The plot: Ten years after the Kaiju first attacked Earth,
Jaegers have become a standard part of Earth’s defence initiative with Shao
Corporations, led by technology magnate Liwen Shao (Jing Tian), working on a
series of drone Jaegers. However, when one of their drones goes rogue, it seems
that the world may be under threat once again. As Pan-Pacific Defence Corps
conscripts Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) and Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) are
brought into the fight, the Precursors lay in wait to once again launch an
assault on humanity and bring it to its knees.
Boyega playing the estranged son of Idris
Elba’s Marshall Pentacost is a pretty easy sell, and thankfully Boyega manages
to show a certain level of Elba’s hardened charisma, mixing it with some
roguish charm. Spaeny just barely
manages to sell some in-universe mechanical wizardry, but otherwise comes
across like the kind of plucky younger sidekick you would expect to find in an
80’s-90’s action flick. Her performance is fine; it’s just that the character
doesn’t necessarily need to be performed in the first place. Legendary Pictures
regular Jing Tian gives off some nice quiet authority, and even gets her own
moments of kick-ass, but after seeing her be the excellent female action lead
in The Great Wall, this is another underutilised role that I honestly hope
doesn’t end up spelling the pattern for the rest of her career.
Scott Eastwood is
blander than dirt, Adria Arjona as a fellow officer somehow makes being the
stereotypical love interest look like an upgrade compared to the nothing she’s
given here, Burn Gorman and Charlie Day tap back into their winning chemistry
from the first with sadly diminishing returns, and everyone else in the cast
manages to exist and little else.
This is Steven S. DeKnight’s first feature film.
Not just as a director; outside of sitting in the writer’s room for the
Transformers Cinematic Universe (let’s hold back the sighs of annoyance at that
thing even existing to begin with), this is the first time he’s touched a
property that isn’t a Spartacus TV show. That larger familiarity with
television rather than film becomes painfully obvious right from the start.
Partly because he managed to make even the studio logos into an eyesore, and
partly because the pacing here is awful.
DeKnight and fellow TV regulars Emily Carmichael and Kira Snyder, with Maze Runner adaptor T.S. Nowlin in tow, manage to put together an incredibly lulled
experience of a narrative. Long stretches of nothing populate the landscape,
broken up only by the decent but few-and-far-between fight scenes, with
everything here feeling incredibly surface level. I’d chalk this up to a lack
of development with all the new characters found here, except even the
returning cast are depressingly subpar. Why did they even bother to bring back Mako Mori, the best character in the first film aside from Pentacost, when they
do absolutely nothing with her? Add
to that the incredibly plain ‘military training’ antics involving Namani and
the other cadets and the mentioned-in-passing-but-never-actually-addressed
character backstories, and you have a very undercooked script. Not the kind of
thing that holds a candle to GDT and Travis Beacham’s original.
But here’s the really disappointing part: What
made the original film work is actually really straight-forward. It didn’t
sport incredibly complex characters or anything particularly deep as far as
themes and subtext; it set out to be an action flick about giant robots beating
the crap out of giant monsters, and so poured everything it had into making that
work. GDT succeeded because he put a lot of effort into the little details,
from the culture that had been created around the Jaegers and the Kaiju to the
under-the-surface similarities between the two, even taking one of the main
conceits of the Drift system and using it as a means of showing traditional
close-quarters comradery. Showing people needing to work together against a
common threat, while emphasising the need to understand their brothers-in-arms
on a personal level; it took underlying character relationship building most
commonly associated with military cinema and, while taking time to
intentionally leave the military out of the equation, rejuvenate those bonds.
All while still delivering on that bombastic thrill of watching a
nuclear-powered mech tear monsters to pieces.
I bring all of this up because the world-building at play
with the first film is a key ingredient in what made it work, rather ridiculous
nomenclature aside. This follow-up basically has the easiest job in the world
when it comes to building off of that, seeing as GDT and Beacham did all the
hard work for them. And yet, they still
screwed it up by largely abandoning any of the details that made this world
fit. Instead, we get a bunch of recycled ideas (not modified, but recycled
whole-cloth) from the first film, combined with story tropes that might have been acceptable if any effort
was put into them beyond your regular action clichés. It introduces some
mildly-interesting ideas, like the scrapyard racket that has sprung up after
the initial war where Jaegers are being stripped for parts, and the advent of
drone Jaegers that only require a single, remote pilot to operate them.
There’s
a fair bit of real-world Americana that can be tapped into to make the stripping-robots-for-scrap
idea work, and I’ll even admit that Scrapper, a Jaeger made entirely out of
spare parts, is easily the coolest thing to be found in this movie. Hell,
considering the fears surrounding drone combat nowadays, there could even have
been some points made about the difference between automated and manned
warfare. Shame these ideas aren’t given nearly enough breathing room to work
in, same with pretty much all of the big change-ups that take place here. It’s
predictable as fuck, and it doesn’t even make the process of getting to the
developments that are predictable as fuck worth it.
On a certain level, though, I think DeKnight and co. knew
that they had a lot to live up to. Along with the rest of the
potentially-interesting ideas presented that the four co-writers somehow didn’t find enough to work with, one of the
bigger themes of this film is that of legacy and living up to what came before.
Jake spends most of the film with a chip on his shoulder concerning his father,
seeing him as someone he wants to escape the shadow of and make his own mark on
the world. The introduction of new technology by Shao and her company show a
move to one-up the technology of old, just in case the Kaiju decide to visit
our humble planet once again. Hell, it even taps into key plot points from the
first film to establish the new threat, complete with a heel-turn that
irritates me for reasons I honestly can’t put my finger on.
A lot of this film is pre-occupied with wondering if it has
the capacity to outshine its predecessors, and yet not that much time is spent
actually setting out to do so. I get that trying to one-up the original film
would have been a tall order; right before The Shape Of Water came out, I would
have eagerly declared the first Pacific Rim as my favourite GDT film. It did that well with its main ingredients.
However, improving on what came before isn’t as easy as just widely ignoring
that past, considering said past includes a lot of what makes this film worthy
to exist in the first place. It laid out a new road to follow; this film was
set up to build the settlement at the end of that road, establishing both of
them as fixed points in our pop culture and a testament to what modern cinema
is capable of. But instead, it just wallows in that shadow rather than trying
to step out of it and succeed on its own merits.
All in all, it’s rather disheartening to know that Michael Bay isn’t the only one who can make giant robot fights as boring as tar. The
acting is mostly basic with only a couple decent performances, the writing
spends more time meandering than it does delivering on what audiences loved
about the first film, and while the effects work is still on-par with the
legitimately impressive efforts of the past, it lacks that same sense of
world-building that made us invested in seeing the fight scenes come to
fruition. It might work out okay as a switch-your-brain-off action flick, but
the very fact that I have to qualify it as such only goes to show how much this
does not hold up as a fulfilling sequel,
or even all that interesting of a singular feature. The worst thing that an
action movie can do is be boring, and that’s just about the only thing this
film succeeds in doing on a consistent basis.
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