John Boyega is Jake Pentecost (son of Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba in the first film). Cailee Spaeny is a young girl named Amara Namani, a talented mechanic who keeps working to improve her single-pilot Jaeger (Jaeger = large, fighting robot for those who are playing catch up). Last, and least, is Scott Eastwood as Nate Lambert, a Jaeger pilot who has a past with Jake. All three come together, as well as some other, sadly forgettable, supporting players , when it looks as if there's a new threat from the monsters that had previously been thought dealt with. That's all you need to know.
As technically proficient as the first film, Pacific Rim: Uprising both benefits and suffers from the need to avoid just repeating the exact same set-pieces as the ones we already saw. The plot this time deals with upgrades and hybrids, which is fine, but also reduces the tension quite early on. Viewers can see that the new enemy is even stronger, and a lot tougher to beat, so the finale is very predictable from the first act. Director Steven S. DeKnight helps to offset this with some impressive, and impressively clear, visuals throughout. He knows that this is a huge helping of cheese (because who wouldn't know it?) and he at least makes the payoff worthwhile, keeping the Jaegers front and centre during the set-pieces that are interspersed throughout. Do you want quotable dialogue and thought-provoking explorations of responsibility and mortality or do you want to see a giant robot produce a giant pair of swords and use them against another giant robot? You can't have both, but the latter is a hell of a lot of fun to watch.
As much as I enjoyed Pacific Rim, the script was not it's strong point, and it's the same here. Without Travis Beacham or Guillermo del Toro taking care of things, it's left to Emily Carmichael, T. S. Nowlin, Kira Snyder, and DeKnight. They do what needs to be done in order to connect events and allow this to feel like a proper next chapter in the story, which it does, but they saddle the cast with a lot of lame lines in between the action beats.
That could have been easier to overlook if the cast were on good form with the material but, sadly, most of them aren't. Boyega is very good in the lead role, and both Charlie Day and Burn Gorman have fun reprising their scientist roles, but nobody else makes much of an impression. Spaeny and Eastwood don't have the charisma required to make this, at the very least, a decent three-hander, and the other supporting players fade into the background almost as quickly as they appear. At least Spaeny might do better in other roles, Eastwood is already making bland his standard acting style for every role (he may have the name of his father, but he didn't inherit his talent).
If you want to get your fix of giant robots fighting one another then this is much better than the majority of the Transformers series. It's not as good as the first, and it's no Real Steel, but it's a fun idea that is well-realised on the screen. And the bigger the screen you can watch it on, the better it will seem.
You can buy Pacific Rim: Uprising here.
Americans can pick it up here.
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