Five years after its debut, Pacific Rim is still a movie with the power to divide the Polygon newsroom between those who found the film’s flaws to be lovable barnacles on an otherwise magnificent day-glo beast, and those for whom those flaws overshadow any virtues, like a giant robot blocking out the sun.
Let’s get this out of the way: If you didn’t like Pacific Rim, you’re not going to like Pacific Rim Uprising. And if you do like Pacific Rim, you’re reading this review because you’re wondering if the jankily constructed confluence of design choices and sci-fi themes that made up the first film can stand up on its own without the guiding hand of now-Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro. The answer is no — Uprising does even less work justifying its own internal logic than Pacific Rim, and even less work than that exploring its cast of characters.
But if you can buy into Pacific Rim, you can buy into Pacific Rim Uprising. And if you can buy into Pacific Rim Uprising despite its flaws, you’ll find it to be a fun, if not exactly filling, film.
We pick up with our giant robots vs. giant monsters story 10 years after the events of Pacific Rim — just because we canceled the apocalypse doesn’t mean we’re not still in a post-apocalypse, you see. Many Pacific coast cities are still wrecked, dotted with kaiju corpses and jaeger junkyards. We’re swiftly introduced to some new ideas — illicit jaeger scrappers, illicit jaeger engineers, and the Pan Pacific Defense Corps jaegers that keep illicit jaegers in line — and we dash away from them equally quickly.
The front end of Pacific Rim Uprising is all in service of introducing our main characters — Jake Pentecost (son of Idris Elba’s exquisitely named Stacker Pentecost, of apocalypse-canceling fame, played by John Boyega) and Amara Namani (street urchin and illicit jaeger scrapper, engineer and pilot, played by relative newcomer Cailee Spaeny) — and getting them to the jaeger base full of all the other characters as quickly as possible.
the United Nations is attacked by a rogue jaeger and our heroes are honor-bound to figure out who built, piloted and sent it
Once it has achieved that, Uprising sets up subplots and relationships with enough speed to give you whiplash. One moment, two characters are clashing over how to train young recruits; the next, they’re companionably griping over their shared past while fixing up an ice cream sundae. By the time the movie introduces a ruthless industrialist who wants to replace our scrappy pilots with clean, sleek corporate drone technology, you feel a bit dizzy.
When Uprising does get around to having a plot, it is, fascinatingly, very nearly a mystery story — the United Nations is attacked by a rogue jaeger on the day of a vote on whether to drone-ify jaegers, and our heroes are honor-bound to figure out who built, piloted and sent it. I must admit that I was taken in by some of the movie’s red herrings and happily surprised by its eventual twist.
But this is about as complex as Pacific Rim Uprising gets. Drift compatibility — the concept that jaegers are so big that piloting them would burn out the brain of a human pilot within minutes, and so to work each one requires at least two people in a psychic and emotional link, in which they share each other’s thoughts and memories — is given lip service but no actual function in the story. Pacific Rim’s underlying theme, that what made us stronger than the alien invaders was our ability to quickly form deep interpersonal bonds, is essentially abandoned.
Without Guillermo del Toro, the design of the film also feels smoothed over, less alive. Uprising is still a candy-colored world, but somewhat muted; dusty where Pacific Rim was drippy, rusty where Pacific Rim was neon. Its jaegers and kaiju lack the personality, weight and scale that animated them so well in the first film.
Their movements are too fast for machines of their size; the viewer is not reminded of their sheer immensity often enough, removing one of Pacific Rim’s most subtle but vital achievements in animation. And the battles themselves lack atmosphere and coherent staging, though individual actions remain clear and fun innovations in jaeger weaponry keep things lively. It’s hard to feel like we’re fighting for the fate of the entire world under a beautiful sunny sky.
And yet.
And yet there is a moment in this movie where all the characters realize that it’s Save the World Time, and it is immediately followed by a montage of all the characters Working Very Hard to Prepare to Save the World, accompanied by a new arrangement of the main theme from Pacific Rim, and it is awesome. If you’ve thought to yourself, “Man, I really wish they’d do [insert wild idea about how to make a robot fight a monster] in Pacific Rim Uprising,” it’s reasonably likely that you will recognize that idea in the movie itself. It is hard to believe that any new jaeger combat trick or kaiju biology twist the production came up with was left on the cutting room floor.
Despite its flaws, you’ll find Uprising to be a fun, if not exactly filling, film
Pacific Rim Uprising does what so many mediocre big-budget science fiction movies forget to do these days: It never, for even a moment, acts as though it’s ashamed of its own mythology. It never attempts to justify why you should be interested in watching giant robots punch giant monsters in order to save the world; it assumes your interest as self-evident.
If you haven’t already bought into it, Pacific Rim Uprising makes no effort at all to justify why you should. But if you can make that leap, it will weld a booster rocket onto a jaeger’s hand and send it flying into battle just to entertain you.
Photo: Photo Credit: Legendary Pictures/Universal Studios.
Shortly before I headed to a screening of Pacific Rim Uprising, a Vulture colleague wondered aloud in a meeting, “What’s the difference between the robots in Transformers and Pacific Rim?” to which I emphatically responded, “They’re not robots! They have people inside!” It’s true that the giant Jaegers are not robots, but is that really all it takes? Is the narrative suggestion that there are little humans inside those otherwise generically hulking, dusky CGI carapaces enough to imbue Guillermo del Toro’s mecha with sufficient soul to carry us through two hours without a crushing, alienated headache? Weirdly, I would say the answer is yes. Even more surprisingly, it’s even enough to carry us through some — but certainly not all — of director Steven S. DeKnight’s dumb, formulaic, but still ineffably zesty follow-up.
Uprising is set some ten years after the events of the first Pacific Rim, after the war with the giant kaiju that has left all Pacific coastlines from Sydney to Santa Monica in ruins. Idris Elba’s impeccably named Marshal Stacker Pentecost is long gone, but his son Jake (lol) Pentecost (John Boyega) is living as a smuggler and Jaeger parts dealer, crashing in abandoned mansions and attending rubble-pile raves. During a deal gone wrong, he runs into a young orphan and prodigy pilot named Amara (Cailee Spaeny). Their daring escape draws the attention of the inter-Pacific military, from which Jake defected years ago. Begrudgingly, he returns to the fold to help his old piloting partner Nate (Scott Eastwood), and Amara goes into pilot training.
Meanwhile, in China …
This is meant as no ding whatsoever, but Pacific Rim Uprising has to be the most China-bait blockbuster I’ve seen to date, and I have seen all of the Transformers movies. The first film was a modest success in the States but killed overseas (it had the sixth-biggest Chinese box-office opening for a Hollywood film) and that bears out in the sequel, which has entire plotlines in Mandarin, and substantial roles for Chinese stars Zhang Jin and Jing Tian. The result is a more cynical, market-driven version of the kind of international popcorn fare that Luc Besson and Bong Joon-ho have come up with in recent years, but I found it disorienting in a not-at-all-unpleasant way. I’ll put it this way: No other U.S. studio movie outside of the Pacific Rim cinematic universe is going to have an Asian woman executing the Han Solo–saves-the-day move in the final act, and I’ll take it for now.
Anyway, in China: Shao Industries, headed by the ruthless Liwen Shao (Jing) is busy manufacturing drone Jaegers that will supposedly be more efficient in the event of another kaiju breach. But Shao has been infiltrated via Dr. Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day), who, the film is more than happy to remind us, mind-meld “drifted” with a kaiju in the first Pacific Rim and may now be more than a little sympathetic to their cause. This all plays out how you might imagine, but some of the steps along the way are delightfully pulpy in their embrace of practical effects, especially once it’s time to slice open some giant kaiju brains.
Other times — and probably too many other times — the steps are just locksteps. There’s a redemption arc for Jake that you can guess in its entirety from the first shot of Boyega; there’s some hint of a love triangle between Jake, Lambert, and a woman played by Adria Arjona about whom I couldn’t tell you the first thing. Uprising’s script isn’t great at jokes or nuance or originality, but it’s pretty good at shuttling us from one set piece to the next. And when those set pieces are good — as is the case with an early Jaeger fight in Siberia, or the gee-whiz silliness of the climactic battle in Tokyo — it’s easy enough to overlook.
When they’re bad, however, you do find yourself asking what the difference is between this and any other clanging, soulless CGI spectacle. I guess that’s the not-quite-drift-compatible problem at the center of the Pacific Rim movies — the humans inside the giant suits are what make it more palatable, but the movies are pretty bad at giving those humans anything interesting to do. But when they’re locked in drift mode, battling giant monsters like some kind of VR interpretive pairs skate, it’s pretty undeniably thrilling. Universal can make the third installment entirely in Chinese and replace everyone with Scott Eastwood if they want, but as long as it ends with some glowing giant monsters and a synchronized dance routine, I’ll find it hard to complain.
When the first Pacific Rim movie came out in 2013, the marketing made it look like another big, silly, ’splodey movie, in the tradition of the Transformers franchise. But there was a bit more going on beneath the hood.
Co-written and directed by 2018 Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, the first Pacific Rim drew on the traditions of kaiju and mecha, added some funky neural science, and was gross and weird enough to be both recognizably a del Toro movie and often a lot of fun. Giant monsters created by beings called “precursors” in another realm, sent through a portal to wreck our universe, and beaten back by giant robots called Jaegers, piloted by pairs of humans? Bring it on.
Most of the fun of Pacific Rim was in the unpredictable world building, and after that, in the kaiju-Jaeger fights. It was, in some ways, the exemplary big, silly, ’splodey movie, and the thinness of the plot didn’t really matter. Pacific Rim: Uprising would either have to figure out how to replicate its predecessor’s charm or find a new way to up the ante.
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Alas, under the direction of Steven S. DeKnight — who’s spent his career working in television, on shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Daredevil — the sequel takes the path of least resistance, becoming less pleasantly erratic, more ponderously predictable.
That’s frustrating. The world didn’t need another Transformers clone, with random slo-mo shots and scintillating dialogue like, “We only get one shot at this!” “Yeah, let’s make it count!” (Four screenwriters, and this is the stuff they came up with?)
So what’s most interesting about Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t the movie itself — it’s how the cause of the impending apocalypse has evolved from the first to the second film, and how that maps onto apocalyptic stories more generally.
The differences between Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim: Uprising map onto how we talk about the apocalypse
Apocalyptic stories have been around forever, but for most of human history, they were tales about the gods visiting destruction on humans, often for their bad behavior. From Noah’s flood to Ragnarok, the apocalypse was a way for celestial beings of one sort or another to hit the cosmic reset button on humankind.
But around the turn of the 20th century, advances in science, technology, and medicine seem to have shifted the way many apocalyptic stories were told. Now, instead of being worried about the apocalypse as retribution from the gods, we started worrying that we’d be the ones who brought destruction on ourselves. It might be through zombies, or Cylons, or robots, or computers, or a “cure” that turned out to be a disease, but in the end, we’d be the source of our own destruction.
That’s why Pacific Rim is fascinating. The series is set in the future, and the first film actually inverts this trend in contemporary apocalyptic storytelling: For once, we are the ones fixing the apocalypse with our technologies. Earth is under siege by creatures from another realm, but through first the warrior-robots called Jaegers and then the ingenuity of two scientists (played by Charlie Day and Burn Gorman), humans are able to fight off the threat, seal off the void through which they’re entering, and — as the movie so eloquently puts it — cancel the apocalypse.
But I suppose it was inevitable that the sequel would come around to the conventional 21st-century idea of apocalypse.
Pacific Rim: Uprising lacks the originality of its predecessor
Pacific Rim: Uprising takes place 10 years after the first movie. The void has stayed sealed and kaiju are no longer an imminent threat, though Rangers still train in case of a return appearance. While some cities have rebuilt, much of the world is still a bombed-out dystopia, where scavengers roam the landscape stripping old Jaegers for parts. When Jaegers do appear, it’s for peacekeeping purposes.
Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the first movie’s Stacker Pentecost (the Idris Elba character), is one of the scavengers, until he comes upon a small Jaeger built by a teenage girl named Amara (Cailee Spaeny). The two of them get into trouble, and instead of being punished with jail time, they’re brought to the training academy — Amara as a cadet and Jake as a Ranger, with the intention that he’ll help train the cadets alongside Nate Lambert (a very dull Scott Eastwood).
Pacific Rim: Uprising hurtles along at a fast clip, throwing lots of generic big-budget blockbuster plot details into the mix. There’s a shadowy multinational company, Shao Industries, headed by Liwen Shao (Tian Jing), that wants to swap out human-piloted Jaegers for drones. There’s conflict between Amara and the other cadets. There’s Jake’s reluctance to take his place among the Rangers, where he doesn’t really feel like he belongs. And there’s a summit gone horribly wrong in Sydney. (If you’re wondering where Charlie Hunnam’s character Raleigh Becket went, well, we don’t really know either. The movie doesn’t find its former protagonist very interesting.) And there’s the triumphant return of Pacific Rim fan favorite Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who is now leading the pilot force and whom Jake considers his sister.
And, of course, it turns out that the kaiju threat is back — but not in the way anyone expected. Pacific Rim: Uprising posits that this time around, it’s not really the precursors or kaiju that are the biggest threat to humanity. No, if humanity goes down, it might be because we think we can master our universe — and it’s ready to master us instead.
And that’s in keeping with the progression of our stories about apocalypse. We know “the gods” won’t kill us in some mysterious fashion; we fixed that with modern science, which lets us control our surroundings and cure illnesses. But it’s our own craving to play god that will get us into trouble, letting our science run amok and kill us.
So how do we fix it? Most contemporary apocalyptic stories suggest that if there’s anything that will save humanity, it’s our capacity for love, empathy, and human connection. That’s Pacific Rim: Uprising’s conclusion too. We need to work together to save the world.
Okay, fine. Sure. But in this case, it feels like just one more paint-by-numbers ’splodey movie, engineered to deliver maximum spectacle and rake in maximum dollars at the global box office (jokes about characters’ bad Mandarin are hardly incidental) while doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get there. It has some fun action sequences, and one scene — only one — that briefly seems to capture the weird originality of the first Pacific Rim. (It involves Charlie Day’s character, and you’ll know it when you see it.)
In the end, the apocalypse gets canceled again — solved, as in its predecessor, with a plot point that seems like an elaborate “Jaeger bomb” joke — and the movie sets itself up for another sequel, so long as this one makes enough money to merit it. But if you leave feeling simultaneously exhausted, overstimulated, and strangely bored, you aren’t alone. Maybe the real apocalypse will come in the form of death by a thousand blandly conceived, loud, ’splodey sequels.
Pacific Rim: Uprising opens in theaters on March 23.
