Pacif­ic Rim Uprising

When Guiller­mo del Toro announced via Twit­ter in ear­ly 2016 that he wouldn’t be hop­ping back into the pilot seat for the sequel to his 2013 big ol’ robot hit Pacif­ic Rim, fans were under­stand­ably dis­ap­point­ed. He decid­ed instead to focus on anoth­er mon­ster movie of sorts, plac­ing the future of the fran­chise in the hands of debut direc­tor Steven S DeKnight. The shiny stat­uettes now lin­ing del Toro’s man­tel­piece sug­gest that he made the right call, but watch­ing Pacif­ic Rim Upris­ing, there’s an under­ly­ing melan­choly as you pon­der what might have been.

Oth­er casu­al­ties include Char­lie Hunnam’s charm­ing pup­py dog pilot Raleigh Beck­ett and Ron Perlman’s gold-plat­ed wheel­er-deal­er Han­ni­bal Chau. It’s nev­er real­ly explained what hap­pened to any of the char­ac­ters from the first film, with the notable excep­tion of Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori who appears in a sup­port­ing role, and fan-favourite kai­ju sci­en­tists Her­mann Got­tlieb and Newt Geis­zler (Burn Gor­man and Char­lie Day) who are back for round two.

Promi­nence is giv­en to the ghost of Idris Elba’s Stack­er Pen­te­cost, as new­com­er John Boye­ga (mak­ing his debut as a film pro­duc­er) plays his estranged son Jake, who ends up pilot­ing a Jaeger as penance for his play­boy antics. He’s joined by scrap­py young junker Ama­ra Namani (Cailee Spae­ny) and gri­mac­ing career sol­dier Nate Lam­bert (Scott East­wood), but it’s Boye­ga who does the heavy lift­ing, his nat­ur­al charis­ma ele­vat­ing a fair­ly unre­mark­able role into some­thing decid­ed­ly more watchable.

And it’s good fun, espe­cial­ly if you like watch­ing giant robots knock­ing sev­en bells out of each oth­er. The film’s first Jaeger face-off sees DeKnight set out his stall, ful­ly com­mit­ting to the whacky con­cept which del Toro’s series open­er laid out. But if big scary mon­sters were the vil­lains in Pacif­ic Rim, Upris­ing is more about big scary humans. Ten years after Elba can­celled the apoc­a­lypse, the con­cern of a poten­tial beast from the deep reprise war­rants the deploy­ment of drone jaegers to stand as the world’s line of defence against any poten­tial threat.

This turns out to be a Very Bad Idea, but don’t expect to find any of the world-build­ing and atten­tion to detail from its pre­de­ces­sor in DeKnight’s fol­low-up. This is a straight-up rock ​’em sock ​’em romp in which log­ic takes a back­seat and big dumb action becomes the film’s beat­ing heart.

Upris­ing nev­er tries to be any­thing more than this, which feels strange­ly refresh­ing in a world of grit­ty reboots and super seri­ous sequels. Although it lacks the soul of the first film, there’s infi­nite­ly more to enjoy here than in The Trans­form­ers fran­chise (from which DeKnight grad­u­at­ed). What could have eas­i­ly felt like a cyn­i­cal cash-in man­ages to retain a scrap­py charm, undoubt­ed­ly due to the efforts of Boye­ga and Spae­ny. Though if we’re split­ting hairs, their char­ac­ters do feel as though they’ve been lift­ed from the oth­er epic sci-fi saga Boye­ga has ties to.