Review: The Big, Loud, Stupid Movie that is 'Pacific Rim Uprising'
This review was originally published for UW Film Club and has since been republished here with the author’s permission.
After Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro was on to direct the sequel to his 2013 surprise hit Pacific Rim: an action sci-fi film that borrowed from both Kaiju and Mech films and blended them into one. The original was pulpy, but in the sea of comic book movies that were just starting to hit their stride that summer, it stood out as a carefully crafted blockbuster that knew what it was while maintaining a degree of nuance that prevented it from devolving into another Transformerfilm. However, in 2015 Legendary Pictures was sold to Wanda Group, forcing delays and causing del Toro to leave the sequel for a little picture called The Shape of Water instead. The artistry and enthusiasm that del Toro brought to the table was lost and the fate of the film given to Steven S. DeKnight.
And here in lies the problem with Pacific Rim Uprising: it forgets what it is and what inspired it. Del Toro is passionate about the creature feature, and it showed on the screen. This film is nothing more than a shell of its former self. This is simply a big, loud, stupid movie that goes all in on the blockbuster tendencies that make the Transformer franchise so insufferable while ditching the subtleties that came from a caring creator and its influences.
For the last ten years, humanity has been free from the Kaiju threat. As cities rebuild, scrappers scour the destroyed remnants of cities for old jaeger parts to either sell or repurpose for their own fighting machines. Enter Jake Pentecost (a Jaeger Ranger exile who is the son of the first film’s hero Stacker Pentecost) and Amara Namani (a talented young pilot who crafts her own robots after losing her family to Kaiju). When the two get caught stealing, they are thrown into the Jaeger Pilot Academy as redemption. From there, the two rogues engage in head butting antics with more in-line cadets until a new danger emerges: Rogue Jaegers. With looming peril, the two must harness their skills and put conflicts aside with other cadets in order to ready a new generation of pilots to defend Earth from its biggest threats.
The problem is how nothing outside of the fights matters at all, making the film one big drawl. There are interesting elements injected into the film, such as talk of drone use, a globalized defense force, and residual fallout from the initial Kaiju attack, but they are never leveraged into something meaningful or thematically relevant. Instead, the audience merely waves past them as they barrel toward a baffling central narrative that’ll have you scratching your head with its erratic nature and an emotionless subplot that follows Pentecost and Namani both trying to live up to expectations set upon them (which doesn’t work because either: A) they never get enough time to come to fruition, or B) the interactions given to the characters are dull and meaningless).
And that isn’t to say that the action is good either. The film predicates itself on selling big monster fights, but it doesn’t even seem to do that right either because by the third act it felt as if I was watching a bunch of toys clanging together. The spectacle generated from seeing massive mechs take on Kaiju is all but lost in the sequel, and its blandness makes for a boring viewing experience. This is destruction porn at its finest and I was astounded by how much it mirrors the Transformers franchise in terms of haphazard construction and repugnant styling.
The tipping point is when the film decides to insert the Trololol song, and I couldn’t tell if it was mocking itself for how bombastically insane it was, or laughing at the audience for actually seeing this movie. Regardless of its intent, at that point in the film I didn’t really care how the rest of the story panned out because I just wanted to go home.
1.5/5 STARS
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