Del Toro may have wowed the Academy with the Shape of Water,
but he’s not above simple pleasures. Those such pleasures being those of having
giant fuckin’ monsters from other dimensions get their faces pounded in by
giant fuckin’ mechs armed with house-sized fists while buildings crumble like
cardboard around them. Yeah, that was how 2013’s Pacific Rim went—no
masterpiece in terms of writing or introspection into the human condition, but
Del Toro is nothing if not a visual artist, and he sold the imagery of titans
of flesh and metal colliding and everything in between to make it a memorable
experience. Five years later we finally get a sequel (produced, not directed,
from him), Uprising, with more mechs, more monsters, and John Boyega fresh from
fighting AT-ATs—does it hold up to the first? Er…not really, though it does in one aspect...
Ten years after the first, humanity has more or less rebuilt
from the incursion of the kaiju, the bioweapon monsters sent forth by
dimensional aliens from below the ocean. That doesn’t seem to mean much to
Boyega’s Jake Pentecost, son of Idris Elba from the first (who leaned a great
commanding presence to the first, and a very kickass speech). Content to
scavenge from the remains of the war, Pentecost soon stumbles on the young
Namani, who seems to be taking a page from Daisy Ridley as a spunky scavenger
that happens to be remarkably good with machines. One high-speed chase later
and both are suddenly recruited into the Jaeger Corps, to join a group of other
young people selected to command these giant robots.
You’ll notice that Uprising has a much faster pace than the
first. As in, anime episode on crack and sugar fast. On one hand, it cuts to
the crap much faster than a boring Transformers sequel, and giant robots are
throwing down in Sydney before you know it. On the other, it feels a lot harder
to digest things, and it kind of lacks that feeling of epicness Del Toro leant
to the first. The plot is actually much denser, involving corporate shenanigans
and new drone mechs, but it all feels a crammed together.
However, if there’s one thing it does better than the first
film, it’s the protagonist. Charlie Hunnan as Raleigh was adequate, but a
fairly typical main character of this sort of thing. Here, Jake Pentecost has a
more intricate backstory of running away from his legacy, and Boyega gives him
that sense of cool that he didn’t really get to show off starring in the new
Star Wars films. His co-star Cailee Spaeny as Namani is alright, but not really
on the level of Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori—who is present in this film, but in
all honesty borderline wasted.
The rest of the younger cast are decent, though some feel
less distinguishable from others. The same goes to the line of mechanical
colossi they pilot—the Jaegers in the first each had an industrial look
combined with a cool gimmick that made them stand out, from the three-bladed
Chinese machine to the reactor tower-shaped Russian giant. Here, they’re all
fine and good, but just lack those little touches that Del Toro’s attention to
detail marked in the first film. There, the main mecha, Gypsy Danger, took as
many bruises over the battle as the characters did—you started to feel for this
skyscraper-sized piledriver. Here, things are mostly rushing through the plot
for that sort of thing to sink in.
But comparisons to the first film aside, if it’s fights and
action you want, well, that’s what you get. There’s an opening chase through a
ruined city, a battle in Sydney, followed very soon by another in Siberia, and
so on…like I said, it’s not a Transformers movie where you have to sit through
eleventy skillion hours of racial stereotypes and fart comedy. The action is
more varied than simply Jaegers and Kaiju, and let’s just say the previously
faceless commanders behind the opposing force get more of a face this time
around.
And while it does lack Idris Elba, or Ron Perlman
(co-starring alongside his chin), Burn Gorman is fun to watch as the manic
scientist Gottleib, along with Charlie Day as Newt. The latter here now works
for Jing Tian as corporate empress Shao, of course bought in to get those sweet, sweet, yuan from
the Chinese market. And it soon starts to feel that Kikuchi was put aside to
allow her to take the stage—all the more marketability for the PRC. That’s not
to say that Tian’s a bad actress or anything, but fans of the first film might
feel something amiss.
You might not have too much time to think about that, or the
little details like the hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage the
main characters cause through their battles, as the manic pace continues up to
the final battle in Tokyo, where things get really balls to the wall. The
trailers already spoil a combining ultra-kaiju straight out of Super Sentai,
but there’s a lot more going on out that you’ll have a millisecond to process
before buildings are toppling, mechs are being literally chewed up, and giant
katanas are flying. If that all sounds awesome or mind-numbing, that should
tell you whether Uprising is a pick for you.
All in all, Uprising is an okay matinee popcorn muncher, but it
lacks the signature Del Toro visual sense of the first, with all it’s epic
shots, industrial aesthetic, and neon lights to contrast the mechs and the
monsters. I’d call this one Pacific Rim Lite—it gets the job done, but it’s not
on par with the original. Give it a watch if you really loved the first or just
want to see lots and lots of urban renewal by way of giant robot, but if the
trailers didn’t appeal to you, there’s not a whole lot here beyond those.
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