Pacific Rim sequel falls short on action, monsters

Cailee Spaeny and John Boyega in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sequels should very, very, very rarely start off by reusing footage from the original film. It shows the filmmakers have little faith in their audience's ability to keep up with the changes in the sequel while showing a lack of narrative enterprise or ingenuity, lazily rehashing previous efforts. It hurts even more when the previous footage is better than anything the movie has to showcase from its own stock. Which is the case with Pacific Rim: Uprising, a movie that starts off on the wrong foot and is never able, or particularly willing, to steady itself.

What makes the choice strange is how much of the time invested in rehashing old history could be used to improve the sloppy narrative Pacific Rim:Uprising tosses together. At the film's heart is a redemption tale for the very lost Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of a legendary Jaeger pilot who died in the first film. That narrative is more than enough to build out a quality movie, providing a pretty solid actor a showcase to build out a character while interspersing some desirable robot versus monster action. But the filmmakers plug in little bits of additional plot lines to muddy the story up. Inserted into the story are a precocious Jaeger cadet Amara (Cailee Spaeny) and her fellow cadets, an ambitious billionaire business owner Shao (Tian Jing), Jake's old friend and current rival Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), and a few returning players (Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, and Charlie Day) engaging in some shenanigans. There's also something that resembles a love triangle between Jake, Nate and a woman named Jules (Adria Arjona), but nothing really comes from it. Pacific Rim: Uprising throws together so many plots and subplots nothing is able to stick. Characters aren't given adequate room to grow and evolve the way the filmmakers (four writers, among them director Steven S. DeKnight) expect. Those stories advance in fits and spurts, with little increments that conclude almost immediately without any actual validation. Amara, for example, has a major crisis caused by a bad memory with the villainous Kaiju that causes a legitimate breakdown that is ripe for character development. Instead of showing her growth, the character moves on with minimal effort made to overcome the obstacle. Everyone effectively has their own version of that problem. Character growth isn't earned in this movie, it's told and shown.

It really is hard though to escape the lack of impetus the writing team has put into Pacific Rim: Uprising. The stakes for most of the movie are surprisingly low, especially given the fate of humanity was in danger in the first movie. This movie de-escalates the danger, hiding the threat until the third act, with acts one and two dedicated to establishing the characters poorly while setting up what resembles a political thriller. Without that stake, that hook for the audience to grab onto, Pacific Rim: Uprising is frightfully dull.

In theory, the hook should be the fights between the Jaegers and Kaiju. It's a really, really simple formula to follow, pitting giant fighting robots against monsters rampaging their way through metropolitan areas. This is the kind of idea that appeals to the inner 7 year old because it is fun and awesome. Even a modicum of good spectacle could easily have redeemed Pacific Rim: Uprising, at least enough to overlook the tremendous story and character flaws. And, yet, the movie skimps on the monster action until the very end of the film, providing less than a handful of monsters to fight against the giant robots. The filmmakers effectively had one job to do, but their push to incorporate so many stories in less than two hours prevented them from supplying an adequate amount of monster time.

It's easy to say the film's problems are connected to the absence of Guillermo del Toro from the creative process. And, yeah, Pacific Rim: Uprising would be a much better movie with del Toro helming it, although that can be said about a lot of movies. But this film shouldn't really need his presence to succeed either. What the new filmmakers had was a fun, interesting premise to build at least a good popcorn flick from. They never found a direction, using the original as a crutch and releasing a boring movie. And a boring monster movie is a damn tragedy. 

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who watched the original Pacific Rim and the growing John Boyega fan club.

Take the whole family?: Kids 10 and older should be fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just stay at home and enjoy it there.

What is up with that love triangle?: This is the plot that bothered me the most about Pacific Rim: Uprising. The filmmakers added an unnecessary love triangle between Jake, Nate and Jules without any justification or true motivation behind it. Even worse, Jules does little else in the move besides serve as an object of mild affection for Jake and Nate. She’s effectively a reason for Jake and Nate to argue, which is an absolute waste of a character.

Watch this instead?: It's cheesy as all heck, but Independence Day is still a pretty fun blockbuster that's worth a trip through memory lane. And you can’t go wrong with the original Godzilla.