In a sentenceGiant robots punch giant monsters in broad daylight, and it turns out the dark was doing a lot of the work
Ten years after the Breach was closed, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of Stacker Pentecost, who led the first war, is scavenging Jaeger parts in the ruins of the Californian coast and trading them for whatever he can eat. He runs into Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), a teenager who has built a small, working Jaeger of her own from scrap, and both are arrested. Jake’s adoptive sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) offers him a choice: a cell, or a return to the Jaeger programme as an instructor to a class of cadets at a training base in China. His old co-pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) is waiting there, still in uniform and unimpressed. Meanwhile the industrialist Liwen Shao (Jing Tian) is pushing a fleet of remote-controlled drone Jaegers that would need no pilots at all.
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Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel to Pacific Rim is brighter, faster and more cheerful than the original, and John Boyega is good company throughout. It is also thinner, louder and harder to care about, and the robots all look alike.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) was a big, wet, night-time film about men and women in robots the size of cathedrals, and it had one idea it loved: two people had to share a mind to move the machine. Del Toro stays on as a producer here and hands the director’s chair to Steven S. DeKnight, who comes from television. The sequel is brighter, faster, cheaper-looking and more cheerful, and it has very little on its mind. It is a passable Saturday afternoon and we would not go further than that.
Ten years after the Breach was closed, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of Stacker Pentecost, who led the first war, is scavenging Jaeger parts in the ruins of the Californian coast. He crosses paths with Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), a teenager who has built a small Jaeger of her own out of scrap, and both are arrested and sent to a training base in China, where Jake’s adoptive sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) gives him the choice between a cell and a cadet programme. That is the first twenty minutes, and it is the best-written stretch of the film.
Boyega is the reason to watch. He plays Jake as a man who has given up and is rather enjoying it, and he gets laughs out of lines that do not have one written into them; a scene in which he tells Amara how to survive the academy has more life than any of the fights. Spaeny is quick and unsentimental, and their scenes together have an easy scrappiness the rest of the film cannot find. Scott Eastwood, as Jake’s former co-pilot Nate Lambert, is asked to be square-jawed and disapproving and does exactly that. Jing Tian’s Liwen Shao, the industrialist pushing a fleet of drone Jaegers that need no pilots, is given a boardroom and nothing else. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman return as the scientists Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, and Day in particular is doing something odder than the film seems to notice.
Dan Mindel shoots the battles in daylight, which is the biggest change from the first film and not a good one. Del Toro fought in rain and darkness, and the darkness did quiet work: the robots looked heavy because we could not quite see them. Here a Jaeger walks across Sydney at noon under a clear sky and looks like what it is, an expensive toy on an expensive pavement. Stefan Dechant and Paul Denham Austerberry’s designs are clean and legible and hard to tell apart; four robots stand in a row and we could not have named a second one. Lizz Wolf puts the cadets in colour-coded flight suits, which is how we kept track of them.
Zach Staenberg cuts fast and clearly, and to his credit we always knew which robot was hitting which monster, which is not a given in this genre. What we did not know, from about the hour mark onwards, was why we should care. Lorne Balfe’s score thumps along underneath, brass and drums and a chanted motif, loud without ever being memorable. The credited writers are Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin and DeKnight himself, and the seams show: the cadets have a subplot, the drones have a subplot, the scientists have a subplot, and each is stated rather than played.
Here is what we felt. When a rogue Jaeger came out of the water off Sydney and the film stopped explaining and simply let two machines hit each other, we sat up, and for about six minutes we were properly enjoying ourselves. Then the second half takes a turn we will not describe, and after it the film is monster after monster and building after building, and somewhere in the last half hour we realised we had stopped minding whether the city stood. That is a failure in a film whose whole promise is that a city falling down will be exciting. We were not angry. We were checking the runtime, which is 111 minutes and feels longer.
Against the first film this is tidier and hollower; against the Transformers films it is a model of manners. If you have a twelve-year-old who wants to see robots punch things, this will do and you will not hate it. If you loved the first one for its weather and its sorrow, watch that again instead.
The reviews split almost down the middle, with a slight tilt towards the favourable. Nearly everyone agrees on John Boyega, whose charm and humour are credited with keeping the film watchable, and a good number of British critics find the sequel an improvement on the original, with a more coherent plot and better-paced action. The giant-robot spectacle is generally judged to deliver what fans want, and several describe it as unpretentious, likeable nonsense.
The reservations cluster around what has gone with del Toro: the visual poetry and the eccentric design. Many find the fights repetitive and the characters interchangeable, and the harsher notices call it formulaic, committee-built and cynical. The spread is wide. IndieWire gives it a B+ while The Wrap finds no fun in it at all, and The Telegraph goes further than most, calling it cheap-looking and muddled. Slant Magazine is the odd one out, arguing it is stranger and less predictable than the original.
This bland sequel is only a minor improvement on the original; it corrects some mistakes while highlighting eccentric charms but remains largely unremarkable.
Read the full review →Boyega's natural charisma keeps the film watchable despite the absence of del Toro. It offers solid, scrappy fun with giant robot action but lacks the poetry and soul of the predecessor.
Read the full review →Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel lacks del Toro’s visual acumen but makes up for it with energetic chaos and hedges closer to nightmarish intensity; it is a more fascinating and unpredictable creation than its predecessor.
Read the full review →Uprising offers more gonzo invention and giddy destruction than the original, with DeKnight twisting the franchise in surprising directions. The action delivers spectacular property damage and thrills beyond recent Transformers films, though it rushes through character beats.
Read the full review →The critic finds the sequel lightly likeable and an improvement over the original thanks to more coherent plotting and human characterisation. John Boyega's charismatic lead performance is singled out for praise.
Read the full review →The sequel improves on the original thanks to John Boyega’s charisma and a more cohesive plot with better-paced action scenes. It has a goofy likability and slick entertainment value despite a thin story.
Read the full review →
Pacific RimThe original, fought in rain and darkness, with the weight and sorrow this one drops.
Shin GodzillaA monster film that is mostly committee meetings, and far tenser for it.
Attack the BlockBoyega at nineteen, holding a south London estate against aliens on no budget.
Neon Genesis Evangelion · not reviewed yetTeenagers in giant robots, taken seriously enough to break them.
Real Steel · not reviewed yetSmaller robots, a father, a son and a boxing ring; more feeling than it has any right to.
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