Pacific Rim Uprising
The sequel to Pacific Rim is even bigger this time round, if that’s possible. And we still don’t care.
A very big robot
How do you follow up a brace of Oscars for best picture and
best director? Well, if nothing else, Guillermo del Toro – director of The Shape of Water – is one ambitious
filmmaker. In 2013 he directed Pacific
Rim, a humungous sci-fi epic that made Godzilla look like a glove puppet. With
the most expensive film of all time now looming on the horizon – Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, in cinemas April
26 – Pacific Rim Uprising, produced
by del Toro and directed by the American screenwriter Steven S. DeKnight, has
upped its own ante. A mash-up of Transformers,
RoboCop and Tron, the new film
eats size for breakfast. Robots tower over skyscrapers and hurl handfuls of
traffic like sand. Cities are destroyed like ants’ nests kicked into oblivion.
A Jaeger – a colossal automaton handled by two human pilots –
has gone rogue and the ‘Pan-Pacific Defense Corps’ has to step up to the plate.
Originally constructed to combat enormous aliens that had popped through an interdimensional
portal under the Pacific, the Jaegers made a formidable law-enforcement agency,
best operated by good-looking kids brought up on VR gaming. Ten years after the
death of the heroic General Pentecost (Idris Elba) and the defeat of the
aliens, an even bigger threat emerges, a mind-controlling force bent on global
destruction. So, who better to lead a new generation of good-looking gamers to
face the enemy than Pentecost’s own son, the cocky, athletic Jake Pentecost,
played by John Boyega?
One can picture the pitch: OK, let’s make the monsters even
bigger this time, get a cast of young cosmopolitan actors who look like models,
stir in some state-of-the-art CGI, add a slew of smart-ass wisecracks and
eye-catching locations, throw in the son of Clint Eastwood and get a black
English actor to play the hero. How could it fail? Of course, it all depends on
your taste. Boyega, who portrays Finn in the Star Wars films, does make an engaging lead, and much of the metallic
action boasts a wow mentality, if one is not tired of that sort of thing. But
the congestion of plot swerves and technical jargon is more than a little
overwhelming and ultimately one really doesn’t care for anybody or anything. It’s
rather rum that the 12A advisory warning alerts the viewer to “moderate
violence” and a “rude gesture.” Yes, a robot does give us the finger but the collateral
loss of human life would seem to be no more troublesome than the innumrable blips
on a video screen.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: John Boyega,
Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian, Cailee Spaeny, Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, Adria
Arjona, Zhang Jin, Charlie Day, Karan Brar, Wesley Wong, Ivanna Sakhno, Shyrley
Rodriguez.
Dir Steven S.
DeKnight, Pro John Boyega, Cale
Boyter, Guillermo del Toro, Jon Jashni, Femi Oguns, Mary Parent and Thomas Tull,
Screenplay Emily Carmichael, Kira
Snyder, Steven S. DeKnight and T.S. Nowlin, Ph
Dan Mindel, Pro Des Stefan Dechant, Ed
Dylan Highsmith and Zach Staenberg, Music
Lorne Balfe, Costumes Lizz Wolf.
Legendary Pictures-Universal Pictures.
110 mins. USA/China/UK. 2018. Rel: 23 March 2018. Cert. 12A.