Pacific Rim is one of my favourite movies of all time: it is a work of genius and love. I'd place it in the top two or three slots of "best movies" in my life. It is a rare, rare thing indeed when I leave a movie theatre feeling grateful; the original Pacific Rim took me right back to childhood and made me feel a wonder I hadn't felt in years. I love Pacific Rim for the same reason I love giants: giant monsters, giant robots, what have you. Maybe it's the same love and wonder as the kind that inspired the like of countless folk tales, the Titanomachy, Goya's El Coloso, Godzilla, Gulliver's Travels... and what a joy to see the giants contend with one another.
Pacific Rim Uprising is not as good as the original, and I'm going to outline why in this review: but, before I do so, I want to say that the movie gets a lot right. I was both surprised and delighted in parts of Pacific Rim Uprising, and I'm happy to say so, because I don't like to run any movie down, or to pick anything apart. You'll see a list of names a mile long constituting the credits at the end of any movie, and blockbusters like these usually takes years to make. Who am I to denigrate something that so much effort went into? A movie really is bigger than I am. However, I love the original, and I need to dissect the sequel's lesser parts. There is effort in Uprising, and the effort pays off in parts: but like Jake Pentecost (protagonist and son of the hero from the first film) and Scott Eastwood's character (son of one of the greatest actors in history) Pacific Rim Uprising is in the shadow of its "precursor."
I'll start with the good: -Pacific Rim Uprising has wonderful action and great set pieces. Seeing the different locations was fantastic, like the the frozen north and exploring more urban environments. The fighting spirit from the original lives on: wonderful fun and joy in titans smashing up a city. -The fights are (usually) very well depicted. A fight scene is like a story in itself: you have the set up, escalation, climax, then boom, resolution. Spectacle like this is why we go to the movies. -Some genuine surprises: I did not expect to see a kaiju brain in the giant robot, for example, and I did not see Newt's plot twist coming.
Now, the bad.
First and foremost, one of the teenage jaeger pilots, on the way to fight for the end of the world, uses the jaeger's screen to show the "Mr. Trololo" singing video. Yes, really. I'm not joking. They played the "Russian Rickroll" for us. Wow. This... ripped me from the moment and the immersion of the movie. I guess the filmmakers were trying to cater to the youtube audience, figuring that much of the audience of this movie are, what, teen, basement-dwelling trolls? I can't begin to count the many reasons how awful playing this meme for us was. Pacific Rim is meant to exist in its own world. The original crafted its own universe: it introduced us to such terms as kaiju blue, the drift, the neural handshake, the Precursors: brilliant world building and writing. Playing this meme feels even cheaper than product placement, and that's something. It's not even a joke, it's a reference: the same criticism of Family Guy. Family Guy doesn't tell as many jokes as it does make references. It's a cheap grab for laughs, mentioning or showing something that you have laughed at or enjoyed in the past to get a laugh now.
Also, showing Mr. Trololo was just inconsistent with the logic of the movie. Most jaegers need a co-pilot where they mentally "drift," sharing one another's thoughts. In the movie, when the kid springs the singer vid meme, it's a surprise to the co-pilot: but wouldn't he actually know, if they're inside one another's heads? And also, these kids are piloting gigantic robots as big as skyscrapers. The cost of one of these jaegers would be what, billions? And these robots are used to fight the apocalypse: literally, *fight* the apocalypse. Can *you* imagine a WWII fighter pilot surprising the other soldiers by playing Internet memes on the way to, what could be, doom for the human race?
This meme really did spoil part of the movie for me and its inclusion was on my mind as I was walking out of the cinema. When I saw the original, I felt gratitude when leaving the cinema, for that aforementioned wonder. Del Toro never pulled crap like showing a meme or reference in the original; it wouldn't have even entered his head. Why? Because del Toro doesn't pander to or patronize his audience. He has class. Pacific Rim is a movie about giant monsters and robots, but he never thought the subject was beneath him. That's why people are happy to celebrate and give him awards.
Also in poor taste was a scene where one of the pilots uses his jaeger to flip off one of the jaegers. Yes, really. I don't know why the filmmakers thought to patronize us further and make these scenes so goofy.
From here, I'll list the rest of my negatives in point format.
-The music from the original is almost nonpresent. The soundtrack from the original is part of what gave Pacific Rim its soul, and it was ultra cool to boot. Really, go to youtube and listen to the Pacific Rim Main Theme now. It makes you want to jump up on tables or go for a run. (Seriously, it's part of my jogging playlist.) The trailers had a remix of the main theme with 2Pac, which adds nothing, and isn't even featured in the main film.
-The robots usually look great, but they move much, much too quickly. In the original, the jaegers moved slowly. This helped build in us the idea of the terrific scope and gravity of these giants.
-Nearly all the players from the original are blown up. Becket, the protagonist from the original, is mentioned, but his disappearance is not explained. (If it is, I didn't hear it, and I was paying attention, so it wasn't explained well.)
-The actors aren't "punished" like before. Guillermo del Toro was happy in building a "torture device," referring to the jaeger pilot cockpits. In the original, you could see the actors straining to lift their legs to move the robots; here the actors are (very) obviously running on treadmills. You could make the case that the technology has developed since the events of the original film, but seeing the strain on the actors adds to the drama of piloting the mechs.
-The giant robots of Uprising do not have the same presence, personality, or character as the jaegers of the original film. Crimson Typhoon, a robot in the original, had a head inspired by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cherno Alpha, who is named for a pagan Russian god, was shaped like a nuclear reactor, and I still smile thinking of Cherno rampaging into battle against Otachi like a wild bull. It's such a shame Typhoon and Alpha don't return, as their bodies are still laying at the bottom of the ocean. In Uprising, 90% of the screen time is given to Gypsy Avenger, which is "Gypsy Mk II." Its body is just the same as gypsy but with a more standard, robot head. Really, Gypsy Danger's bullet-swivel head in the original has much more charm than a homogenized design. -This lack of personality is the same with the kaiju, the little screen time that they get. The monsters showing up for Uprising's climax do not have the same character as the monster from the original film. The three of these kaiju are all grey with glowing blue eyes: yeah. There is zero of the personality or presence in these monsters as Leatherback, the skull-faced King Kong, Knifehead, the goblin shark abomination, or Otachi, the creature literally filled with surprises. The only real surprise offered to us is that these three monsters fuse into a single giant, a surprise spoiled by the movie's trailer. This "mega kaiju" is impressive, but has a disappointing end...
-The final confrontation is an anticlimax. In a scene very (perhaps even too) similar to when Gypsy Danger slays Otachi high up in Earth's atmosphere, Gypsy Avenger simply flies into the sky and then crash lands into the kaiju, killing it. No final fight. Imagine if Luke Skywalker just jumped from a catwalk and landed on Darth Vader or the Emperor and ended the fight that way? Pretty lame, eh? That's what you call an anticlimax. -The jaegers and kaiju are mostly present in the day. While daylight helps us see more detail, the night and constant rain environments of the original helped added to the drama and mystique of the giants.
-The cast. Annoying kids, and John Boyega speaks in a thick slang rife with incorrect grammar (he does a spot-on impression of Scott Eastwood's character in the movie and shows that, yes, he knows that it's "you weren't" instead of "you wasn't.") I haven't seen Scott Eastwood in a movie before and I never realized how incredibly similar he is to his father, right down to the cowboy tough guy voice and squinty eyes. The female lead exists only to tease these two dudes; there's some weird love triangle that is never explained and goes nowhere. The young cast isn't exactly stellar, either, and all feel tokenly diverse.
-Weirdly, many more bystanders are killed in the rampages of Uprising as opposed to the battles of the original, where we knew people were held up and protected in anti-kaiju bunkers. Having so many bystanders killed onscreen takes away from the fantastic that fueled the soul of the original; these killings are a poor attempt to add grit to where there should be none. The original showed no bystanders getting killed, so the cities the giants fought in were like great sandboxes for these creatures to wrestle in.
So, there you have it. I could go on: the scene where Gottlieb and Newt beat up the very large, armed security team is contrived (two tiny scientists, one of which has a cane,) and Newt's "demon voice" is lame, for example, but really: I'm just happy that we have a sequel. There is literally nothing else I want to see in cinemas, and I haven't been to the movies in months. Come back, del Toro!
Pacific Rim Uprising is not as good as the original, and I'm going to outline why in this review: but, before I do so, I want to say that the movie gets a lot right. I was both surprised and delighted in parts of Pacific Rim Uprising, and I'm happy to say so, because I don't like to run any movie down, or to pick anything apart. You'll see a list of names a mile long constituting the credits at the end of any movie, and blockbusters like these usually takes years to make. Who am I to denigrate something that so much effort went into? A movie really is bigger than I am. However, I love the original, and I need to dissect the sequel's lesser parts. There is effort in Uprising, and the effort pays off in parts: but like Jake Pentecost (protagonist and son of the hero from the first film) and Scott Eastwood's character (son of one of the greatest actors in history) Pacific Rim Uprising is in the shadow of its "precursor."
I'll start with the good: -Pacific Rim Uprising has wonderful action and great set pieces. Seeing the different locations was fantastic, like the the frozen north and exploring more urban environments. The fighting spirit from the original lives on: wonderful fun and joy in titans smashing up a city. -The fights are (usually) very well depicted. A fight scene is like a story in itself: you have the set up, escalation, climax, then boom, resolution. Spectacle like this is why we go to the movies. -Some genuine surprises: I did not expect to see a kaiju brain in the giant robot, for example, and I did not see Newt's plot twist coming.
Now, the bad.
First and foremost, one of the teenage jaeger pilots, on the way to fight for the end of the world, uses the jaeger's screen to show the "Mr. Trololo" singing video. Yes, really. I'm not joking. They played the "Russian Rickroll" for us. Wow. This... ripped me from the moment and the immersion of the movie. I guess the filmmakers were trying to cater to the youtube audience, figuring that much of the audience of this movie are, what, teen, basement-dwelling trolls? I can't begin to count the many reasons how awful playing this meme for us was. Pacific Rim is meant to exist in its own world. The original crafted its own universe: it introduced us to such terms as kaiju blue, the drift, the neural handshake, the Precursors: brilliant world building and writing. Playing this meme feels even cheaper than product placement, and that's something. It's not even a joke, it's a reference: the same criticism of Family Guy. Family Guy doesn't tell as many jokes as it does make references. It's a cheap grab for laughs, mentioning or showing something that you have laughed at or enjoyed in the past to get a laugh now.
Also, showing Mr. Trololo was just inconsistent with the logic of the movie. Most jaegers need a co-pilot where they mentally "drift," sharing one another's thoughts. In the movie, when the kid springs the singer vid meme, it's a surprise to the co-pilot: but wouldn't he actually know, if they're inside one another's heads? And also, these kids are piloting gigantic robots as big as skyscrapers. The cost of one of these jaegers would be what, billions? And these robots are used to fight the apocalypse: literally, *fight* the apocalypse. Can *you* imagine a WWII fighter pilot surprising the other soldiers by playing Internet memes on the way to, what could be, doom for the human race?
This meme really did spoil part of the movie for me and its inclusion was on my mind as I was walking out of the cinema. When I saw the original, I felt gratitude when leaving the cinema, for that aforementioned wonder. Del Toro never pulled crap like showing a meme or reference in the original; it wouldn't have even entered his head. Why? Because del Toro doesn't pander to or patronize his audience. He has class. Pacific Rim is a movie about giant monsters and robots, but he never thought the subject was beneath him. That's why people are happy to celebrate and give him awards.
Also in poor taste was a scene where one of the pilots uses his jaeger to flip off one of the jaegers. Yes, really. I don't know why the filmmakers thought to patronize us further and make these scenes so goofy.
From here, I'll list the rest of my negatives in point format.
-The music from the original is almost nonpresent. The soundtrack from the original is part of what gave Pacific Rim its soul, and it was ultra cool to boot. Really, go to youtube and listen to the Pacific Rim Main Theme now. It makes you want to jump up on tables or go for a run. (Seriously, it's part of my jogging playlist.) The trailers had a remix of the main theme with 2Pac, which adds nothing, and isn't even featured in the main film.
-The robots usually look great, but they move much, much too quickly. In the original, the jaegers moved slowly. This helped build in us the idea of the terrific scope and gravity of these giants.
-Nearly all the players from the original are blown up. Becket, the protagonist from the original, is mentioned, but his disappearance is not explained. (If it is, I didn't hear it, and I was paying attention, so it wasn't explained well.)
-The actors aren't "punished" like before. Guillermo del Toro was happy in building a "torture device," referring to the jaeger pilot cockpits. In the original, you could see the actors straining to lift their legs to move the robots; here the actors are (very) obviously running on treadmills. You could make the case that the technology has developed since the events of the original film, but seeing the strain on the actors adds to the drama of piloting the mechs.
-The giant robots of Uprising do not have the same presence, personality, or character as the jaegers of the original film. Crimson Typhoon, a robot in the original, had a head inspired by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cherno Alpha, who is named for a pagan Russian god, was shaped like a nuclear reactor, and I still smile thinking of Cherno rampaging into battle against Otachi like a wild bull. It's such a shame Typhoon and Alpha don't return, as their bodies are still laying at the bottom of the ocean. In Uprising, 90% of the screen time is given to Gypsy Avenger, which is "Gypsy Mk II." Its body is just the same as gypsy but with a more standard, robot head. Really, Gypsy Danger's bullet-swivel head in the original has much more charm than a homogenized design. -This lack of personality is the same with the kaiju, the little screen time that they get. The monsters showing up for Uprising's climax do not have the same character as the monster from the original film. The three of these kaiju are all grey with glowing blue eyes: yeah. There is zero of the personality or presence in these monsters as Leatherback, the skull-faced King Kong, Knifehead, the goblin shark abomination, or Otachi, the creature literally filled with surprises. The only real surprise offered to us is that these three monsters fuse into a single giant, a surprise spoiled by the movie's trailer. This "mega kaiju" is impressive, but has a disappointing end...
-The final confrontation is an anticlimax. In a scene very (perhaps even too) similar to when Gypsy Danger slays Otachi high up in Earth's atmosphere, Gypsy Avenger simply flies into the sky and then crash lands into the kaiju, killing it. No final fight. Imagine if Luke Skywalker just jumped from a catwalk and landed on Darth Vader or the Emperor and ended the fight that way? Pretty lame, eh? That's what you call an anticlimax. -The jaegers and kaiju are mostly present in the day. While daylight helps us see more detail, the night and constant rain environments of the original helped added to the drama and mystique of the giants.
-The cast. Annoying kids, and John Boyega speaks in a thick slang rife with incorrect grammar (he does a spot-on impression of Scott Eastwood's character in the movie and shows that, yes, he knows that it's "you weren't" instead of "you wasn't.") I haven't seen Scott Eastwood in a movie before and I never realized how incredibly similar he is to his father, right down to the cowboy tough guy voice and squinty eyes. The female lead exists only to tease these two dudes; there's some weird love triangle that is never explained and goes nowhere. The young cast isn't exactly stellar, either, and all feel tokenly diverse.
-Weirdly, many more bystanders are killed in the rampages of Uprising as opposed to the battles of the original, where we knew people were held up and protected in anti-kaiju bunkers. Having so many bystanders killed onscreen takes away from the fantastic that fueled the soul of the original; these killings are a poor attempt to add grit to where there should be none. The original showed no bystanders getting killed, so the cities the giants fought in were like great sandboxes for these creatures to wrestle in.
So, there you have it. I could go on: the scene where Gottlieb and Newt beat up the very large, armed security team is contrived (two tiny scientists, one of which has a cane,) and Newt's "demon voice" is lame, for example, but really: I'm just happy that we have a sequel. There is literally nothing else I want to see in cinemas, and I haven't been to the movies in months. Come back, del Toro!