2018 Film Review - Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Directed by: Steven S. DeKnight
Written by: Steven S. DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin
Starring: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny
IMDb Link

Pacific Rim is my personal favourite movie of all time on style alone; the entire film feels drawn straight from my childhood imagination, with the perfect storm of mecha, kaiju, and neon, all with Guillermo del Toro's own Gothic twist. For all its faults the movie was perfect to me. With this in mind, my expectations of this film have been tempered since the day I learned del Toro was no longer directing. The style of Uprising isn't for me, but it's not bad at all.

The marketing wrote itself

The film follows Jake Pentecost (Boyega), formerly unknown son of Marshal Stacker Pentecost (still one of the best names in all of fiction) as he returns to the Jaeger Program he was once rejected from after breaking the law one too many times and being given one last chance by his adoptive sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, sidelined for the sake of the new generation and to dump exposition when needed). Jake's arc is largely about overcoming the chip on his shoulder about his old man and his desire for personal freedom in the face of threats that affect others, and while mostly rushed Boyega has more than enough enthusiasm to carry the role.

The original Pacific Rim took a weighted approach to the style of the fights; the Jaegers and Kaiju moved with a heft that emphasised their sheer mass and the force of their hits, and the cinematography supported this, shooting usually from low, human-level angles and drawing brief attention to the small scale juxtaposed against the gargantuan creatures, all of which was affected by a flood of neon and dark contrast for maximum effect. Some parts of this style remains in Uprising, while other aspects have been removed completely. There's still the brief moments of humour wrought from the sheer size of monsters when scaled to everyday objects as a deliberate stylistic choice. The camera does often take low shots to emphasise size, especially when principle characters are on the ground, but it just as often swooshes about smoothly; the contrast between the two types of shots is jarring, and the choice to move overhead for high angle shots often robs the Jaegers and Kaiju of their intimidating size. This isn't helped by the choice to make all of the creatures move faster, jumping around like guys in rubber suits; it seems like a nice callback to the inspiration for Pacific Rim, but it also breaks immersion because the movements of the robots are often switching between smooth and rickety, while they flit about cityscapes without a hundred tons weighing them down. It draws attention to its own animation. As a stylistic choice, I like the idea I see behind it, but the execution is dodgy. On another note, the score is almost completely forgettable this time around, with only the tracks remixed from the first film standing out.

Boyega is easily the
best thing about the movie

For everything that isn't robots and monsters smashing in to each other, the movie by hastening through too many conceptually good ideas and seeming to bank it all on Boyega's line delivery. There's a lot of plot threads in this movie that seem forced, such as a love triangle between Jake, Eastwood's Lambert and Adria Arjona's Reyes, which gets referenced only a couple of times, contains only bad humour, and ends ambiguously. The idea that a woman would be attracted to two men because those men are similar enough to be drift compatible is intriguing, but like so much else the film does almost nothing with it until its time to wrap it up. This is the same for the recruit subplot involving the talented Amara (Spaeny, being a surprisingly not annoying young adult protagonist); she encounters conflict and has a handful of characters to bounce off, but it's only touched on a few times and only gets resolved because the movie needs them to work together in the final act without any real build-up. Once again, a potentially interesting idea that's not given the time it needs to be fleshed out effectively. The only exception is Jake's arc, which thanks to Boyega has emotion to it that far exceeded the other human aspects of the movie; he aches with the weight of his choices, and screams names and yells with a passion unparalleled in the film, and he gives a speech worthy of his father. Boyega is so good in the movie that I can almost ignore the fact that many of the character arcs in the film feel like forced repeats of arcs from the first movie.

The Short Version: Pacific Rim: Uprising is a lot of rushed good ideas, carried largely by Boyega's performance.

Rating: 5.5/10

Published March 22nd, 2018