'Pacific Rim Uprising' Review

I'm a huge fan of robots fighting kaijus. I'm a giant fan of franchises like Godzilla, Gamera, and King Kong. I fell in love with the first Pacific Rim film when it first came out because, like the before mentioned franchises, all you really want to see are giant monstrosities beat each other up for supreme dominance.

However, Pacific Rim Uprising takes that formula, and waters it down a lot with a very thinly woven plot line, lack of real character development, and very lack luster monsters fighting robots. And that is probably the main problem. If you come into this movie, you are expecting big spectacles of CGI madness as jagers and kaiju smash into each other while in cities. All you want to see is total destruction. No one goes into these films because they expect an amazing love story about humans, or some coming of age tale. They came to tune out the outside world and just watch hysteria come to life on screen. And that is severely lacking with this installment.

In the first Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro did a great job of putting a story around monster battles and it worked. It wasn't the biggest blockbuster, but it was enjoyable and easy to comprehend what was happening. Since Pacific Rim Uprising was directed and written by a completely different person (Steven DeKnight), I knew going in that this film was going to have a very different feel. And that's exactly what you get. A more comedic based film with action. It does have some somber moments near the beginning of the film, but then it falls into the trap of being mainly a laugh fest with action in-between the jokes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it takes away from what

The main plot is as follows, it's been ten years since the breach had been closed by Stacker Pentecoast sacrificing himself and his jager. In that time, his son, Jake Pentecoast (played by Jon Boyega), has become a scavenger, stealing from dismantled jager bases and selling the scraps. He meets a young girl named Amara Namani (played by Cailee Spaeny) who makes a one manned jager from scraps. They get caught and are put into the jager program to train new recruits and to be ready for new threats. Which, obviously, is what happens. New kaijus, new jagers, and a new mystery that links the two dimensions together. But the threat this time comes from our dimension.

They do bring back a handful of familiar faces that were in the first film, Herman Gottlieb (played by Burn Gorman), Newt (played by Charlie Day), and Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi) but that couldn't really save this film. They couldn't even explain what happened to Charlie Hunnam's character after the events of the first film. It felt like a updated version of the first film, but without the charm that the first one had.

And as for the monsters vs. robots? Very lack luster fights. By the time the fights started, they were already done and it felt like they focused more on wanting to have a full plot then the actual fights. Even the main monster battle at the climax of the third act feels extremely anti-climatic, feeling like it should be more an introduction fight instead of the main brawl. Once the fight was over, I asked myself, "Is that it?' I can't remember for sure if that's how the first film felt, but this was very forgettable.

I give this movie two stars out of five. If you just want to get out of your house and need to turn off your brain, it's ok to see. However, it does not hold a candle to what the first film was.