KEITH on Reels

Produced by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro who directed the original Pacific Rim released in 2013, Pacific Rim: Uprising is a preposterous yet sometimes entertaining sequel that falls short of the original’s creativity and fun. The film takes place ten years after the first movie when the extraterrestrial monsters known as Kaiju are defeated by the Pan-Pacific Defence Corps and their gigantic fighting machines known as Jaegers. The story follows Jake Pentecost, played by John Boyega of Star Wars fame, who as the son of the fallen hero and leader of the PPDC Stacker Pentecost is forced to reenlist as a Jaeger pilot instructor after he is arrested dealing in the black market. He must begrudgingly work with his former copilot Nate, played by Scott Eastwood, and train the young new recruits, including a young orphan named Amara, in case the Kaiju return to earth to wreak havoc. With the world at peace, the Jaeger program is under assault with the rise of a drone program developed by the wisecracking scientist Dr. Newt Geiszler, played by the highly entertaining Charlie Day, and the Shao Corporation based in China. Eventually, the Kaiju present an imminent threat and Jake and his cohorts are relied upon to pilot the Jaegers to prevent widespread destruction. The PPDC are assisted by the odd genius Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, played by the highly believable Burn Gorman, who discovers that Kaiju blood is highly reactive and could be used to kill off humanity. Similar to the Transformers movie franchise and the long line of Godzilla-like monster films known in Japan as Kaiju, the movie is chock-full of elaborate CGI fight sequences between building-sized creatures and robot in which wide swaths of cities are wiped out in over-the-top fashion. Overall, I found it to be a rather typical Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi movie overflowing with rather silly action scenes; the only true asset to the film is its almost tongue-in-cheek view of itself as a popcorn flick that should not be taken too seriously.