PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING (2018)
Before we begin, some site business: Yes, I know this month shouldn’t technically be “KaiJuly” but “DaiKaiJuly”. “Kaiju” just means monster in Japanese while “daikaiju” more specifically refers to giant monsters. But I think that distinction is lost on many and the parlance of our times has conflated the two (at least in most Western markets). For those who object, I acknowledge that you are technically correct (the best kind of correct) and respectfully I must say that I don’t really care.
2013’s PACIFIC RIM is a very flawed film, but still maintains to have a lot of great things going for it. While the Charlie Hunnam’s lead performance is wooden and his character’s arc is not that interesting (and basically the last third of TOP GUN), director Guillermo Del Toro still brilliantly executes a bunch of ideas and sequences. The supporting cast of weirdos (Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Clifton Collins Jr., Ron Perlman) is a lot of fun, Idris Elba delivers an incredible speech, Rinko Kikuchi has an excellent performance, there’s cool designa, the voice of GLaDOS from the Portal games has a cameo, and most of the Jaeger on Kaiju fights are entertaining. I mean, a giant robot hits a monster with a cargo ship. There are lots of valleys, but the few peaks are towering accomplishments.
Its sequel, PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING, has a lot going against it from the outset: Del Toro wasn’t on the project (he was busy making his Oscar-winning THE SHAPE OF WATER), there wasn’t a ton of natural direction for where the series could be headed, many of the cast wasn’t returning (for various reasons), and the directing duties were handled by Steven S. DeKnight, a very talented and prolific writer/director/producer for television but this would be the biggest project he had tackled thus far. Also, Scott Eastwood was cast and that always bodes ill.
What was delivered to audiences is kind of a mess. There are about three (technically four?) storylines that never mesh. John Boyega is the bad boy prodigal son (who was never mentioned) of Elba who has to answer the call to adventure by learning to work within the Jaeger program. There’s some sort of frayed relationship between him and his former co-pilot (Eastwood) that basically gets patched up…I literally don’t know when it does. It just does at some point. There’s the group of cadets who want to be the next crop of badass mech pilots. The outsider (Cailee Spaeny) brought into the program after demonstrating her engineering prowess and building her own mini-Jaeger.
Plus there’s the impending launch of a drone program to replace the current towering robot defenses where there are clashes between corporate, national, and defense issues. And lastly, the wily machinations of Newt (Charlie Day) who [SPOILER ALERT] has his mind taken over by the Precursors (the builders of the Kaiju) in order to complete the plan of ruling/terraforming Earth. So…that’s a lot happening all at once which means most of it gets short shrift.
Which is ridiculously frustrating because there’s lots of good in this overstuffed smash ‘em up. Boyega finally gets a chance to show off his charming side while being competent, instead of his STAR WARS roles or the badass but inexperienced Moses in ATTACK THE BLOCK. And he truly excels as that character and deserves way more work where he gets to be the funny and hardcore and suave.
Spaeny’s character is really intriguing as this savant scavenger who can build her own tech; while that ability comes into play later, it would’ve been a brilliant jumping off point for a lot more smaller (one-pilot) Jaegers to work alongside the giant ones. The drones turning into cyborg kaiju is also a dope idea and the visuals are neat (if very reminiscent of Neon Genesis Evangelion).
The evil Jaeger on Jaeger fight scenes are pretty fun and probably the best blocked/edited/rendered skirmishes in the PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING. Especially when compared to the migraine-inducing twisted metal confusion of the TRANSFORMERS movies, it’s not hard to tell the spatial relationships or who each combatant is and how they are being attacked. Charlie Day acquits himself well in the comic relief turned villain thanks to his manic energy, a pretty “grounded” origin for his turn, and his natural ability to deliver dialogue that mocks events around him without feeling like too much winking.
Despite all of these excellent points (not to mention a fairly diverse cast with multiple languages going across each other), the film still drags because the fights go on too long, there’s too much plot that doesn’t ever come together into a cohesive story, and it repeats basically all of the sins of the first one. Plus it casts Scott Eastwood, the black hole of talent where charisma goes to die. In all seriousness, I think Eastwood could work in various roles, but probably best as the antagonist representing an evil government/corporation or some other bland villainy.
One thing that struck me about PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING upon a rewatch is how much total destruction occurs. While the film goes out of its way to point out that most citizens are safe, cities are essentially leveled by these monsters AND by the Jaegers who use buildings as launching points to do cool moves. This resonated not because of that oft-repeated criticism of heroes causing more/as much damage as the monsters, but because of the reaction to social justice protests last summer where property was equated (if not valued more) than (Black) people’s lives.
The city wreckage skews more towards “destruction porn” (echoing Bay’s work), but there is an idea that this architectural devastation is how people can see and measure the power and weight of the the monsters. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING raises the property as the real victims (with humans being displaced and affected by the rampaging being tacitly implied) which is both a good way of avoiding callousness towards human life and a bad way of making the damage associated only with things and not people. It’s a minor thing but was more apparent on this watch.
PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is frustrating as all hell. There are a lot of good elements in it and tons of narrative potential but it gets overshadowed by far too much mediocrity. Hopefully those successes in PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING can provide lessons for future filmmakers on which they can build a better version of this movie.