Pacific Rim: Uprising * (2018, John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny) – Movie Review

Five years on from Pacific Rim (2013), they have ditched all the things that made the first film pretty good, including the stars and the director, and have replaced them with moderate or mediocre stuff.

Pacific Rim: Uprising is all ridiculously overblown CGI, duff, cheesy dialogue and weak, uncharismatic acting, descending into the boring Transformers/ Godzilla video game teen movie that original creator Guillermo del Toro was able to avoid. It’s a dumbing down of a promising original, with all of del Toro’s dark edges smoothed over. It gets quite cheesy and then quite draggy on its way to an unsurprising conclusion, and of course sets up the threat of another sequel.

Rinko Kikuchi as Mako Mori, Charlie Day as Dr Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman as Dr Hermann Gottlieb survive from the original. Day and Gorman have quite a lot to do and they are pretty tedious, though Gorman is the main culprit. With Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam sadly gone, a complete clean sweep and an entirely new start would have been better.

John Boyega stars as hero Jake Pentecost, son of the late original hero Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). There’s a lot of musing about the late dad. In a fragment of a plot, Jake reunites with his half sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots against a new Kaiju alien threat.

The boys and girls in the band include Jake’s rival Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) and 15-year-old hacker Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), and a bunch of teens who do not have properly developed roles, so we don’t care about them. Not that we care about Jake, Mako, Nate and Amara very much. It’s just that they have a lot of screen time when we can mull over how little we care for them. Boyega banters at length with Spaeny and then with Eastwood, but this is not witty banter. Spaeny and Eastwood seem uneasy, particularly Eastwood, who doesn’t play second fiddle in the band very well.

It’s not really the actors fault. It’s mainly problems of the script and direction. The movie is directed and co-written by Steven S DeKnight. On the plus side, it runs a bit like a cheesy Fifties Z-grade monster movie, especially if you see it in 2D, non-IMAX and on a small screen like I did.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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