Pacific Rim: Uprising

photo courtesy of superherohype.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Pacific Rim: Uprising follows Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of legendary war hero Stacker Pentecost, as he stands up to face a new wave of threats from beyond our dimension. He lives in a world only ten years removed from the battle the closed the “breach” and stopped massive monsters called “Kaiju” from wreaking havoc on coastal cities around the Pacific ocean. But together with an unlikely copilot, Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), Pentecost has to come to terms with the fact that the dreaded interdimensional beasts are far from defeated.

     Now, I’m just gonna go ahead and put this on the table up front. If you have any clue about what the Pacific Rim franchise is about, you probably already know whether you’re the target demographic or not. Uprising is an unabashed monster mash, complete with massive urban destruction, cheesy dialogue, and on-the-nose lessons about teamwork. Think Godzilla or Power Rangers. So if that’s your thing, you’ll get a kick out of Pacific Rim: Uprising. If not, you were probably already planning on skipping it.

photo courtesy of nme.com

     As these types of movies go, Pacific Rim: Uprising is somewhere in the middle of the pack. There’s something to be said for the fact that the movie knows what it’s about; it doubles down on the loud, effects-driven combat sequences and never pretends it intended to do anything else. It features plenty of impressive CGI, without which the entire enterprise would likely collapse. And Uprising finds a likeable new lead in John Boyega. Boyega’s natural charisma has been put to good use in the new Star Wars movies, and it’s good to see he’s branching out. Of all the newbies catapulted into fame by The Force Awakens, it’s looking like he might have the best shot of sticking around for a while. He certainly carries all of the movie’s best character scenes.

     But Uprising has lost some of the Guillermo del Toro magic that made the original Pacific Rim more than your average monster flick. Its plot is paper-thin, as is to be expected. Character-wise, it creates a fun mentor-mentee relationship between Pentecost and Namani. The two actors have decent on-screen chemistry, but it’s a dynamic that’s definitely been done before (see everything from Transformers: The Last Knight to Terminator 2), and it feels like it exists to supply the bare minimum number of character moments necessary to sustain the action.

photo courtesy of pacificrim.wikia.com

     Dialogue is hit-or-miss for most of Uprising’s runtime. Outside of a few funny Boyega quips, it doesn’t really do the movie any favors. Cringe-y dialogue causes several scenes to fall flat even before the robots come out, but once the fighting gets started, most of the lines are only there to show us how we should feel about what’s happening (there’s lots of “hoorah!” and “hell yeah!” and “let’s go!” lines). If the writing were a bit sharper and a bit less exposition-laden, Uprising might have a better shot at justifying its own existence.

     FINAL VERDICT: Pacific Rim: Uprising produces a satisfactory spectacle, but there’s not much going on underneath.

Watch the trailer here. 

photo courtesy of theatlantic.com