March has become something of a big month for film releases recently. Last year, it saw Logan and Beauty and the Beast do remarkably well for early year releases. However, that month was also filled with a number of notable misfires such as Life, Kong: Skull Island and Ghost in the Shell. There were plenty more big name titles on deck for 2018, but quality was far from guaranteed. While Pacific Rim: Uprising may have finally taken down Black Panther at the box office, it left much to be desired, not only as a sequel, but as a stand alone movie.
I grew up watching Godzilla, Ultraman, and Voltron, so this was right in my wheelhouse. As a fan of the first Pacific Rim, I was basically on board for a second installment without much information. Big robots battling big monsters and that’s basically all I needed to know. While I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into, it was still surprising (and disappointing) to see just how hollow this turned out to be.
The events of the sequel take place 10 years after Charlie Hunnam and company closed the interdimensional rift known as “the Breach” and saved the world…at least for the time being. This time around the story focuses on Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) who sacrificed himself to help defeat the Kaiju threat at the end of the first film. Now, I’ve seen the original Pacific Rim a few times and I’m pretty sure I don’t remember even a mention of Jake’s existence. Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), Stacker’s adopted daughter, was one of the primary characters in the first movie and still has a small role in the sequel, but no Jake. Considering it’s only 10 years down the line, he would have been a young boy or teenager in the original. He just materializes for the sequel with little more than an implicit history. For my dollar, this is a major continuity oversight. With a little effort, it could have been made to work a whole lot better. Instead, they just slapped a last name on him, patched a backstory together and hoped the audience would just look the other way.
John Boyega did what he could, given the painfully annoying character design he had to work with, but it just didn’t click. As the son of the first movie’s most iconic figure, the writers decided to go in the complete opposite direction with Jake. He has none of the qualities we like about his father and is really just a dick. It isn’t the brashness itself that’s off putting, it’s the lack of self awareness. He’s basically got one foot in a Jaeger and the other out the door, until it becomes personal. Wait, his dad gave his life to protect the world and Jake needs added motivation to make it “personal”? I told you this kid was a prick. Again, this wasn’t Boyega’s fault, at all. He actually played the role pretty well, but was the victim of a sloppily written character and a less than stellar script across the board.
Director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight, has done a lot of work in television but this was his first time at the helm of a full length feature film…and it showed. Tonally, the entire film is bizarrely off key from where we left the end of the first story. Injecting humor into a screenplay is important, but this was just bad punchline after bad punchline, trying desperately to capitalize on humor they have seen work for other films. It’s not as if the original didn’t have a sense of humor, but it worked because it was character driven. Drift compatibility, openly sharing one plane of memory in order to engage the neural-handshake and effectively co-pilot, was a key plot element in the first film which made the bond between Mako and Raleigh worth investing in. This time around, the plot is driven by the action instead and the mostly cartoonish characters don’t do much in the way of engagement.
Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T.S. Nowlin (the only member of the writing team with feature film experience having worked on screenplays for The Maze Runner franchise) all had a hand in writing the screenplay as well, but this may have been a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Realistically, the script wasn’t good but there were some interesting ideas at play. Unfortunately, no single one was fully flushed out or written with singular focus and you can spot the cluttered narratives pretty easily as they collide with and often trample one another. For example, we are introduced to a young Jaeger hacker, Amari Namani (Cailee Spaeny), who’s building her own machine from spare parts. She crosses paths with Jake and winds up becoming part of the pilot training program for the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Her story is more interesting and she’s is easier to cheer for than Jake, but her journey takes a backseat. Then there’s another story arc involving the two zany scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) from the first film and a powerful robotics corporation that also needs time to play out on screen. This was undoubtedly an ambitious effort, but there’s simply too much going on and not nearly enough runtime to adequately address everything.
The action and the effects were certainly top notch and it’s not difficult to see where the majority of the film’s $150-million budget went. As a studio, when you make a film about giant robots battling kaiju, you had better have spent the money to make it look good. The new Jaeger designs were cool and the weaponry they utilize, at least in a few of them, was fun to watch. Still, the majority of the action isn’t anything we didn’t already see the first time around and in many cases doesn’t even live up to the coolest moments from its predecessor. The first film also boasted a surprisingly good original score that wasn’t featured enough this time around. This movie definitely didn’t raise the bar for the franchise and may wind up being a lateral move, if not a step backwards altogether.
The original had heart and a good sense of humor to back it up, but its successor fell flat in both those areas. Thankfully the action was still solid and the story was paced at a good clip, so the nearly two-hour runtime wasn’t a real struggle. Domestically, it made almost $30-million on opening weekend, which isn’t bad at all, but word of mouth it going to hurt the long term gains. However, the foreign market is where it’s made 80-percent of its money totaling $122-million so far thank to the diversity and youth of the cast. Uprising is a fairly pedestrian effort from a franchise with a lot of potential, but should do well enough financially to generate a third film.
Recommendation: If you liked the original, you’ll probably enjoy this one as well. If you’ve never seen Pacific Rim, go watch that. The sequel does everything its predecessor does, only not as good.
Grade: C