Pacific Rim Uprising Review

Pacific Rim was a fun homage to Kaiju films and mecha anime. Its sequel, is mostly more of the same. If that's what you want, then you'll like this movie, and if not, then why are you even bothering?

While I enjoyed the original film, I did have a problem with our leads feeling dull compared to the rest of the cast, and before the Hong Kong battle, we got introduced to two Jaegers that sounded cool just to see them get scrapped without making any meaningful impact so Gypsy Danger could save the day. You could have cut them out and had Striker Eureka do the fighting and nothing would have changed.

My former is issue is resolved with our leads. Jake Pentecost is a much more fun protagonist than Raleigh Beckett with his initial dickish but comical behavior and only getting involved with the Pan-Pacific Defence Corps to avoid jail, but he shows his chops when actual danger does start and he needs to step and defend the Earth. Jake's dynamic with the no nonsense Nate Lambert is especially entertaining.

People incorrectly assumed the original film was mostly influenced by Evangelion (for the record Evangelion is also a homage to classic mecha anime, with a touch of Ultraman), but Jake's relationship with his old man Stacker does sound a bit like what Shinji had with Gendo, if Gendo weren't a complete dick.

Our other lead Amara has personality traits I can pin down, with her most notable characteristic being that she is the rookie means she has a hard time with training to pilot a Jaeger. For a film that doesn't rely on smarts it's surprising to see this done and it made for a good arc with Amara struggling throughout the film, on top of the trauma she had from losing her family to the kaiju. Amara is also a nice audience surrogate when she geeks out over seeing the Jaegers, I feel almost any of us would react the same way. Her skills as a mechanic are entirely implausible, to say the least, but this is a movie about giant robots and monsters that should sink into the ground from their own weight. A kid genius mechanic/engineer isn't that hard to accept, but I'm certain some people will scream "Mary sue!"

The action for this movie is great and adds enough new ideas to feel fresh. In the original the Jeagers mostly punched the kaiju. Here we see a lot more weapons being used. The fight in Russia on the ice is especially creative, and our final battle in Tokyo finally gives a fight where our Jaegers are working as team against multiple kaiju, which is what I feel the Hong Kong fight in the original film should have been. We even have a bit strategy being used by our protagonists, even if all laughs in the face of physics but come on, giant robot/kaiju film, physics have no place here.

It also goes without saying that visually this film is amazing. And while the trailers do show the Jaegers as more mobile than in the original, their movements still have the kind of weight to them you would expect that makes it so you feel there is force behind anything they do.

The film's humor is also pretty good. It knows that it's not a smart film and has fun with its own premise. My personal favorite joke is when we have Hermann Gottlieb being told to rig up rockets to propel the Jeagers at high speed and saying his idea can work in theory, and when asked what that means, he says "yes." The movie knows it ran into the "it's experimental, it's untested, so of course it's going to work."

If I were to say anything bad about the film as a mindless action film, it's that when it introduces all the cadet pilots, it doesn't have time to flesh them all out beyond showing little personality quirks. There was just too many characters for the time frame the movie had.

Also getting into spoilers regarding the film's twist. If you actually care the plot to this movie, skip down below.





Something I'm will leave people divided is that the movie does actually throw a twist with one of our comic relief characters from the last movie, the eccentric scientist Newt Geiszler, turning out to be evil thanks to a number of mental links with a kaiju's brain. I personally didn't mind because felt he actually made for a pretty fun villain. His cheering for the kaiju in the final battle felt like what an audience member rooting for the bad guys of a film would say.

The other reason I like this is because the film looked to be setting up Liwen Shao as a villain in a reveal that would be visible from orbit it was so obvious, and it would have made her look like a complete idiot. Sending Obsidian Fury to attack the PPDC council meeting when it already looked like they were going to approve of her drones would have been the stupidest evil plan since the Weyland Yutani's plan to weaponize the Xenomorphs. Instead Shao turned out to be a good character who even helps save the world in the end.

Also we get a really dumb explanation that the kaiju were targeting Mount Fuji to cause an eruption that would wipe out all life on Earth which was never hinted at in the original film. It's only there to create tension for the climax since three kaiju would obviously never be able to take down all of humanity, or the on giant one given that it would years for it to get anywhere.





Other item of note is that the movie's ending is setting up for a sequel if there is enough of a positive reception, and the idea of setting up a Pacific Rim film universe. While I admit the idea of a sequel where the humans take the battle to the aliens sounds cool, I don't see Pacific Rim as a franchise that could carry a cinematic universe. Or at least not one on the scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not if every film is just going to be more mindless clashes of giants. Though the idea of crossing over with the MonsterVerse sounds interesting. And if nothing else, I want to see a monster killed by Godzilla or King Kong throwing a sword wielding Jaeger at it. Regardless, this did at least avoid sacrificing any of its own plot to set up a cinematic universe and confined the set up to a single scene. There is none of that mess that happened with Universal's recent Mummy film or Batman V Superman.