By Brett Blake A sequel that nobody was asking for usually has a tough road ahead of it, and that proves to be the case with PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING. Despite a game cast (almost all of whom are wasted) and some fun monster hijinks (which mostly arrive too late in the game), this movie is - for the most part - lifeless and empty. Picking up 10 years after the events of the first movie, UPRISING concerns Jake Pentecost (John Bodega), son of one of the heroes of the original movie and a reluctant teacher of a new generation of pilots in the Jaegar program: the giant robots which protect the planet from the monstrous kaiju, which haven’t been seen in a decade but are (for some reason) still thought to pose a threat. Jake must overcome friction with a former friend, Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), and teach his 15-year old protege, Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny). And in the background, a sinister new drone program may pose the greatest threat of all... The main thing about PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is this: it’s not a good movie. It nominally functions as a movie, it hits certain beats that it thinks movies need to hit, but there’s an utter emptiness here -- a soulless quality -- that stands in striking contrast to the first PACIFIC RIM... which itself was far from a perfect movie! That film, though certainly silly and with only enough plot and character development to justify the massive action setpieces, at least had heart, a feeling of whimsy, and artistic flair courtesy of its director, Guillermo del Toro. UPRISING feels (ironically) robotic, like a calculation, a facsimile. It’s purely product, designed to appeal to demographics in the Asian markets where the first PACIFIC RIM performed well at the box office. This is not a movie concerned with being particularly good. Its only concern is with making money overseas, and that’s blatantly obvious at the script level, because the characters here are so thinly, broadly sketched that it’s almost insulting. However, that will make it easier to be translated into the various foreign languages of the countries where the studio hopes it can make some money. There’s no real depth, no compelling dynamics or relationships between characters; they exist only as necessary cogs in the machine, and one gets the sense that if the filmmakers could have figured out a way to present a movie without any characters at all, they would have. There’s also unnecessary - and uninteresting - nonsense about corporate intrigue which serves only to pad out the running time, and to provide the story with an ostensible villain (and in fairness, this angle is so far out-of-nowhere that it’s almost interesting). The script also features some of the most painful exposition in recent memory. But I will also say this: after making the audience slog through an eye-rollingly dull and painfully unfunny (but, boy, does it think it’s funny!) first half, the movie does eventually unleash some agreeably goofy giant monster madness in its back half. In contrast to the first PACIFIC RIM, which staged the majority of its big setpieces at night/in the rain/underwater, UPRISING sets most of its action in the daytime, which this gives those sequences a bright, colorful flair, and that feels like really the only aspect where this movie brings anything different to the table compared to the first. The downside to this is that the harsh light is not particularly kind to the CGI, rendering the battle sequences - essentially - cartoons. There is some playfulness to be found in this stuff, though, which is more than can be said for the drudgery of the human (so-called) drama. In terms of the acting, John Boyega is forced to coast purely on his inherent charisma and likability, because the screenplay saddles him with an unconvincing and contrived character journey that is both entirely superfluous and perfunctory, the double-whammy of badness. Really, the only true bright spot in the cast is Cailee Spaeny as Amara; she’s playing a stock “type” (the tough, street-smart kid who deep down just wants to belong), but Spaeny brings energy and plausibility to the role. She an appealing, very naturalistic performer who takes what could have been an annoyingly-cliched part and makes it grounded and memorable. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING is just not a movie that needs to exist, and one gets the sense that most involved knew that was the case as it was being made. It’s not aggressively bad or unwatchable, and just on a surface level I suppose it’s possible for somebody to get something out of it, but ultimately it’s a big misfire.
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