Thursday, March 22, 2018

Film Review - Pacific Rim Uprising (2018)

Pacific Rim Uprising takes place 10 years after the events of the Pacific Rim film from 2013 and this time Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) takes up the mantle of being the chief Jaeger pilot but when Kaiju begin to re-emerge on Earth Jake has to lead a new team of recruits to go and cancel the Apocalypse once again.

This was a movie I had very skeptical views about mainly because I am a massive fan of the first film it had Guillermo Del Toro being given $200m to give us a film form his immense imagination with giant robots fighting giant monsters and Idris Elba showing what a toweringly charismatic figure he can be when given the chance so this movie had a lot to live up to.

And sadly and this comes as no pleasure at all this movie does not deliver on that promise it feels like another sequel that’s made because the first film makes a bunch of movie either in cinemas or on video and watching it I got really bored with it all.

And that mainly comes down to the storytelling and the first film much like Highlander in 1986 kinda wrapped everything up whereas here the way certain events play out felt very silly to me and didn’t make an awful lot of sense when comparing it to the first movie.

But there are 2 major reasons that dwarf all of those:

- Firstly the absence of Mr Del Toro in the directors chair is very keenly felt as you watch the movie as Guillermo has an extraordinary visual imagination, an attention to every single detail no matter how small and the love, the passion, the humanity and the energy he brought to that movie.

He also understood very clearly and this is apparent when you watch the extras on the double disc Blu-Ray release of the movie is that these robots and monsters even though they would be digital creations they have to have a sense of weight and a physical presence in the movie whereas here it just felt like a bad Transformers knockoff.

- And secondly Mr Elba’s absence is also plainly felt when it comes to the overall performances and everyone tries their best Mr Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman both of whom reprise their roles from the first film as well as many others and all of them felt very flat and I just kept wanting Idris Elba to show up.

Because in the first film he hovered above the proceedings as the fixed point the last man standing between humanity and the Apocalypse whereas and though I wasn’t a big fan of the Dark Tower film last year it reminded me of how very charismatic he can be in a movie and his absence was felt for me like it was for Mr Del Toro.

And so that was Pacific Rim Uprising an okay sequel but a very very pale shadow of the first film, 1.5 out of 5.

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