Pacific Rim Uprising Review by Grayson Perry

Before we start, obviously there are major spoilers to both Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim Uprising.

I recently went to see Pacific Rim Uprising, and that was a mistake. I remember when the original movie released back in 2013, and it was beautiful. The thought of giant robots fighting monsters to save the world sparked my young imagination. Not to mention that the score for the movie (soundtrack, music) was composed to perfection by Ramin Djawadi. The movie had a consistent plot and did not stray from it. The movie was based around a “rift” that allowed skyscraper sized monsters, nicknamed Kaiju, to come to our world from another dimension, and the human race had to come together to close the rift. To combat these monsters, they built Jaegers, skyscraper sized robots that would kill these monsters to prevent them from causing mass extinction. The Jaegers required two pilots to sync brains in a process called Neural Handshake, once done the robot would copy the movements of the pilots. The head of the Jaeger program, Stacker Pentecost, enlists the help of Raleigh Becket, an ex-Jaeger pilot who has retired to rebuilding cities, to help his close the rift. They plan on entering the rift and detonating a nuclear bomb to close it for good. They are successful but lose almost all of the Jaegers and Jaeger pilots in the process, including Pentecost. The original movie was simple and brilliant and I immediately bought it on DVD when it came out. You can remember the names of the characters and robots, the most popular bring Gypsy Danger.

Uprising picks up 10 years later, with Pentecost’s son as the protagonist. I find this odd as Pentecost never mentioned he even had a son, and cared more about a girl he found on the streets in the first movie. The son, Jake Pentecost, was kicked out of the Jaeger pilot program by his father when he was younger. He gets arrested and has the choice of going to jail or re-enlist in the Jaeger pilot program. He chooses to re-enlist and becomes the leader/instructor of a group of young teens. During this, a rouge Jaeger attacks a city, which is barely stopped by Jake and another pilot. The rouge Jaeger attacks a second time, when it is destroyed by Jake and the other pilot. They discover that the Jaeger doesn’t have pilots, rather it has the brain of a Kaiju. The world is then attacked by many Jaeger/Kaiju and decimates the world’s defenses, including killing many veteran pilots. In the process, the Jaeger/Kaiju open several rifts and allow Kaiju to pass through. The Jaeger/Kaiju are then destroyed due to someone hacking their “Jaeger” parts and causing them to self-destruct. Three Kaiju successfully make it through the rifts and start headed towards Japan. Apparently (and I use that word VERY loosely) the Kaiju in the first movie had one target, Mount Fuji. They were trying to mix their blood with the “rare earth materials” in Mount Fuji to cause an explosion that would activate a chain reaction on the ring of fire. This is unrealistic because all of the Kaiju in the first movie took separate paths, and some would take forever to reach Mount Fuji, because of their EXTEMELY indirect paths. Because of all of the veteran Jaeger pilots being dead or critically injured, they enlist the help of the teens that Jake is in charge of. The teens all pilot a group of Jaegers and try to stop the Kaiju in Japan. They are very unsuccessful and many of the teens die, who we barely got to know. The three Kaiju them morph into one super Kaiju and face Jake’s Jager alone. Jake looses and his Jager is damaged horribly. They then come up with a plan to use one of the rockets that the Jaegers used to catch up to the Kaiju, which is almost at the top of Mount Fuji. They use the rocket, blast off into the sky, and use gravity to hurl towards the Kaiju. They eject, and the Jaeger collides with the Kaiju, killing it. The End.

Time for everything I hate about this movie. My biggest complaint is that Raleigh from the first move, doesn’t even show up. His name is not even mentioned, even though he saved the entire world. He was humorous, which added a little light-heartedness to the first movie. The second movie had SO MANY STUPID TEEN JOKES that I wanted to jump off a Jaeger and commit Kaiju-cide. Even the dead meme song “troll-lol-lol” made it into the movie. There were so many “empowered teen” moments in it, which is strange because they got their butts handed to them during the fight. There were middle fingers, which is childish. There were a few mentions of feminine parts, obviously they didn’t respec women. The fight scene was shorter than Tom Cruise, which was what the movie was about in the first place. They killed off main characters from the first movie without regret. They couldn’t even keep their own plot together. At the beginning of the movie, someone mentions that people are building their own Jaegers to prepare for the next Kaiju, but those Jaegers never showed up. I thought it would’ve been a neat idea to have a group of rag-tag Jaegers come in to save the day when the other Jaegers were destroyed. Nope. Never happened. And the thing that I was most upset about (besides original characters not showing up) is that in the first movie, the Jaegers and Kaiju seemed huge because of the awesome scenes on ground level looking up at them fighting. I didn’t have that same feeling. The Jaegers and Kaiju in this movie just seemed like oversized toys. If you were to ask me the names of main characters, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. In the first movie they even named the Kaiju… which I don’t think happened in Uprising. They didn’t even bother to bring back the original composer from the first movie… disappointing. Looking at this movie as a whole, I’d give it 5 out of 10 toppled skyscrapers. This movie just didn’t deliver, as all sequels, and I truly hope there will be a 3^rd movie to fix this mess.