Pacific Rim Uprising: Deserves to drown

Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for relentlessly dumb and noisy sci-fi violence, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Godzilla has a lot to answer for.

So does Guillermo del Toro, basking in the reflected glow of the Academy Awards now resting on his mantel.

When an entire squadron of giant robots goes berserk, only a handful of cadets — notably
Amara (Cailee Spaeny, and do note her wind-swept hair) and Jake (John Boyega) — are
in a position to prevent Earth's complete annihilation. Can they succeed, against such
overwhelming odds? Is there really any question?

Because we must remember that he brought us Pacific Rim, back in 2013. And if that film hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t now be suffering through its soulless, brain-dead sequel.

It’s important to note that del Toro always has had an affinity for grandiose monster movies, which he demonstrated with his two Hellboy entries, and even as far back as 1997’s Mimic. (Needless to say, The Shape of Water also is a monster movie.) Del Toro has a knack for finding — and somehow making credible — the emotional center of even the craziest premise; he also knows how to add just the right amount of humor to a formula that requires an equally precise blend of tragedy and triumph.

In short, we care about the characters in del Toro’s films, human or otherwise. We get involved.

Nothing — and nobody — in Pacific Rim Uprising elicits even a shred of interest. This isn’t a film; it’s a global commodity, assembled with calculated coldness by corporate bean-counters ticking all the little boxes.

Multi-national characters? Check. Disillusioned soldier who finds his inner hero? Check. Plucky young girl? Check. Eye-rollingly dumb dialog intended to facilitate bonding? Check. Jealousy in the ranks? Check. The destruction of vast cityscapes? Check.

First-time big-screen director Steven S. DeKnight can demand — and obtain — the most whoppingly, prodigiously colossal beasties and human-powered mechanical warriors that today’s special-effects money can buy, but the result has no more emotional significance than we got from watching two guys in rubber suits bash each other, while striding amid the balsa-wood cities of 1960s Godzilla flicks.

The reason? This film’s script — credited to DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T.S. Nowlin — is strictly from hunger. Not content merely to be a perfect example of the idiot plot — which lurches from one scene to the next, only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times — it also boasts some of the clunkiest, most laughably atrocious dialog ever conceived.

With only a few exceptions, the performances are stiff and unpersuasive, the line deliveries so wooden, they warp. And the landscape-devastating battle sequences go on, and on, and on, and on ... as if DeKnight hopes to win us over by sheer brute force.

Pacific Rim: Monster Mash

Pacific Rim (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense sci-fi violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.12.13

Guillermo del Toro must have loved Godzilla movies as a kid.

His newest action fantasy, Pacific Rim, is a valentine to the dozen or so romp ’em, stomp ’em features that starred “the big G” during del Toro’s formative years. (Quite a few more have been made since then.) This tip of the hat clearly is deliberate, since the director and fellow scripter Travis Beacham refer to their ginormous critters as kaiju, the Japanese term — literally “strange beast,” but more commonly “giant monster” — coined, back in the day, to describe Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and their ilk.

Strapped into the high-tech body suits that make them "one" with the giant robot
warriors into which they've been placed, Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako (Rinko
Kikuchi) prepare for a battle they already know is unwinnable, against a monstrous
beast with adaptive "enhancements" that have made it far stronger than their
mechanical avatar.

Throw in plenty of 21st century whiz-bang special effects, and the result is a high-tech thrill ride that blends big monsters, equally massive robot-like avatars, and the stubborn pluck of a puny human race unwilling to go quietly into that good night.

During a summer laden with end-of-the-world scenarios — zombie apocalypse and Kryptonian apocalypse, not to mention the biblical Book of Revelations — this one takes the prize for cheeky absurdity. At the same time, del Toro and Beacham pay careful attention to the human element, giving us would-be saviors who are inspiring for their fortitude, and endearing for their flaws.

Not to mention, it’s always nice when a screenplay takes the optimistic view, and shows world powers uniting in an effort to save the planet. Such all-for-one selflessness goes all the way back to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the reminder is refreshing in this divisively cynical age.

Audacious fantasy has been del Toro’s stock-in-trade ever since 1997’s under-appreciated and genuinely creepy Mimic. He also was the perfect choice to adapt graphic novelist Mike Mignola’s lunatic Hellboy series, and — as an executive producer — del Toro has chaperoned riveting projects such as 2007’s wonderfully atmospheric The Orphanage.

And let us not forget his masterpiece: 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the Oscar-winning horror film that brought adult sensibilities to a genre too frequently willing to settle for much less, and which demonstrated that human monsters can be much, much worse than anything cooked up by our vivid imaginations.

Pacific Rim doesn’t wade through such high-falutin' waters, though; this is simply del Toro’s first stab at a crowd-pleasing, mega-budget summer blockbuster, and he has done a commendable job.

The film, set in the not-too-distant future, opens with an extended flashback: An unseen narrator recalls the unexpected arrival of the first kaiju, an enormous — and quite savage — amphibious creature bent on death and destruction. It rises from the ocean depths and wreaks considerable havoc before being brought down by conventional military hardware.

Apparently passing this off as an isolated incident — perhaps a lone, Bradbury-esque behemoth, driven by curiosity to the surface world — mankind is similarly unprepared months later, when the next one arrives. And then another. And another, at noticeably shorter intervals. Scientists realize that they’re coming from some sort of dimensional portal deep in the Pacific Ocean.