Pacific Rim: Uprising

A film you have seen before but in different packaging. Giant robot annoying kids anti hero etc. Just wasn't good. A film to watch when there is nothing else to watch.

Will admit to enjoying the first 'Pacific Rim'. It wasn't great or perfect as an overall film, and somewhat of a case of style over substance, but it entertained and did well on delivering on its objectives. The involvement of Guillermo Del Toro and Idris Elba are reasons enough to see the film

Really do wish that the same can be said for its sequel 'Pacific Rim: Uprising'. The trailer was not good and the reviews not great (one of the weaker received films of those released so far this year), but saw it anyway due to liking the first film enough and wanted to see something that was pretty much the same sort of thing quality-wise (and perhaps with improvements). No such luck. 'Pacific Rim: Uprising' turned out to be a dull and soulless sequel and film, and one that comes over as pointless at the end of the day.

Starting with what 'Pacific Rim: Uprising' excelled with, which sadly is not much, much of the cinematography and editing are slickly atmospheric, the production design is gritty and audacious and some of the effects are top-notch.

Some of the action and spectacle is exciting, they're big and over-the-top but appropriately so. John Boyega is a reasonable and charismatic lead and the only actor to come over well.

On the other hand, nowhere near as good a job is done with the direction, nowhere near as in command of or at ease with the material the action, making for a film that tries to be both silly fun and taking itself seriously but fails at both and neither gels. The film doesn't know what it's trying to be, it can be dully paced and target audience is not easy to figure out due to the film's muddled done.

Boyega aside, the acting is very bad, especially from Charlie Day and Burn Gorman who are as irritating as they were before. 'Pacific Rim: Uprising' also has some cringe-worthy, childish and vomit-inducingly inane dialogue and paper thin stereotypical characterisation (enough to tick off the long list of cliches one by one in quick succession) where not much is done to develop the characters and make one properly care for them. There are clumsy and unnecessary references to the first film too and there is too much exposition that really bogs things down.

Although there are instances of them being good, other effects are cartoonish. A lot of the action doesn't work, not very inventive and not always cohesive let alone exhilarating. A big case of a lot of noise and attempted style but not a lot of brains or soul. Worst of all is the story, which is dull, ridiculous, barely coherent and with a cobbled together glued badly feel and a complete lack of emotional investment.

Concluding, a mess apart from a few good things. 3/10 Bethany Cox

The story is senseless and is very poorly told. I just don't know who is who, who is good or who is bad. It is so silly to see the characters running inside the robot to make the robot run. If technology is so advanced, couldn't they just make a neural link? The only good thing is that this time the film is in daylight, so at least I can see what is happening.

Of course, adults are incompetent at doing anything to save the world, so the tweens must do it alone. Heard this plot line before? A thousand times? Of course you have. It's not any better this time.

You're not missing anything of substance by skipping this one. Just stick to the original and stay happy.

A sequel to a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. What was expected? Bigger robots fighting bigger monsters. The same thing with little tweaks - as most sequels do. What we got?

A product. A film generated by an AI. I wasn't there, but I assume it went something like this. The first meeting of the creators of this movie follows.

Ok, Google, what do modern kids like?

1. Robots (Transformers) 2. Scary cool monsters 3. Robots fighting monsters 4. Robots fighting robots 5. Memes from 2009 (Trololo sing) really? + memes from 2017 (the salt). 6. Horribly executed kid rebel subplots (Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger games whatever) 7. Action 8. Forced drama? 9. Bad jokes?

Ok, let's take The Independence Day Resurgence's basic plot and fail miserably at everything. Done.

In other words, there is nothing in this movie besides action scenes. The plot lives on its own, there are no characters, and even their substitutes are completely disconnected from the dead plot. Nothing they do matter, it just follows typical cliches until the end. It even gets confusing at some point, but then you see the light at the end of the tunnel. It rushes the ending knowing that by this point nobody cares.

All the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Most of the actors are just having fun knowing that there's no need to get invested into anything here. Sadly, Scott Eastwood's face is stuck in one emotion and is unable to display anything else.

CGI crews did a good job, I guess. Looks fine. There's even one creative action scene involving buildings. Other than that the action is generic, even IMAX can't make it feel better. Maybe it would've been more impressive but the overabundance of CGI city destruction in modern blockbusters seriously lowers the threshold for getting impressed by CGI.

I'd compare this to a long video game cut-scene, but modern games have more character development and creative visuals in their cut-scenes. For instance, pretty much all Blizzard cut-scenes are visual masterpieces.

Final verdict: not entertaining on the big screen and a total waste of time for home viewing.