Steven S. DeKnight is a television man: a builder of long serials who has made one feature, Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), and it plays like a season of television folded into a single film, every thread announced and none given time to become anything.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), the cadets have a subplot, the drones have a subplot, the scientists have a subplot, and each is announced and then left where it stands. That is the clearest thing DeKnight's one film tells us about him. He arrived at it with four credited writers, himself among them, and the habits of a man who has spent his working life laying out whole seasons, where a thread can be dropped in one episode and picked up three later. A film has to finish everything it starts in one sitting.
He began in the writers' room of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as a staff writer and story editor from 2000 to 2002, then wrote, directed and produced on Angel (2002–2004), Smallville (2004–2007) and Dollhouse (2009), three of them under Joss Whedon. The turn came with Spartacus (2010–2013), which he created and ran himself, and he followed it by running the first season of Marvel's Daredevil (2015). We have not reviewed either, so we will say only that Spartacus was the breakthrough and that the two together are his reputation. Then came the film.
Uprising is not a bad afternoon. John Boyega is good company throughout, and Zach Staenberg cuts the fights so cleanly that we always knew which robot was hitting which monster, which the genre does not guarantee. But Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim (2013) had one idea it loved, two people sharing a mind to move the machine, and the sequel has nothing it loves as much as that. From about the hour mark we did not know why we should care about anyone on screen, and Lorne Balfe's brass and drums thumping underneath did not tell us. DeKnight has said that the character stuff is the important part and that anybody can write action; on the evidence of his one feature, he wrote the action and stated the characters.
He has since gone back to television, developing Jupiter's Legacy (2021), which he left during production over creative differences, and returning to his own franchise with Spartacus: House of Ashur (2025–2026). That looks like the right instinct. What he is known for is the long haul, and characters who are neither good nor bad for long, and a single loud film about robots gave him room for neither. If he makes another feature we will go, but we will go hoping for something smaller, with fewer subplots and one thing it loves.
Biography
Steven S. DeKnight is an American screenwriter, television producer and director. He began his career as a staff writer on the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), later working as a writer and story editor on the show. He subsequently wrote and produced episodes of Angel (1999) and Smallville (2001).
DeKnight created and served as showrunner and head writer on the Starz series Spartacus (2010), including its prequel Spartacus: Gods of the Arena (2011). He developed and showran the first season of Marvel's Daredevil (2015) for Netflix, and directed and co-wrote the film Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). He also contributed to Dollhouse (2009) and Jupiter's Legacy (2021). He is married to Jaime Slater.
