years after Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) ‘cancelled the apocalypse’ and stopped the Kaiju threat in the first Pacific Rim, a new generation of Jaeger pilots has grown up in the shadow of the Kaiju War. Among them, Jake Pentecost, (Jake Boyega), son of Stacker Pentecost of ‘today, we cancel the apocalypse!’ speech fame. Jake’s not quite followed in his father’s footsteps, having bailed on the Jaeger pilot program, and now ekes out a living scavenging in the coastal cities destroyed during the war, that has yet to be rebuilt.
A run-in with a fellow scavenger of Jaeger parts, Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) and the law results in the two of them being press-ganged back into the Jaeger academy, Amara as cadet and Jake as an instructor. They might be arriving just in time to be the very last generation of Jaeger pilots, thanks to some new drone jaegers developed by Liwen Shao (Tian Jing) and her corporation, which includes Charlie Day’s Dr Newton Geiszler on the payroll. Any thoughts of retirement are soon pushed to one side thanks to the appearance of a new ‘Rogue Jaeger’ (how do you hide one of these?) and it’s up to Jake, Amara, a cast of forgettable cadets and Jake’s old Jaeger co-pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) to chase down the source of this new threat.
While not entirely a box office smash, the first Pacific Rim had a lot going for it, mostly thanks to director Guillermo Del Toro’s unique take on the giant monster genre. His world may have been populated with characters painted in broad strokes, but they at least gave the illusion of some depth. Pacific Rim Uprising, on the other hand, doesn’t even manage that much!
While there’s no sign of Raleigh Becket, a couple of characters do return from the first film, however, the fates of some of these old favourites are sure to tick off some fans. To be fair, the plot does also provide some very surprising developments for other old characters.
This treatment of the returning characters wouldn’t be so much of an issue the new charters were in any way compelling. It’s a testament to John Boyega’s considerable charm that he still manages to come across as likeable even when every single joke he is lumbered with falls completely. A supposed rivalry with Scott Eastwood’s character goes nowhere as Eastwood seems incapable of playing anything other than a nice guy and the late introduction of a possible competition between the two for the affections of Adria Arjona’s engineer Jules gets only slightly more screen time than Jules herself. She’s barely in the movie! The new cadets fare almost as badly as Jules, with little or no characterisation beyond ‘the angry Russian one’, ‘the Indian one’, ‘the other Russian one’, ‘the nice Asian one’ and the three other ones who stand in the background.
Almost everything that happens outside the Jaegers is eminently forgettable, although they do still provide a decent spectacle when they do turn up. They do feel a little weightless, however, and not just the CGI. For the first film, the actors famously had to work against ‘an elliptical machine from hell’ on set in order to ‘operate’ the Jaegers. Here it seems that no such hardship was undertaken, and the lack of attention to details like that really brings the film down. Why does no one point out why we still need Jaegers (a single line would have achieved this). Why do the Kaiju defence cannons in Sydney point AT the city instead of out to sea? Did John Boyega eat an entire bowl of cream without ice cream in that one scene? Why is Scott Eastwood?
Like the version of Ramin Djawadi and Tom Morello’s iconic theme from the original that plays over Uprising’s credits, this feels like a bad cover version. At best it can be seen as the set up for a new ‘Young Adult’ take on the franchise, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would still need to focus more on either the kids or the young adults and build better characters if it hopes to follow through on the promise of more sequels that it hints at.
PACIFIC RIM UPRISING / CERT: 12A / DIRECTOR: STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT / SCREENPLAY: STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT, EMILY CARMICHAEL, KIRA SNYDER, T.S. NOWLIN/ STARRING: JOHN BOYEGA, SCOTT EASTWOOD, CAILEE SPAENY, TIAN JING, CHARLIE DAY, RINKO KIKUCHI/ BURN GORMAN / RELEASE DATE: MARCH 23RD
Expected: 8 out of 10
