Author: Emily Yoshida / Source: Vulture
Shortly before I headed to a screening of Pacific Rim Uprising, a Vulture colleague wondered aloud in a meeting, “What’s the difference between the robots in Transformers and Pacific Rim?” to which I emphatically responded, “They’re not robots!
They have people inside!” It’s true that the giant Jaegers are not robots, but is that really all it takes? Is the narrative suggestion that there are little humans inside those otherwise generically hulking, dusky CGI carapaces enough to imbue Guillermo del Toro’s mecha with sufficient soul to carry us through two hours without a crushing, alienated headache? Weirdly, I would say the answer is yes. Even more surprisingly, it’s even enough to carry us through some — but certainly not all — of director Steven S. DeKnight’s dumb, formulaic, but still ineffably zesty follow-up.Uprising is set some ten years after the events of the first Pacific Rim, after the war with the giant kaiju that has left all Pacific coastlines from Sydney to Santa Monica in ruins. Idris Elba’s impeccably named Marshal Stacker Pentecost is long gone, but his son Jake (lol) Pentecost (John Boyega) is living as a smuggler and Jaeger parts dealer, crashing in abandoned mansions and attending rubble-pile raves. During a deal gone wrong, he runs into a young orphan and prodigy pilot named Amara (Cailee Spaeny). Their daring escape draws the attention of the inter-Pacific military, from which Jake defected years ago. Begrudgingly, he returns to the fold to help his old piloting partner Nate (Scott Eastwood), and Amara goes into pilot training.
Meanwhile, in China …
This is meant as no ding whatsoever, but Pacific Rim Uprising has to be the most China-bait blockbuster I’ve seen to date, and I have seen all of the Transformers movies. The first film was a…
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