Author: Josh Spiegel / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains spoilers for Pacific Rim Uprising]
In the five years since Pacific Rim, the career of its director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro has had some remarkable ups and downs. A couple of years after the film opened — to a firm embrace by a cult of fans around the world, but only moderate success at the domestic box office — del Toro released the spooky horror pastiche Crimson Peak to even milder box office and a smaller but similarly dedicated cult. Just last month, del Toro won the Academy Award for best director and best picture for last year’s wonderful The Shape of Water. This month, he’s produced Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel to Pacific Rim, suggesting that the goofy sensibility of the first film still exists, but isn’t as successful without his presence as director.
Pacific Rim Uprisingmostly forges a new world, with only three major characters returning from the original film. The new leads, played by John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, and Cailee Spaeny, suggest a sequel defined by its youth. Boyega, playing the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost, doesn’t get a barn-burner of a speech with lines like “We are canceling the apocalypse!” Instead, when he does get to inspire the cadets who will pilot giant robots called Jaegers to face off against mutated Jaegers as well as aliens known as Kaiju who are attacking cities like Tokyo and Sydney, it’s to emphasize that “it’s our time.” The past is past here; the first film’s lead, Charlie Hunnam, doesn’t appear and his character is only referenced briefly in a tossed-off line of dialogue.
The characters who do return all end up being instrumental to the story, however. Stacker Pentecost’s adopted daughter Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) first recruits her brother Jake (Boyega) to return as a Jaeger ranger, before she’s killed in an attack by a mutated robot. Then there are the…
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