User blog:Crabwhale/A Skeletal Retrospective: Pacific Rim Uprising

Note: It'd probably be best if you'd already seen the first movie, cause I don't really care about spoilers of any kind, so this is your only warning.

So, I've seen P.R.U. recently. It was...decent. Nothing out of the ordinary, surprisingly enough. I was expecting the film to be total dogshit, but...no. It did it's job ok.

So, what to discuss first? Oh yeah, plot, that's a thing that happens. Basically, giant monsters (Kaiju) are gone now because we died them to death 10 years ago (see first movie for details), giant robots (Jaegers) are just apparently used freely in law enforcement now and not much is happening aside from that. But anyway, wibbly-wobbly, Kaiju-majogally, and our main scientist from last film, Newt, has become a very, very nerdy Tony Stark, who's not actually Tony Stark. Also, he now seems to gain actually sexual stimulation from drifting with a piece of a Kaiju brain, probably because he's been taken over by the Precursors.

Anyway, he does some bad-bad stuff while remaining completely likable because that's just the power of Charlie Day, and BOOM! Jaeger drones from the company he's now working for are filed with Kaiju gunk like delicious neon blue Slurpees, in a shameless nod to Evangelion. They somehow open some portals through their Kaiju...energy...blue...stuff and bring a few actual Kaiju through before they're shut down. And that's all I'm gonna say about plot, just the general outline of the villains side of things, cause I really don't care and you can always just look it up/watch the movie yourself.

So now, onto characters:...they were fine too, I guess. John Boyega was admittedly enjoyable and Teenage Gril (can't bother to remember her name) was surprisingly not as annoying as I thought she'd be. Granted, her arc was sort of a rehash (Hell, if not a watered down version) of Mako's arc from the last film, but...eh. The other characters are fine as well: Herman and Newt are once again the best bromance ever (yes, even better than Hulk and Thor), for all the time that they're together before Newt does the whole "evil but still totally likable" thing, the other kids weren't very annoying and even Tough Military Guy I didn't mind much.

However, there is one very big, glaring issue: Mako and her total waste. Understandably, when you take the last movie's main character pretty much, delegate her to a supporting role, then kill her off not even halfway through for some cheap, artificial emotional bullshit, you done fucked up badly. That, and aside from Newt and Herman, you get nothing from the first film. No Raleigh (his actor was busy with another film, but shush), no Herc, no Tendo the Coffee Guy?

I mean, half the cast from the first movie is dead, so I guess there's that. But still, they could've at least squeezed in SOMETHING from then, like I don't know, a flashback maybe? Actually giving us something other than meaningless words to show us the supposed connection between these characters? Hell, give us a reason to bring back Big Pentecost (a.k.a. Idris "Fokin" Elba) back. Raleigh even gets mentioned in the film but we never hear anything else about him. I get that the director is trying to keep his fate ambiguous due to the actor not being available but come on. This is a main character we're talking about.

Since we're getting into the the main points of contention I have here, let's get everything out of the way: the movie moves at about a million miles per hour and it's tone is wildly inconsistent. For the first point, it may not sound like a major complaint, and for me it wasn't particularly annoying, though it's still a problem. I mean, one second you're in a quiet scene, and then an action sequence, and then a talking scene, and so on. The movie really feels as if it could've used a little extra time to tell everything it had to tell, but that would probably cost a few extra tens of millions of $, so you know.

As for tone, well, let me put up a practical example: one scene, a Russian is playing the Trololololo Man while he's entering the battle. Literally, ten or so minutes later, that kid's co-pilot (who is also an Indian kid, played by Ravi from Jessie) is brutally murdered, in such a gruesome way that they can't even show his corpse. Yeah: I've seen Bipolar people more consistent than that. And don't get me wrong, the first movie had really silly moments too, but it never went into mood whiplash of this magnitude. It knew when it wanted to be serious, and Hell, discounting some of it's goofier fights, silly premise and over-the-top characters, the first movie could be fairly dramatic when it was called for. This one? It tries to have an outdated meme and literal child murder in the same act, you have a problem.

>clears throat< >drinks Pepsi snootily<

Well, anyway, let's get to the thing you're all here for, you animals: the fight scenes. In a movie that is arguably make-or-break on those alone, how are they? Good, actually. They employ some very creative choreography, and although I'm not a fan of the new swiftness of the Jaegers, they can pull off some very impressive shit.

They also employ a greater deal of variety too: Jaegers vs Jaegers, fights in the frozen tundras of Siberia (granted, there the first fight in the first movie off the coast of Alaska, but that was mostly a sea battle that only had one iceberg for like 3 seconds, so shush) and yes, the hyper, giga Kaiju fusion fight scene at the end. Now, the actual way the Jaegers fight is...a bit lackluster, but nowhere near as bad as I'd thought it'd be. I still am not a fan of how fast they move, even if they are improved models, but at least they still retain some measure of their weight.

Now, since this is very long and I don't know how to end it properly, I'm just going to put a few notes here of things I found weird, idiotic and the such.


 * Perplexing ravine: Ok, so during their second fight, happening in Siberia, Gipsy and Obsidian fall down into a ravine that is big enough to make them seem like average-sized people by comparsion. HOW? They're 80 meter tall robots for fuck's sake. I'm pretty sure the Grand Canyon couldn't offer that same perspective. I know some glaciers are huge, but still...


 * Kaijus wanting to ignite the Ring of Fire: Okay, so if the Kaijus' whole goal was to reach Mount Fuji the entire time, then why did they attack literary any other city except Tokyo? I know there are probably other active volcanoes that they could've used, but the movie specifically mentions Fuji as their rendezvous all along. Oh wait, it's a retcon, of course, it doesn't have to make sense.


 * PPDC confusion: How the Hell has building 300 foot tall walking nuclear reactors become a viable option for peacekeeping? On that note, how did they manage to convince states to give up their ownership rights? I know a few certain Ruskis would definitely not be happy with that.


 * Gundam statues in there, seriously?


 * A giant robot flips the double bird in this movie. We have officially reached Food Fight levels of "what even"...