Pacific Rim Uprising

The 2013 film Pacific Rim by Guillermo del Toro had left the world in ruins. The sequel, this time produced by del Toro, looks at how the survivors are rebuilding from the devastation after they had won the war. Steven S. DeKnight (in his feature-film directorial debut) and written by DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S. Nowlin, introduce us to Jake Pentecost, the son of the first movie's hero (idris Elba), who wants to be far away from his father's reputation. if you were a fan of the CGI monsters and robot fest of the first film, you will get plenty of the same this time around. Lots of mindless action and destruction and some humorous character development.

Boyega fresh off Star Wars is Jake, the cynical party boy and scavenger. He has no ambitions to follow in his father's footsteps. Instead he earns his ill gotten gains from selling parts of old Jaegers, the robots that saved the world, to illegal gangs creating their own machines. He meets Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) during one of his heists who built a scraper, a smaller version of a Jaeger. She firmly believes the Kaiju will be back from The Breach where they rose from another dimension. They are eventually captured by the Jaeger Ajax after a futile by glorious chase and thanks to Jake's adopted sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), they are sent to the Jaeger base where Jake will help train the new recruits. Amara who is like a Jaeger groupie, fangirls all the Jaegers on the base. She is equally blown away that Jake is the son of the man who saved the world in the last war.

We are reminded on how the whole robot pilot thing works, by having two drivers who are connected by the drift. Their brains are interconnected so they work in tandem to control the humongous metal machine. Burn Gorman as Dr. Hermann Gottlieb is developing a new tech that would rocket the Jaegers using the blood of the Kaiju's. But he's not getting support since the Shao Corporation is pushing for Jaeger drones who will elimninate the needs for human pilots. Liwen Shao (Jing Tian) has devoted her life to this project. Unfortunately Shao Corp's scientist Dr. Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day), Gottlieb's old lab partner, has other plans.

The last third of the film involves some CGI heavy improbable battles with large robots causing massive mayhem to save the world. Jake is able to come to terms with his legacy and find his own. Amara finally gets revenge for her parents death in the last war. Scott Eastwood as Nate, Jake's drift partner just basically grits his teeth and acts heroic. The fact that most manage to survive with some scratches on their faces is pretty amazing. But that's O.K. because they will all be back for the next movie.
(Review by reesa)