Pacific Rim: Uprising fails to connect on any level
Life was better when I was eight. As I watch my own eight-year-old, I often get to see him enjoy a variety of things that an adult can’t always derive pleasure from.
Eating macaroni and cheese for every meal three days in a row. Unabashedly wearing stained clothing. Falling asleep five minutes after going to bed and waking up at 6 a.m. rested and ready to face the day. Enjoying simplicity in all forms of entertainment.
For whatever reason, these things fall away as we get older, replaced by their annoying opposites—some due to health concerns, some due to the judgement of others, some due to the ever-expanding world that we eventually come to occupy.
So, while watching Pacific Rim: Uprising, I felt a certain wistful sadness. Here was a movie my eight-year-old would enjoy immensely, full of giant robot on giant monster violence, and all I could do was glance down at my watch every few minutes. The film is childish and obvious, a leading example of dumb, unnecessary sequels, full of loud explosions and boring dialogue. I found no moments to cheer for, no characters to care about, and no suspense to create thrills. Pacific Rim: Uprising is boring as hell, which is the worst sin a film can commit.
The film is a sequel to Pacific Rim, a 2013 fantasy directed by Guillermo del Toro. While I love most of del Toro’s films, Pacific Rim never caught my imagination the way his others did. Again, this may be because I have simply outgrown giant robots as a plot device. The series is certainly better than Transformers, as it’s based on a real idea rather than a toy line, but it was a little too silly for my tastes.
The premise of both Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim: Uprising is pretty dumb at heart. Sometime in the near future, humanity is under constant attack from Kaiju, giant sea monsters that come from the Pacific Ocean to attack coastal cities.
In response, humanity create giant robotic mechs called Jaegars that must be piloted by at least two people through a neural network with a technique known as drifting.
In the first film, we learn that these Kaiju are bioweapons created by extradimensional antagonists bent on destroying humanity. The come from a “breach” deep in the ocean, which was subsequently closed at the end of the original film. Pacific Rim: Uprising takes place after the war against the Kaiju was won and humanity has begun rebuilding.
While I could spend a few words summarizing the plot of this film, there’s not really any reason to do so. Everything in Pacific Rim: Uprising is generic action movie. The film is a little over ninety minutes, and most of what happens in that time is filler.
There are long tedious scenes of dialogue between characters, whose names I don’t know, for reasons I can’t fathom. There are some returning characters, but they don’t matter either.
The only interesting parts of the film are the action sequences, though even they aren’t especially thrilling. I found myself tense during these, but I couldn’t really figure out why. It might have been because the film was loud and busy. I’d be tense while watching a car crash or listening to cats fight in an alley. That doesn’t mean I’m engaged.
Pacific Rim: Uprising was an opportunity to explore the world established in the original film. The world building was the best part of Pacific Rim, and while the premise is silly, the sequel missed out on the opportunity to expand on this mythos.
The first few minutes of Pacific Rim: Uprising is more interesting than anything found in most of the film. It begins by showing life as it is after the war, with characters living on the fringes of society in collapsed cities alongside destroyed Jaegars and decayed Kaiju.
A film that focused on this, with the greater conflicts in the background, might have been worth seeing.
There might be real stories to be mined in the brightly lit streets of a coastal city decimated by war. Instead, the film created bigger monsters and bigger robots and cardboard characters.
A child might not care, but a rational adult should find something else to do.