"Fire everything you've got!"
Hello everyone!
As promised last week, it's time for the sequel to the awesome movie that was Pacific Rim. Aka, the movie in which Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam got to kick some serious Kaiju butt.
If you don't know what a Kaiju is, let's just say it's a big monster.
Looks a lot like Godzilla but at the same time it's a hell of a lot uglier and WAY meaner, considering Godzilla always worked FOR the people, not to eat the people.
Well. Mostly.
Anyway.
Before I digress any further, there's time to backtrack and return to my original point: the point of the sequel.
Pacific Rim: Uprising promised to deliver everything and more that its predecessor did. Whether or not they succeeded, however, you'll have to read in this post.
As always with prequel reviews, you can find the one for Pacific Rim at the bottom of this post.
In Uprising, we begin ten years or so after the original movie, which is ten years without Kaijus but with multiple Jaegers running around as a sort of police because ... well I actually have no clue why this would even happen. Apparently it's much easier to deal with stuff when you're in a big ass robot, so there you go.
Instead of the original players, we run into one Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the character Idris Elba portrayed in the first movie, who seems to be a squatter and a bit of a rogue rat running around the streets, hitching up with Amara, another sort of street rat like him, who's managed to build a miniature version of a Jaeger, named Scrapper, which can be piloted by one pilot.
If you remember, Jaegers normally need two pilots because of their size.
Anyway, a police Jaeger stops the two runaways (in a hilarious scene where it pokes little Scrapper and seems to be standing there with its hands on its hips like 'c'mon kids, out you get') and Jake is facing some serious charges because this isn't his first time in any kind of jail.
Mako Mori, whom you might remember as one of the saviours from the original film, and coincidentally his stepsister, springs him, but only on the condition that he returns into the fold and comes to train Jaeger pilots/rangers, with Amara as one of the rangers.
This isn't universally accepted by all, because one Nate (Scott Eastwood) seems to have it in for Jake regardless of his lineage, and Amara isn't doing so well with the other recruits either.
But they have bigger problems in terms of the fact that, once again, Jaegers are being made obsolete (do humans ever learn from their own mistakes?), this time by automated robots that don't really need pilots so they can just go out there and there's less danger should anything attack.
Which if course, right during the conference about said robots, something DOES attack while Gypsy Avenger (with Jake and Nate piloting) is on guard duty to bring Mako Mori to Sydney: a rogue Jaeger.
Unfortunately, Mako is killed, but she manages to send a sort of blueprint for a location high up north where they used to build Jaegers, if I understood correctly. Anyway, they go North, run into the rogue Jaeger again, and after defeating it realise that there aren't any human pilots in there - but there ARE bits of Kaijus.
How did this happen?
Well, backing up to when Amara gets thrown out of the academy, she tells Jake that some of the wiring in the rogue Jaeger belongs to Li-Jen, the woman who owns the automated robots company. Gottlieb, the scientist we remember from the first movie, goes to Newt, his former partner who now works for Li-Jen, to investigate, but instead of finding it's the beautiful Asian woman who's working with the Kaiju, what he finds is more horrifying: it's Newt!
If you recall, back in movie one, Newt drifted with a Kaiju brain, and he and Gottlieb managed to tell Pentecost what he has to do to close the Pacific Breach. But while Gottlieb was happy never to go close to the monsters again, Newt became addicted, and the Kaiju used his addiction to make him work for THEM instead, incorporating bits of the monsters into the rogue Jaegers.
You might ask yourselves what the Kaiju even want from our poor Earth.
In short, they want to get to Mount Fuji and make sure it goes KABOOM in a catastrophic event. Good enough reason?
But with Jaegers being decommissioned (and their home base blasted), it's Gypsy Avenger with the new recruits (Amara included) who needs to stop the three Kaiju trying to reach the volcano, not that it's a pretty battle. I mean, no battle with the Kaiju is ever pretty, honestly.
Nate is injured during these battles and gives up his place to Amara in Gypsy, while he goes after Newt, who seems to be helping or controlling the Kaiju somehow. Meanwhile, Gypsy Avenger goes to cut off the beast headed straight for the volcano, and with some assistance from Li-Jen in a remotely operated Scrapper, they finish the job.
No volcanos were harmed during the making of this film.
Newt, now in custody, screams that the Kaiju will just keep on coming. Jake, pissed off because of the deaths he's had to witness, tells him there's no need to shout threats: humans will attack the Kaiju first next time, so the monsters don't even have to stir from their home dimension.
FIN
The last scene certainly sets up a belief that there might be a third Pacific Rim movie sometime, but I'm not sure how that might go, seeing as the sequel already had loose plot holes the size of mini vans. For instance, what was the significance of the old Jaeger building site up north, other than it seemed to conveniently be where the rogue Jaeger popped up to fight Gypsy Avenger again? And second, Mako mentions at one point that the rogue Jaeger has the same power source imprint as Jake somehow, which initially made me think Idris Elba was going to be brought to life by Kaijus.
Those are just some of the questions I kept asking myself while watching this movie, and I also have to admit it took forever to get started.
In the first, we are immediately thrown into this battle between robots and monsters, whereas in this one, three quarters of the movie seems to be spent trudging over to where the Kaijus are planning to crawl up to Mount Fuji. It doesn't make for the most exciting viewing, so if there IS a third movie, I hope they follow more along the blueprint of the first!
xx
*images and video not mine
No comments:
Post a Comment