PACIFIC RIM UPRISING (2018) Forget it, Jake

If Pacific Rim Uprising isn’t a Starship Troopers-esque satire of the military industrial complex, then it is simply one of the most cynically over-commercialized and under-thought sequels I’ve ever seen, what’s lack of care and attention to its own material has resulted in a movie what’s implications to its own universe are darker than almost any other fiction I’ve ever seen. If you seriously consider the world Pacific Rim Uprising for more than two minutes, it unravels completely…unless you extrapolate that this world is a living nightmare.

Uprising picks up ten years after the first Pacific Rim; ten years after Marshal Stacker Pentecost led the last remaining Jaeger pilots on a suicide mission to close the breach in the Pacific Ocean from which Kaiju were entering the world. Their mission was a success, the breach was closed, and there hasn’t been a single Kaiju attack since.

So why are there still Jaegers?

Without the threat of Kaiju to defend against, why has the Pan Pacific Defense Corps invested so much to the continued creation and development of these 300ft super weapons that serve no other purpose? Also keep in mind that the Jaeger Program was already on it’s way out in the first movie. With the breach and the Kaiju gone for good, why has the world’s governments continued to expand funding on these now targetless weapons of mass destruction?

The only possible explanation the movie provides is that scavengers are repurposing the Jaeger technology to create their own giant robots, which would mean that the world of Pacific Rim, cured of its external Kaiju threat, now faces the internal threat of constant military escalation. Either that, or, as Jaeger technology became privatized after the Kaiju threat, it became too profitable to stop production on these now purposeless weapons. And the continued participation of the world governments in the research, development, and deployment of the Jaegers would hint at the world being in an Orwellian state of constantly manufactured fear. Humanity has beaten the Kaiju, but we are still at war with them. We will always be at war with them.

But it’s not just the technology that’s changed. The PPDC now recruits child soldiers to pilot the new Jaegers, rationalizing that children make bonds easier, and are more “drift compatible” – able to pilot the Jaegers more easily. And we see at least one child – one of the movie’s main characters – kidnapped and enlisted against her will into this child-soldier program! Thankfully, a main plot-point of the first half of Uprising concerns a company that wishes to replace Jaeger pilots with drones. The movie, however, considers this elimination of the child-soldier program to be a bad thing.

And, in the back-half of the movie, when the villain uses the Jaeger drone army to open new breaches to summon more Kaiju; it’s up to these child soldiers to save the world from the war-machines that wouldn’t have existed if the adults just decided to stop building them after they had already won the war.

Oh, and also, the big robot fights in this movie have a lot more needless property damage than the last one. Like; in the big climactic fight in Tokyo, one of the Jaegers uses a gravity-whip to just fling skyscrapers at a Kaiju, while another one scrapes its giant laser swords across buildings for style points, basically? Like, you can argue it’s visually boring of the first Pacific Rim for so much of the fighting to take place in the middle of the ocean; but at least that makes more sense than the Jaeger’s purposely destroying more of the cities they’re ostensibly out to protect than the Kaiju attacking them.

So, yeah – if Pacific Rim Uprising isn’t purposely telling a parable about nuclear proliferation and the dangers of the military industrial complex; then, this otherwise complete mess of a movie has completely accidently done so.

And, as much as I like to give works of art the benefit of the doubt, this movie feels so corporately dedicated in every other respect that I can’t help but think that the studio just didn’t give anyone enough time to think through all of this enough to fix it. And Uprising suffers from a lot more than just the lack of direction from Guillermo Del Toro.

The Jaegers in the first movie had so much personality. They were each visually distinct, with immediately recognizable design elements to differentiate their age and country of origin and fighting style. In Uprising, they’re basically all just part of the same Power Rangers team, differentiated more by their color and weapon than by silhouette.

And then there are the names of everything. The human names have gone from Stacker and Hercules to Jake and Nate. The Jaeger names have gone in the other direction, trying too hard to be cool by using words that mean cool things rather than by just using words that sound cool together. Gypsy Danger, Cherno Alpha, and Crimson Typhoon have been replaced by Gypsy Avenger, Sabre Athena, and Obsidian Fury.

Where Pacific Rim felt like an enthusiastic love letter made by a director who was genuinely inspired by kaiju movies and giant robot anime; Uprising feels fueled only by the first one having made a lot more money globally than anyone expected. Uprising has bigger robots and monsters, but a smaller heart.