"Pacific Rim: Uprising" Had Every Reason to Be Good but Isn't

Originally Posted 3/23/18

For everyone who was disappointed by Finn's characterization in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, Pacific Rim: Uprising is the movie for you -- almost. John Boyega is the absolute best thing about the movie. And it starts off pretty great: there's nice-looking sci-fi and a guy who looks exactly like Finn showing backbone and displaying competence. But then all of his myriad co-stars show up and the whole thing turns into eyebrow dandruff.

2013's excellent Pacific Rim was practically begging for a sequel and laid the groundwork for a follow-up nicely. Unfortunately, the folks behind Uprising failed to resist the temptation to go much, much bigger -- literally, in the case of the final monster -- repeating the exact same mistake made in Independence Day: Resurgence. Maybe writer/director Steven S. DeKnight followed Resurgence's playbook (like a dummy). Both movies take place years after its predecessor; and each movie's star is the son of the previous film's dead military pilot hero. 

Also, the original movie's biggest appeal stems from the idea that Jaegers (giant robotic machines) fight Kaiju (giant monsters). But in an effort to "fix" a winning formula, the filmmakers decided to have the robots mostly fighting each other instead (We've already seen that in every single Tranformers movie. Stay in your lane.). If all that weren't bad enough the decision was made to have the first film's main source of comic relief become the villain this time around. Wtf? When will they learn?  You'd think the head writer of  the Starz network's "Spartacus" series could do better than this.