JOIN USEnglish (U/A)
Director: Stephen DeKnight
Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian, Cailee Spaeny
Pacific Rim Uprising is a true successor to Pacific Rim (PR) in that it is not subtle, nuanced or intellectual, and that it does not hit you at an emotional or philosophical level. And if any or all of these categories are necessary for you to call a film good, don't go for it.
The PR universe is about the fight bjween kaijus (Japanese for 'strange beasts', refer to massive alien monsters out to colonise Earth) and jaegers (German for 'hunter', refer to equally massive humanoid machines, designed to beat the shit out of kaijus).
The film does not care to engage you in any of the above lofty categories; it is crafted to give you an experience that's the cinematic equivalent of a kaiju getting hit on the head by a ship.
Which, strangely, was one of the things that pleased me immensely in the first film and I missed this time. The deeply gratifying pleasure of watching a jeager pick up a whole ship and swinging it at the head of a kaiju like a baseball bat is unmatched.
I am sure we all have someone in our lives we want to hit with a ship, and seeing it done on silver screen is a cathartic experience.
In fact, like the original, jaegers and kaijus in Uprising break everything you see on screen. Last time around, it was Hong Kong that was torn down as though it were lego blocks; this time, its Tokyo. Even with entire cities are broken down as easily as squeezing a lemon, you don't see anyone dying. Skyscrapers are falling, one after another, without a single human casualty.
There is an attempt at a more fleshed-out plot in Uprising, the characters are a lot more likeable in general and unlike PR, where the whole movie happened at night, all the actions scenes here are during the day, literally and figuratively casting a better light on this fictional universe. Yet the raw energy of PR is missing here.
Uprising has a long build-up to the fight with the kaijus, and those who came in for that have to wait until the end. In the first movie, there was so much kaiju-punching, kaiju slapping, kaiju-kicking, throwing kaijus on buildings, throwing buildings on kaijus, et cetera et cetera. There is much less of that here.
DeKnight is not a bad director, but we miss the fairytale surrealism of Guillermo del Toro, who made PR, whose trail of Oscar stardust, thanks to Shape of Water, is still fresh.
The idea of the Kaiju black market in PR, and the mafia don (by Ron Pearlman, aka Hellboy) who looks he walked out of Lewis Carroll, may at first glance have looked like a banality beside the monster-fighting surface of the film, but that product of Del Toro's delightfully weird - and borderline gross - imagination had made the film richer. Uprising is all surface.
While practically no one is a great actor in the film, John Boyega's Jake Pentecost (son of PR's Staker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba) stands out as the hero, rebel and a passionate defender of ice cream toppings. No one else is expected to, or makes the effort to, act very well. They mostly walk around looking pretty.
Basically, if you think breaking stuff and punching people is fun, watch Uprising. The film gives you little else.