Pacific Rim: Uprising

Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) was a big, wet, night-time film about men and women in robots the size of cathedrals, and it had one idea it loved: two people had to share a mind to move the machine. Del Toro stays on as a producer here and hands the director’s chair to Steven S. DeKnight, who comes from television. The sequel is brighter, faster, cheaper-looking and more cheerful, and it has very little on its mind. It is a passable Saturday afternoon and we would not go further than that.

Ten years after the Breach was closed, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of Stacker Pentecost, who led the first war, is scavenging Jaeger parts in the ruins of the Californian coast. He crosses paths with Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), a teenager who has built a small Jaeger of her own out of scrap, and both are arrested and sent to a training base in China, where Jake’s adoptive sister Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) gives him the choice between a cell and a cadet programme. That is the first twenty minutes, and it is the best-written stretch of the film.

Boyega is the reason to watch. He plays Jake as a man who has given up and is rather enjoying it, and he gets laughs out of lines that do not have one written into them; a scene in which he tells Amara how to survive the academy has more life than any of the fights. Spaeny is quick and unsentimental, and their scenes together have an easy scrappiness the rest of the film cannot find. Scott Eastwood, as Jake’s former co-pilot Nate Lambert, is asked to be square-jawed and disapproving and does exactly that. Jing Tian’s Liwen Shao, the industrialist pushing a fleet of drone Jaegers that need no pilots, is given a boardroom and nothing else. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman return as the scientists Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, and Day in particular is doing something odder than the film seems to notice.

Dan Mindel shoots the battles in daylight, which is the biggest change from the first film and not a good one. Del Toro fought in rain and darkness, and the darkness did quiet work: the robots looked heavy because we could not quite see them. Here a Jaeger walks across Sydney at noon under a clear sky and looks like what it is, an expensive toy on an expensive pavement. Stefan Dechant and Paul Denham Austerberry’s designs are clean and legible and hard to tell apart; four robots stand in a row and we could not have named a second one. Lizz Wolf puts the cadets in colour-coded flight suits, which is how we kept track of them.

Zach Staenberg cuts fast and clearly, and to his credit we always knew which robot was hitting which monster, which is not a given in this genre. What we did not know, from about the hour mark onwards, was why we should care. Lorne Balfe’s score thumps along underneath, brass and drums and a chanted motif, loud without ever being memorable. The credited writers are Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin and DeKnight himself, and the seams show: the cadets have a subplot, the drones have a subplot, the scientists have a subplot, and each is stated rather than played.

Here is what we felt. When a rogue Jaeger came out of the water off Sydney and the film stopped explaining and simply let two machines hit each other, we sat up, and for about six minutes we were properly enjoying ourselves. Then the second half takes a turn we will not describe, and after it the film is monster after monster and building after building, and somewhere in the last half hour we realised we had stopped minding whether the city stood. That is a failure in a film whose whole promise is that a city falling down will be exciting. We were not angry. We were checking the runtime, which is 111 minutes and feels longer.

Against the first film this is tidier and hollower; against the Transformers films it is a model of manners. If you have a twelve-year-old who wants to see robots punch things, this will do and you will not hate it. If you loved the first one for its weather and its sorrow, watch that again instead.