Review: Pacific Rim: Uprising, or Six Reasons I Cried While Watching This

NY  Mag

Seriously, there's no need to name this "Gipsy" if it's not related to Gipsy Danger, anyway.

2013's Pacific Rim was a great movie. It was the Western visualisation of the great Eastern traditions of kaijus and mechas. It was (and still is) a great example of world-building. So you can just imagine how excited I was for its sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising, and how disappointed I was after watching. Mainly because...

1. It's not by Guillermo del Toro.
This alone should have restrained me from shelling out cash to watch it on IMAX. But I gave it the benefit of the doubt, that maybe del Toro's world-building was so solid that any sequel would be just as good. Sadly, that wasn't the case. Uprising was helmed by Steven S. DeKnight, and if he was as big a kaiju and mecha geek as del Toro, it doesn't show. With del Toro, his love of Japanese monsters and machines oozes out of him that you could almost tell he was bullied in school as a kid because he was clearly a geek.

2.  There are more jaegers, but they are less endearing.
The first film showed only four (4) jaegers in action: Cherno Alpha, Gipsy Danger, Crimson Typhoon, and Striker Eureka. Uprising has twice as many: Bracer Phoenix, Gipsy Avenger, Guardian Bravo, Saber Athena, Titan Redeemer, Obsidian Fury, November Ajax, and Valor Omega. Now let me state my qualms about the film's jaegers.

First, less is more. We grew to love the jaegers from the first film because there's only four of them, and we'd be drawn to one of them as a favourite, kind of like how we have our favourite Beatle, because they were all distinct and different from each other. Now, however, there's just too many. They all look the same. Sometimes I can't tell them apart.

Second, the jaeger names. I think the rule for naming jaegers is to have two random words, and both words must have a 99% chance of never being seen together in the vernacular. Like how likely will the word "eureka" follow the word "striker" in real life conversation? (Also, Gipsy seems to be a spelling typo, but it looks nice, so what the hell.) But in the sequel, it seems they were too lazy to name the jaegers that they just chose two words at random by flipping through a dictionary. Sometimes you get a hit, like Obsidian Fury, and sometimes you get a miss. Like November Ajax. What a lousy name.

3. John Boyega is definitely not Idris Elba
Yes, Jake Pentecost admits in the beginning of the film that it's hard to live under his father's shadow. He'll never be as badass as his father was. First, he has a lame name. "Jake". Ugh. Compare that to the awesome name "Stacker". Right? Second, he isn't as tall and heavily built, and he lacks that low, raspy voice. And third, his speech wasn't awesome enough to cancel the apocalypse. And fourth, he didn't die a martyr. I could go on, but you get the point.

4. It wasn't scored by Ramin Djawadi.
Admit it, the original Pacific Rim score by Ramin Djawadi was perfect. It was a fusion of classical and modern. It made you feel like a jaeger leaving the Shatterdome for battle. However, in this film, the score seems to have mellowed down that you'll be battling kaijus with little to no adrenaline in your blood stream. And when you hear the (reprised) Pacific Rim theme a little later in the film, you'll actually wonder where that music was all this time. I mean, I get it, first it was John Paesano composing the score, then they changed it to Lorne Balfe. Well, they could have changed the composers for all I care, but they could have at least retained the original theme. Because: Tom Morello.

5. The kaiju designs are meh.
Guillermo del Toro stuck to a strict philosophy in creating the kaijus for the first film. First, they should not look like any pre-existing monster. Second, they should look as if it could just be a rubber suit with a man inside it. And with those two simple rules, the legendary Wayne Barlow went on to design the kaijus of Pacific Rim, while Uprising's kaijus were designed by Stefan Dechant and Doug Lefter, who are undeniably talented, but are also in a different league from Barlow. The kaijus in this film are ugly. Big, ugly, and dangerous. But Barlow's kaijus looked way more menacing–the stuff that nightmares are made of.

6. Bigger is always better. 
Jaeger means huge. Gigantic. Humongous. Well, literally it means "hunter", but in this context, when we say jaeger, we mean very, very big fighting robots, so big that they can dwarf a major city's central business district. Which is why I really don't like Scrapper. Okay, he can turn into a ball. That's cute. But he's small, so no. Making him instrumental in stopping the super kaiju is just a consolation prize to justify Scrapper's existence.

Also, the world of Pacific Rim isn't a post-apocalyptic world with a dwindling population. There are many, much more qualified jaeger pilots on the planet, even just in the Pacific Rim nations. So why recruit a teenage girl (Cailee Spaeny)? Just because she built a mini-jaeger? Come on.

Empire Online

On a scale of 1 to Idris Elba, John Boyega is a 5.
On a scale of 1 to Clint Eastwood, Scott's a 9.

Pacific Rim: Uprising. USA/China/UK. 2018.



Original rating: 7/10
Mako Mori dying: -0.5
Jaeger cadets being too young: -0.1
Final rating: 6.4/10