Ha ha and bash bang boom, it’s Burl, here with another review of a giant robot movie! Yes, some years ago I had the mindless pleasure of seeing Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim in the movie theatre, and now, at the insistence of my son, I’ve just recently caught up with its sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising!
Well, Del Toro was not involved with this one except as a producer and as some kind of consultant, and his absence is keenly felt! The original picture was silly but had Del Toro’s nearly evangelical monster movie conviction behind it, exemplified not just by the monsters themselves but by the details surrounding them! And so we get crazy character names like Stacker Pentecost, or a home base called the Shatterdome!
The newer picture lacks this conviction and in fact has no understanding of it, and as a result the necessary carryovers from the first installment are present only grudgingly, it seems! Thus Stacker Pentecost’s son, played here by John Boyega from Attack the Block and The Force Awakens, is called Jake Pentecost, and all the other names are boring too! And it takes a good long while for the monster action to really begin - there’s far too much robot vs. robot, leading the viewer to wearily conclude that he or she might as well be watching a Transformers picture!
I realize this sounds like an extremely harsh criticism, and it is, but the picture offers a few compensations here and there! Boyega, while not especially memorable in the role, is at least perfectly cast! And the direction they take that annoying little motormouth scientist from the first one makes a certain sense, and opens the narrative up a bit from the battling behemoths! The trick effects are a little more weightless than they were in the first, but it all still looks pretty good in that sequel-to-a-blockbuster way!
Unfortunately the bad guys behind all this are not the creatures themselves, but a never-seen race of extra-dimensional beings referred to, for no particular reason, as Precursors! (Ha ha, as an attempt to keep up with the Del Toro standard, this nomenclature fails spectacularly!) But the triple-sized creature they send up for the climax is soundly defeated by the last remaining robot, and the picture ends, as does another misbegotten big-budget sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence, with a call to arms and a pledge to Take The Fight To Them! If a third picture in either of these series manifests itself, I shall be fairly surprised, ha ha!
Now I realize I haven’t told you much about the plot or the craft of this movie, but that’s because, take it from me, you don’t need me to! And if you care about any of that, you’ve probably already seen the picture! So all that remains is for me to give Pacific Rim: Uprising a single frenemy!
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