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.
Universal and Legendary
The Box Office:
Pacific Rim: Uprising opens Thursday night in North America and over the weekend in much of the world. It is something of a test case for the idea that a middling franchise-starter, one that wasn't exactly embraced by critics or audiences, can spawn a successful sequel just a few years later. The trap is that, even five years later, a movie like Pacific Rim: Uprising is far more common than it once was. And if some of the fandom involves director Guillermo del Toro, well, he's not around this time. But we do have John Boyega, making this an all-too-rare case of a would-be fantasy tentpole headlined by a black actor "just because." At least one would-be ID4 knock-off actually learned a lesson from ID4...
The film cost around $150 million and is arguably banking on breaking out overseas, especially in China where the first flick made a then-huge $111 million. Its domestic fortunes are cloudier, but it may open just high enough to take the top spot from Black Panther, which will at the very least earn it a place in the trivia books. Either way, the top movie of the weekend will (again) be one starring a black actor, which is pretty cool. And, fair or not, Pacific Rim: Uprising dethroning Black Panther certainly makes for better optics than Ready Player One doing so next weekend.
The Review:
Director Steven S. Knight's Pacific Rim: Uprising is the Saturday morning cartoon version of Pacific Rim. Like all too many movies of this nature, it plays like an extended pilot for the long-form storytelling that we'll probably never get to see, even if Uprising does its job as a singular stand-alone narrative. While it lacks the grandeur and mythmaking of Guillermo del Toro's original, it offers superb special effects work, a surprisingly restrained story that offers a genuine plot twist or two and some solid character work. Most importantly, it offers John Boyega in a truly winning leading man turn that makes the movie worth watching on that merit alone.
Not to get too naval-gazey about it, but it is a big deal, even 22-years after Independence Day, that a movie like Pacific Rim: Uprising has a black leading man. That this film, specifically intended to play overseas (and in China) gives Boyega (instead of, say, the charisma-free Scott Eastwood) the leading role is a refreshing change of pace and hopefully a sign of things to come. And Boyega offers a delightful quirky star turn, offering such gee-whiz charm and old-school heroics that, yes, I would compare him to Brendan Fraser and Orlando Bloom. I have long said that Hollywood's movie star problem is that they spent 15 years looking for the next Tom Crusie instead of the next Will Smith, and Boyega offers proof to that theory.
The screenplay is no great shakes, but I appreciated that there is a real story beyond just "Oh no, the monsters are back!" For much of the running time, the threat is not the kaiju but rather the corporate folks who make the Jaeger. The picture glosses over the political/social implications of its premise, and the potential commentary about the dangers of unmanned drone warfare feels a few years too late. It takes an entire act to establish its new characters (played by Boyega, Cailee Spaeny, Scott Eastwood, etc.) and reinsert us into the new "ten-years after the first film" status quo. Only once we meet Jake Pentecost (yes, Boyega plays the son of Idris Elba's Pacific Rim character) and the next (younger) generation of would-be Jaeger pilots do we get a full-blown action sequence. It's a surprisingly compelling setpiece, playing out in a way that creates genuine suspense.
We get quite a bit of character interaction in those first 30 minutes, including an attempt to avoid standard rivalries between Boyega's cynical rebel and Eastwood's authority figure. In a nice touch, there's a notable scene toward the end where (vague spoilers) Eastwood explicitly gets out of the way so that the black guy and the white lady can save the day. Speaking of which, Cailee Spaeny has terrific mentor/mentee chemistry with Boyega, and she brings a certain "girl and her pet robot" sincerity to her opening scenes. While the film initially sets her up against one of the other female cadets (Ivanna Sakhno), that rivalry disappears when it matters. The film won't win any medals, but there is relative gender parity (and relative racial diversity/inclusivity) throughout the movie, which made it stand out accordingly.
When the robots-v-monsters action does arrive, it's delivered in broad daylight, with clear images and mostly coherent choreography. There's not a lot of style or personality to the action, but it is big and almost casually obscene in its wanton destruction. It is a little insane that we've become so accustomed to huge movies that production value and big-scale spectacle on par with Pacific Rim: Uprising is not only considered par for the course but the glorified equivalent of a B-movie. But it is the character work, specifically from Boyega, Spaeny and returning franchise vets Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, that makes the movie work. Sadly, fan favorite Rinko Kikuchi doesn't get much to do, while Tian Jing gets most of the fun. The robots and monsters are cool enough, but it only (barely) works because I kinda liked this new crop of would-be world-savers.
Pacific Rim: Uprising is an unnecessary sequel to a film that wasn't that big of a success in the first place. If anything, it plays like The Incredible Hulk to Ang Lee's Hulk, operating as a mass-market, rejiggered for maximum commercial impact sequel compared to the more idiosyncratic predecessor. But Incredible Hulk was not an MCU high point, and even the more overtly commercial Man of Steel (after Superman Returns) got its franchise off to a shakey start, so it's unlikely that this second Pacific Rim will flourish beyond what the first film did, if not noticeably less. Still, it's a glorified B-movie with a $150 million budget, a Saturday afternoon matinee piece of kid-friendly pulp fiction that is (barely) justified by Boyega's lead turn and some warm character chemistry that makes the climactic blow-outs matter just a little. Pacific Rim: Uprising isn't quite "good," but I had a good time.
Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat.
