Thursday, April 12, 2018

Guillermo, You Are Sorely Missed: A Review of Pacific Rim: Uprising

directed by Steven de Knight
written by De Knight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin

Even though Guillermo del Toro's giant-robots-versus-giant-monsters epic Pacific Rim didn't exactly set the box office on fire, it did win a few fans, including myself. In a world where the bottom line means everything, surprisingly, Legendary Pictures saw fit to greenlight a sequel, a decision they stood by even after their lead actor Charlie Hunnam backed out and del Toro moved on to other projects. Truth be told, I don't think it was a bad decision at all, but I will say that a lot of the decisions they made while making the movie were well beyond bad.

The film picks up ten years after the events of the first movie. The war with the massive Kaiju and their alien masters, the Precursors has ended, and while the world rebuilds from the destruction wrought by the giant monsters from another dimension, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, which consists of the giant robots called jaegers, stands ever vigilant, in case the threat reemerges. It is in this milieu that we find Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of the legendary jaeger pilot Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba from the first film, who had the rare distinction of delivering the few lines of memorable dialogue in a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters), and who used to be a pilot himself, until he washed out. Jake now lives on the fringes of society, eking out a living selling stolen Jaeger parts, until one of his deals goes south and he finds himself struggling for a spare part with a fellow scavenger, the spunky Amara (Cailee Spaeny) and they are both rounded up by the PPDC, which does not allow trading in stolen jaeger parts. To avoid going to prison and on the urging of his adopted sister Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), Jake re-joins the PPDC, this time as an instructor, with Amara as one of his cadets. This reunites him with his former co-pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), in a not-so-warm reunion. Just as he rejoins, the PPDC is on the verge of a crucial decision on whether to approve the deployment of drone jaegers courtesy of the monolithic Shao Industries, headed by the icy Liwen Shao (Tian Jing) for whom former PPDC scientist Newt Geisler (Charlie Day) now works. On the day of the vote, however, a mysterious rogue jaeger emerges from the ocean and wreaks catastrophe on the PPDC before disappearing again. A new threat has emerged, one which could shatter the peace that Jake's father and many others fought and died to win.

I felt that there was a lot this sequel should have had going for it that could have made it work. The whole story of Jake's fall from grace and his quest to step out of his father's long shadow, while hackneyed, could have made for a compelling narrative, had it been more tightly written. I actually liked Boyega's performance relative to that of Charlie Hunnam, but his dialogue (and everyone else's) was so clumsily written I couldn't believe that De Knight, who used to be the showrunner of the excellent season one of Marvel's Netflix series Daredevil, had script credit. There were decent concepts like mystery boxes and twists that, had they been handled correctly, could have made the film, at minimum, a decent distraction, but again, the execution was just extremely slipshod. Also apart from Boyega, who pretty much threw himself into the role, I got the impression that everyone else, from the veterans of the first movie like Kikuchi, Day and Burn Gorman, to newcomers like Eastwood, was phoning it in bigtime. And the Chinese propaganda here was, in a word, laughable. It was so bad that I don't think even Chinese audiences bought into it, as evidenced by the film's lackluster showing in the Middle Kingdom.

One aspect where the filmmakers made it a point to step things up was to have more jaeger fights, and fancier moves, and in that respect the film definitely delivered, with quicker-moving jaegers that actually engage in martial arts moves rather than just punching, kicking and bludgeoning. It was pretty clear that the jaeger movement of the first film was rooted, as much as it could be anyway, in the actual physics of how a robot the size of a skyscraper would move, and here, physics are all but thrown out the window. Truth be told, I completely understand the imperative to speed things up, and there's even a halfhearted attempt to explain why the robots move more quickly, but at times it does feel silly, even though I'll readily admit it looks cool. Still, I think the filmmakers deserve some measure of credit for trying to fill in at least one of the gaps from the first film. And for whatever it's worth, the fights here made much more sense than anything in the Transformers films; at least there was some coherence to them.

Still, a couple of cool fight scenes couldn't distract me from the really deplorable scripting and some painfully obvious corner-cutting. The body armor worn by jaeger pilots in the first film has been replaced by some really embarrassing spandex-cum-rubber-muscles outfits that would look more at home in an old Power Rangers episode than they would in a $150 million movie, and the jaeger helmets don't even have glass visors anymore. Considering del Toro's painstaking effort to make his absurd proposition of giant robots fighting giant monsters something that could actually feel real, these little details speak volumes about how little the filmmakers really care.

It's still kind of a mystery how this film was greenlit in the first place, considering that the first film cost $200 million and couldn't even clear half a billion at the global box office, but the even bigger mystery is why Universal didn't at least try to make a better movie, which, I'll argue, would probably have sold more.


5.5/10

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