‘Pacific Rim: Uprising’ Review

So they made a sequel to Pacific Rim……..

“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.”

I can’t believe it has been 5 years since I sat down in a theatre and was absolutely blown away by Guillermo Del Toro’s incredible Pacific Rim. The man grew up loving monsters and this was a project he wanted to make his entire life. Pacific Rim kind of came out of nowhere, I remember the trailers being really loud and fast paced and I didn’t know that to expect from the film. Once 2013 was all said and done, turns out Pacific Rim was my favourite movie from that year. Guillermo has the ability to craft such poetry on screen. His colour schemes, the Jaeger and Kaiju design were so impeccable, you really felt the passion all over this movie. You could just feel his magical touch all over Pacific Rim, I think that’s what it sets it apart from every other movie like it. Transformers, Battleship, Godzilla, all these movies are just generic in every sense of the word, yet Del Toro managed to create a really beautiful universe within the Pacific Rim realm.

So we had to wait 5 long years to go back into a world that had giant robots fighting lager than life monsters, but this time around, Del Toro was not behind the camera. And for me, this is the biggest weakest of the movie. Steven S. DeKnight fills in. He doesn’t do a horrible job, but that magical touch I was talking about is quite frankly gone. This is what Pacific Rim would look like if someone who wasn’t so passionate about the material made the movie. The biggest flaw of Pacific Rim: Uprising is that it just feels like every other movie. They made a paint by numbers rock em sock em blockbuster. With generic characters and an insanely weak and messy plot. I wanted this movie to be great, but it’s just not a very good film. Instead of building off what Del Toro built, they almost decided to erase all of his work and start fresh and that was a terrible idea.

We pick up 10 years after the events of the first film and the Kaiju are no more. This time around we follow the journey of Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) son of war hero and former Jaeger pilot Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who doesn’t want nor believes that he needs to follow in his fathers footsteps. When a new threat arises, Jake must not only follow in his fathers shoes, but finished what he started. He isn’t alone on this journey, Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) and Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) are along for the ride. I don’t want to say the acting is terrible, I think the script is just poor. Everyone is trying their best with the material given to them. Boyega remains insanely charismatic, like I’m talking young Dwayne Johnson levels here, but it wasn’t enough. Scott Eastwood is in this movie, that’s all I got to say about that. The big problem for me was they introduced a bunch of kids, and it made it feel too much like Power Rangers. The first one had these mature adults piloting the Jaegers and now we have some really young kids, who aren’t great actors trying to carry this whole movie, and it didn’t work out. We see some old familiar faces with Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as the wacky Kaiju scientists. I will only say this, the worst part of the entire movie is what they did with Charlie Day’s character, I won’t get into it, but my god. One of the worst things I’ve seen in a movie in a very long time. We also get the return of Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who happens to be Jake’s sister. She is totally misused, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. A total badass turned into an army general, who I felt was in the movie just so we had a familiar face to look at.

There just wasn’t any jaw dropping moments, even the action lacked anything we haven’t seen before. The new looked Jaegers were almost to sleek and slim, it just made them look less realistic. I liked the old, clunky, slow moving but methodical Jaegers from the first. The Hong Kong action sequence is still some of the best stuff I’ve seen on IMAX. There was no moment throughout the entire film where I felt I was getting something new, something revolutionary, which is just really a shame. A lot of it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and by the time the good stuff came around, I found myself completely checked out of the movie. The action doesn’t really occur until the final 20 minutes of the movie, and it’s just nothing special. I just wanted them to take what Del Toro started and make a few adjustments and improve on it just a tad. Just take a look below and nothing even comes close to it.

I went in thinking how bad could this movie possibly be? As it turns out, pretty bad. I hate to say it, because you know a ton of work goes into making any movie, but at the end of the day, Pacific Rim: Uprising will go down as one of 2018’s worst. It’s going to bomb at the box-office this weekend, so I have a feeling this will be the last time we get to venture into this world, and that just sucks. Maybe if Del Toro agrees to come back and do a sort of prequel, the guy did just win best director and picture, so I think he has the power to do anything he wants right now. That is the only way we will see Jaegers vs. Kaju in the near future. I know this is a movie about giant robots punching and fighting monsters, and I shouldn’t think so much into it, but when at it’s core is about that, and that thing can’t even satisfy you or entertain you, well something isn’t right. If the plot stinks, the acting is sub-par, and the action doesn’t measure up, well you have a big time failure on your hands. I wanted this movie to be great so badly, I love this world, but it failed massively, and I think this is the end of the Pacific Rim franchise.

Check ya later

Nate’s Movie Tour Reviews – Pacific Rim: Uprising = 44/100