Pacific Rim: Uprising

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 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.

Strangely enough, the quality of big blockbuster movies is reaching the point where they have the same level of quality as those of game cinematics. The acting part and the "story" are so forgettable that the CGI is all that remains. And the CGI is stupid. I mean, not bad, just completely dumb. I've seen this done real time in computer games. The creators of this movie bet big money on condescendingly telling their entire audience that they are cretins for watching and, of course, paying for this. The whole movie is stupid, not the CGI, the CGI is slightly more interesting.

And you might think that I am one of those haters, but I am not. I actually loved the actors and how they played. Imagine good actors, waiting and training their entire life to get into the big leagues, and when they get there they have to perform admirably... on a dumb script. I am not going through it, just consider this: the entire premise of the movie is that kaiju blood reacts violently with rare earth minerals. So all you need to do is shoot him with rare earth mineral bullets! It was that bad.

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.

I'm not sure there's too many people out there who would call Guillermo Del Toro's 2013 robot/monster infused popcorn event Pacific Rim a classic of any sort but the eye-candy clad and seriously entertaining experience looks like a genuine masterpiece when placed alongside this charmless and trite sequel.

Somehow turning the prospect of giant robots and oversized monsters going at each other in a battle of life and death into an utterly boring and tiresome exercise, Pacific Rim: Uprising is the early death knell to a series that should've been a brand name that became the perfect excuse to turn your brain off and enjoy some big screen spectacle that is home to cheesy one liners, over the top CGI infused carnage and some A-listers hamming it up for good measure.

Taking over directing duties from Del Toro, debut feature film director Steven S. DeKnight brings none of the child like charm or enthusiasm the Mexican auteur brought to the table with his entry as we instead get a lame and tame tale of Idris Elba's Stacker Pentecosts' child Jake (played by a struggling John Boyega) turn from troublemaker to Jager pilot, as the world finds itself once more under threat from the dreaded Kaiju monsters.

The first Pacific Rim had a similarly dumb plot and characters that were more like walking caricatures but there was a sense that everyone involved was having a great time and despite better judgements, you as an audience member did to.

That's completely lost here, there's little fun to be had with the bland and uninteresting action scenes, the main cast are all completely forgettable, while even returning cast members such as Charlie Day's Dr. Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman's Hermann Gottlieb are more of a tacked on accessory, with Day in particular getting an embarrassing character development that is both lame and totally misguided.

With a pulse-free plot line and thrill-free action there was little chance Uprising ever had at succeeding and there's little mystery as to why this unwanted sequel failed to capture the dollars at the box-office, guaranteeing the Pacific Rim brand is now dead in the water.

Final Say -

Not even the most hardcore of Pacific Rim fans will find much to enjoy in Uprising, an utterly forgettable and disposable new entry into the wannabe franchise that somehow manages to turn it's over the top foundations into a bland, charm-free and tiresome event.

1 child mechanic out of 5