By Erik Jimenez
2013 was a rough year for blockbusters. A vast majority of them were poorly-executed, yet one film stood out of from crowd; so much it became one of my all-time favorite films. And that was “Pacific Rim,” produced by the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo Del Toro.
Del Toro took a premise that was essentially a checklist of Saturday morning action cartoons and giant monster movie clichés, and dumped about 900 gallons of himself all over it until it resembled something like an elevation of the form.
It’s been 10 years since the events of the original film and surprisingly, unlike many other monster movie sequels, the world pretty much agrees that the Kaiju (the giant monsters that attacked Earth) will probably come back one day.
The creators decided to keep the Pan-Pacific Defense Corp (the multi-national organization that made the Jaegers, the giant robots that fight the Kaiju), and have them continue building bigger and better Jaegers to fight.
But another option has appeared to counter keeping the PPDC when a remote-controlled “drone” versions, developed by a Chinese company run by owner Shao (Jing Tian) and former PPCD scientist Newton (a returning Charlie Day), threaten the group.
John Boyega plays Stacker Pentecost’s (Idris Elba’s character from the first film who sacrificed himself to save the world) estranged wash-out son Jake, who gets pulled back into the Corps. He trains the new Jaeger pilots with ex-friend Nate, played by Scott Eastwood.
Among the pilots is the young Amara (played by Cailee Spainey), a child orphan prodigy whose parents were killed by Kaiju. She is able to build her own Jaegers and is partially responsible for getting Pentecost pulled back into the Corps in the first place.
Pentecost soon gets wrapped up in a conspiracy mystery involving a rogue “evil” Jaeger of unknown origin. It probably goes without saying that something fishy is up with those drones.
On paper it’s a pretty good narrative, but there’s actually a solid mystery as to what’s going on. There’s honestly a little too much of it, and it’s paced very awkwardly (i.e. there’s a villain reveal that’s blown way too early for no good reason). It’s clear that action beat story in every “what can we afford to cut?” discussion during production.
The biggest problem with the Uprising is that, unlike the original, it mostly looks like any other optimized-for-Chinese-IMAX-3D multiplex blockbuster: bright primary colors, lots of big swooping slow-motion tumbles and particle effects, mostly daytime shooting and big stretches that are either entirely CGI or CG characters dropped into plate shots.
It’s certainly not bad looking, it just lacks the signature flair that made the original stick out so
much more profoundly.
And that’s because this film is not directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Del Toro’s in the producing role whereas Steven S. DeKnight (director of Netflix’s Daredevil) took the director’s chair.
The first movie lived and died on an atmosphere that a uniquely bizarre fusion of del Toro’s retro-pulp schlock-horror sensibilities mashing together.
But once the FX team gets to take over for the robot fighting it’s quite a show, especially at IMAX-scale. While nowhere near as stylish or involving as the original, you still get a lot of robot/monster combat as things roll into Act 3. The finale is much more brazen about the Godzilla/Gundam/Ultraman homages than the first one.
Unfortunately, it barely made any money in the United States. It made over half of it’s money overseas, specifically in China. However, it still didn’t make enough money to justify a sequel (400 million on a 200-million-dollar budget, making less than 100 million in the U.S.) at the time.
But as rumors for a sequel swelled as China’s money-making potential to save films rose, it happened a mere five years later. And while nowhere near as good as the original, this miracle of a movie packs enough punch that most fans of the first will be glad to be back.
Photo retrieved by Flickr.
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