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Pacific Rim: Uprising is only interested in the giant-robot fights

Pacific Rim: Uprising is only interested in the giant-robot fights

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And there’s nothing wrong with that, except when the half-assed plot gets in the way

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Photo: Universal Pictures

The downside of sequels is that they so rarely have anything new to offer. Unless they’re part of a planned, ongoing storyline, like the Star Wars or Harry Potter movies, sequels are usually about mechanically reproducing the most popular parts of the original film, and making them bigger, louder, and faster. But the “faster” part can be one of the upsides of sequels. Once a franchise-launching film gets all the roadblocks of world-building, exposition, and character development out of the way, sequels have a clear road to the action, and they can rev the motor and speed along without impediment. 

That certainly holds true for Pacific Rim: Uprising, the slick, upbeat sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s giant-monster movie Pacific Rim. The 2013 film had a lot of heavy lifting to do, as it established a version of Earth beset by immense, other-dimensional monsters called kaiju, and explained humanity’s effort to fight them off with equally titanic mecha-suits called jaegers. Del Toro’s film promised a high-tech modern update on the Japanese rubber-suit monster movies of the 1950s through the 1970s, which featured gargantuan beasts clashing against each other, sometimes flattening cities in the process. But Pacific Rim sometimes got bogged down in its own mythology, as del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham tried to cover the protagonists’ personal baggage, build in del Toro’s usual themes of people haunted by history, and explain new concepts like the Drift, the psychic connection jaeger pilots have to forge with each other to run their huge machines.

Pacific Rim: Uprising has no such thematic ambitions, and no interest in wasting time on explanations, deepening the mythology, or exploring new corners of its world. Writer-director Steven S. DeKnight is making his feature directorial debut after a career of writing, producing, and directing on shows like Angel, Smallville, and the Spartacus franchise. His credited co-writers, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S. Nowlin, have similarly genre-focused resumes: Carmichael on the video game-focused web series The Adventures of Ledo and Ix, Snyder as a story producer on Alphas and Eureka, and Nowlin on the Maze Runner movies. All of them have worked in television, and all of them treat Uprising like it’s a payoff action finale after a full season of intricate setup. It doesn’t seem to bother any of them that the setup hasn’t actually happened.

And all their roots in action and fantasy have a part in Uprising, which plays out much like an action-adventure game, with escalating battles and increasing stakes, all the way up to the final boss fight. The story and characters here are strictly secondary. What matters is the clash of humongous bodies, and the monumental devastation they leave in their wake.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the original film’s heroic leader Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), opens the story with a quick montage of exposition that sums up the action of the first film. It’s been 10 years since the kaiju were defeated, the dimensional breach they came through was sealed, and Earth began rebuilding. Jake was trained as a jaeger pilot, but abandoned the program; now he scavenges through decommissioned military sites and puts jaeger parts on the black market. In the early going, the film seems startlingly familiar. The opening scene, where Jake’s latest clients turn on him and accuse him of a string of failures and double-crosses, is more or less an exact replica of Han Solo’s reintroduction scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, minus Chewbacca and the CGI tentacle-beast.

And when Jake escapes that encounter and confronts Amara (Cailee Spaeny), a scrappy 15-year-old who’s fending for herself in the ruins, it’s impossible to miss the similarities to Boyega’s first scene with Daisy Ridley in The Force Awakens. The main differences are that in this case, Boyega is using his own British accent instead of an American one, and Amara’s version of BB-8 is a 20-foot-tall mini-jaeger. There are no Jedi in sight, but naturally, Amara is a plucky orphan with hidden talents and a grand destiny.

Photo: Universal Pictures

The story frequently loses track of Amara and focuses on Jake, but only barely. Jake left the military under a cloud, and there’s bad blood with his old piloting partner Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood). The two pilots also fall into a love triangle with jaeger mechanic Jules (Adria Arjona). But the first conflict is resolved with an offhand shrug, and the love story gets maybe two minutes of screen time, and no resolution. The various nods to expected genre tropes are handled so lightly and inconsequentially that they play more like parody than plot.

None of this is a serious knock on Uprising, a film that utterly defines mindless fun. Amara is a fangirl who blurts out the names and stats of every jaeger she sees, like a sports nut identifying her favorite players at an all-star game. Her enthusiasm for mecha is infectious and compelling. Like Mako Mori in the first film (played by Rinko Kikuchi, who reprises the role in Uprising), Amara has personal traumas that interfere with her ability to Drift. But where Mako’s battle for serenity was a major plotline in Pacific Rim, Uprising acknowledges Amara’s trauma, then forgets it. Briefly sketched characters and a minimalist plot can be a sign of a film’s low ambitions, but in this case, it’s more a mark of very specific ambitions: the filmmakers want to see giant robots fighting, and don’t want to spend too much time on boring human talky-talky that might get in the way.

Photo: Universal Pictures

The only problem is that Uprising’s laughably cavalier script keeps taking the time to establish emotional situations and major conflicts, then shrugging them off minutes later. The unanswered plot questions are significant, but the story moves briskly past any particular hangup or fundamental failure of logic. Boyega and Spaeny are both charismatic, strong screen presences, and that becomes crucial to the movie, because otherwise it would be hard to care who’s in a given cockpit, and whether they survive. The film overstuffs the screen with characters, including Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, reprising their Pacific Rim roles as wacky kaiju researchers Dr. Gottlieb and Dr. Geiszler, and The Great Wall’s Jing Tian as a hard-driven Chinese industrialist who plans to replace jaegers with her own remote-piloted drone mechas. Each of them gets a bit of an arc, but in an environment where half the lines are shouted and everyone seems to be in a monumental hurry, it takes a lot of energy for anyone to stand out from the crowd.

And those fights are, as intended, visually impressive. They’re staged creatively, with a variety of weapons and tactics, and DeKnight slows down the action to convey a palpable sense of the weight of these mechas and the monsters they’re fighting. Uprising doesn’t go any further than Pacific Rim in explaining the Drift, how it was developed, or why it’s necessary. (Something-something “psychic strain,” let’s move on.) But the dual-pilots mechanic enables a lot of rousing visuals, as jaeger operators move like perfectly synchronized fight-dancers, posing in their cockpits as if flying, falling, or leaping. The mechas actually have more personality than most of their operators, and the fight scenes have all the investment and attention to detail that the plot-based scenes lack.

For some viewers, though, destruction fatigue may set in. Around the time of the first Pacific Rim, film critics expressed concerns that action movies were visually channeling the destruction of 9/11 for cheap thrills and easy pathos. Variety’s Justin Chang referred to the “annihilation porn” of films like Man of Steel and Transformers 3. These concerns focused in part on the moral issues of turning mass devastation into entertainment, but they also brought up how visually similar action movies were becoming, with their near-identical shots of crumpling buildings, smashing glass, and fleeing victims.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Del Toro’s Pacific Rim had a few ways of avoiding the city-smashing clichés that were taking over films at the time, but Uprising returns to the older mode, and fully embraces it. One jaeger weaponizes and destroys buildings; other fights have heroes and villains charging each other, oblivious to the way their extended energy swords are slicing skyscrapers in half. The combatants here are hilariously casual about turning entire cities to rubble, and the film is equally casual about declaring that it’s okay, because those cities have been evacuated. Never mind that at one point, Uprising watches a mob of terrified Tokyo civilians getting shut out of an underground shelter and stranded on the street. That’s one more detail where the filmmakers don’t care in the slightest about follow-through. Seconds later, a planetary-defense operative tells Jake and company that they’re free to fight, because the entire population has gotten to safety. The message is clear: “Destroy anything you want, don’t worry about repercussions, and make it look good.”

And it does. For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre. It pays lip service to having characters with individuality and personality, but over and over, the writers forget about all these things, and just throw monsters and mecha at each other in a big, bright game of smashy-smashy. Maybe by the time Pacific Rim 3 rolls around, they can just give up on plot altogether, and focus solely on what they’re really interested in — and what they do best.