Pacific Rim Uprising
- Apr 9, 2018
- 3 min read
Pacific Rim Uprising is a failed attempt to give fans what they shouldn’t have asked for. When I wrote about the original Pacific Rim I explained how it is a silly action movie with a large heart and a clear purpose. While containing a great deal of mindless action, it was clear that the film was more than the sum of its parts to Guillermo del Toro. In every interview that del Toro gave following the movie, he gave even the most obscure scenes value. The disappointment about there not being enough monster and robot time that I had after my first viewing was replaced with an understanding on the real weight the original film conveyed.
Several of the key criticisms faced by the original Pacific Rim include a lack of action, a lack of robots and monsters, and an overly simple story. It is clear that the creators of Uprising heard these complaints and listened. Uprising has more action, a more complicated story, and yes… more robots fighting monsters. These upgrades were all paid for with the weight that the original worked so hard to portray.
In Uprising, almost every scene is connected by action. Jagers, the giant fighting robots used by humans, are everywhere. Where their very existence seemed like a struggle in the original, now jagers are commonplace. Because there are now so many jagers it is easy to find reasons for them to fight. The first half of the movie is less focused on building a cohesive reason for the audience to wonder what may happen next and instead gives us jager fight after jager fight. Each consecutive battle means less and less to the viewers. Audiences were understandably disappointed that fights in the original were often obscured by heavy storms or being underwater, but the choice to have every fight take place in daylight or in an otherwise clear environment takes away from the end product.
The overarching story of Pacific Rim is clear. Giant monsters exist, so giant robots were made to fight them. Every conversation and decision is based off of this key fact. Since the arrival of giant monsters lead to the destruction of many cities and resources, even the most basic amenities are difficult to come by. The remains of giant monsters created new markets for interested people to make money and giant robots are so complicated that they need two pilots. While this at times makes for silly story details, Uprising takes things in an even more confusing direction. Former heros were turned into villains and the constraints that made the struggle of the first movie interesting was completely removed. These decisions created much more action at the cost of engaging story.
In interviews with del Toro, he stresses that each robot is supposed to feel distinct from the many anime robots that preceded the jagers of Pacific Rim. There are clear similarities that some of those old jagers had with anime robots, but those jagers each had at least one feature that made them distinct from each other and connected to their pilots. Jagers in Uprising suffer the same failure as all other mentioned aspects of the movie. Simply put, they lack heart. Jagers feel disposable and in the final fight, their sacrifice means nothing. The audience is not convinced to invest in the motives of the pilots or their robots.
The quality of robots in an action movie may sound like it is a small problem to have with a movie, but in the case of Pacific Rim it is indicative of every other problem Uprising had. Every step of the way the decisions of the directors show that the heart of the original movie was replaced with soulless spectacle. Yes, viewers of the original wanted more action and flare. What was given up in the process was everything that made Pacific Rim special.
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