Ancillary apocalypse
Robots vs monsters sequel tells its story well enough, but is hampered by its familiar structure.
Pacific Rim Uprising
Director: Steven S. DeKnight
Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny, Tian Jing, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Max Zhang, Rinko Kikuchi
WITHOUT his father’s awesome speechwriting (and oratory) talents, it is difficult for Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the hereditary hero of this robots-versus-monsters sequel, to cancel the apocalypse with verve.
Yet do it he must, because a panel of scriptwriters have decreed that this movie will once again feature some seriously outmuscled heroes giving their all to save the planet from more Kaiju, or giant monsters, and a speech is called for – even if it doesn’t quite match up to Idris Elba’s delivery.
But, as Jake reminds us several times during the film, he’s not his father. (Conversely, something that is rather difficult for Boyega’s co-star Scott Eastwood to do, since he channels his dad Clint a lot of the time.)
Nor is this the original Pacific Rim, where Guillermo Del Toro brought out sufficient amounts of humanity and warmth to make some of the silliness acceptable.
Oh, and one awesome shot after another of machine-on-monster mayhem didn’t hurt that one, either.
Pacific Rim Uprising is, however, so similar in tone and structure to the original that, despite some surprises in how it sets up the latest crisis to threaten humanity, the end product smacks of familiarity.
To summarise its skimpy story, 10 years have passed since humanity sealed the breach at the bottom of the Pacific to prevent any further incursions by the Kaiju that seemed intent on wiping out human civilisation.
A new drone programme pioneered by the mega-corporation Shao Industries appears to be on the verge of mothballing human-piloted Jaegers (as the film’s giant robots are called).
But as usual, something unexpected occurs and – yeah, you know the drill. It’s Cancellin’ Time, to paraphrase a certain lumpy orange comic-book character.
While the movie hits all the proper beats for a good monster bash-’em-up, a couple of things bothered me about it.
For one, the junior junkyard hacker heroine Amara (Cailee Spaeny) is a little too much like a certain other JJHH from last year’s execrable Transformers: The Last Knight. For another, there’s a glaringly obvious mid-mayhem spinning shot of the kind Michael Bay seems to have made his own.
These may have been conscious commercial considerations on the part of Steven S. DeKnight (the Daredevil Season One showrunner), who takes the directing reins on this sequel. But it just strikes me as a little odd to crib from an inferior (if vastly more money-churning) franchise.
Sketchy supporting characters and underutilisation of Max Zhang and the returning Rinko Kikuchi are just a few of the other niggling things that eventually add up to subtract from the film’s entertainment quotient.
Boyega does make a watchable hero, though, bringing a suitable intensity and amusing irony to keep the character from being just a dour scion of greatness unconsciously trying to prove himself.
And one storytelling choice DeKnight can be complimented on is setting the majority of the action scenes in broad daylight rather than the original’s murky night and underwater sequences.
At least this way, viewers can get what they really paid to see: war machines and rampaging beasts laying waste to each other and whole cities in all their whizz-bang CGI glory. On that, Uprising certainly does not skimp.