Science Fiction

• Title: Pacific Rim: Uprising
• IMDb: link

I enjoyed 2013’s Pacific Rim as a throwaway action flick with sci-fi influences featuring robots fighting monsters, but aside from the possibility of having the robots fighting big-name threats like King Kong and Godzilla I wasn’t much interested in a sequel. Without director Guillermo del Toro, who is replaced here by Steven S. DeKnight, and returning stars only in supporting roles, Pacific Rim: Uprising has all the flaws of a bloated, over-complicated sequel trying to out-do the original. It also doesn’t help that the number of robot vs. robot scenes remind the viewer (painfully) of Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise.

Set a decade after the original film, the sequel centers around the never-before-mentioned son of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) who is forced to re-enlist after trouble with the law. John Boyega works fine as Jake Pentecost, even if the script can never quite decide how disinterested or invested he should be in the Jaeger program. The sequel also plays fast and loose with the core concept of paired drifting being as much art as science by throwing pairs randomly together once the action gets fast and furious. Cailee Spaeny co-stars as a troubled but talented teen who also joins Jake in the program as part of a plea deal.

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