Five years later, the sequel fails to live up to the original.
Pacific Rim: Uprising made me mad. Really mad. At the Transformers movies. Let me explain.
The newest offering in the Guillermo del Toro-led franchise is not a great movie. It’s not even a good movie, but when it comes to the bread and butter of a “robots vs. monsters” flick–rock ’em sock ’em fight scenes–Pacific Rim does the job serviceably enough.
What became painfully clear over 111 mostly dull minutes is that both Pacific Rim movies yearn for a compelling backstory and a mythology on which to build these awesome action sequences. What’s painfully clear after five Transformers movies is how bad a job they do of using the backstory and mythology at their disposal AND they can’t even get the fight scenes to sniff Pacific Rim.
Uprising moves the story on to the next generation, swapping Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost for his son Jake (John Boyega) along with a fiesty teenage prodigy, Amara (Cailee Spaeny). There’s a bit of a Starship Troopers vibe as a group of several young people train to become pilots for the massive robotic Jaegers.
When the names of these metal beasts are said aloud, it’s almost farcical. Gipsy Avenger. Coyote Tango. Saber Athena. It implies there’s a whole world that’s been created for these “characters,” but what it really sounds like is a toy campaign. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (see above), but without the grounding of a TV series or books or something, it’s just odd.
Speaking of odd, Charlie Day is back as Dr. Newton Geiszler, and it’s just as disconcerting to see essentially the same character who can’t read and eats milk-steak on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia be an integral part of a semi-serious science fiction tale, but integral he is.
The stakes are just as high in Pacific Rim: Uprising as they were in the original, and one could guess how things will pan out, but if the goal is to watch enormous robots fight each other and some gnarly monsters from “beyond the breach,” then this film is just the ticket.