Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) - Movie Review

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.

The Great Wall (2017) - Movie Review

Lines of argument like what I’m about to get into are usually the sorts of strawman burning matters that get people lynched on social media for daring to voice it. But as I have already brought up this point in previous reviews, it’s worth repeating: I don’t care about “whitewashing” controversies when it comes to film casts. Or, at least, I don’t buy into them nearly as much as critics have in recent years. The reasons why are many and varied, from how people tend to cherry-pick examples to rage against to the inherent hypocrisy involved in isolating only this instance (white actors portraying non-whites) as a bad thing. But the biggest factor for my own reasoning is that, considering the utter crap I’ve highlighted on this blog, I can think of a myriad of worse sins that a filmmaker can commit than anything involving ethnic (or non-ethnic) casting. So, imagine my lack of reaction to how the only thing that anyone seems to discuss with this film is how a white actor was cast as the lead in a film set in China and populated by and primarily made by the Chinese. Time to dig in, and let’s see if there’s anything else worth discussing.