Sequels hardly live up to their originals, that’s a stated fact. But what Pacific Rim Uprising has done to the original is akin to what Gus Van Sant did to Hitchcock’s Psycho or what our very own Ram Gopal Varma did to Sholay.
Yes, a terrible travesty.
When Guillermo del Toro came up with Pacific Rim in 2013, it had every possibility to look like a Transformers copycat.
But what made it rise above the Bay cut was a passionate investment in the machines and the monsters it created, a hallmark of Del Toro’s empathy.
A child’s fantasy of action and demolition, of impossibly giant figures who can't exchange a punch without taking a skyscraper down pumped a grand sense fun that washed out cynicism out of summer blockbusters.
Oh, how much we clapped!
All that has come undone in the sequel.
Set a decade later, a voiceover introduces us to a generation born into war, beginning with Jake, the son of Idris Elba's character Stacker Pentecost, who steals to make a living. John Boyega, filling in between his Star Wars assignments, plays Jake with a pronounced British accent, perhaps his producing credit allows him this levity. When Jake stumbles into Amara (Cailee Spaeny) who has built her own mini jaeger, both get sent to the training academy where much of the first film was set. The trainees include a calculated bunch of human samples from every race, and a sterile Scott Eastwood as a major. The rest constitutes of bland soliloquies about how ‘you should never let others define you’, little bit of training, and of course, the return of kajius so that we can cancel the apocalypse yet again.
It’s common knowledge that the original failed to warm the audience in the US, but it wowed audiences in China, pulling in a sizeable amount of collections.
It’s no wonder that Pacific Rim Uprising is a bait for the Chinese, putting many Asian actors in the proceedings, especially Chinese star Jing Tian who gets her own Han Solo moment in the climax.
In the ingenuity of Del Toro, brawls were staged at night, making way for neon hues, and an astonishing aesthetic of lights and shadows. The sequel chooses daytime and sunshine for the combats, perhaps to offer clarity in the fight sequences which ends up stripping the kaijus of any convincing menace. Del Toro also used clever camera tactics to make kaijus and jaegars appear monstrous, but DeKnight’s detached lensing does the opposite, making it almost the Power Rangers variety of silly.
The screenplay is credited to four minds: Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, TS Nowlin, and director Steven S DeKnight, but it emerges more as a product of business meetings than creative churning.
No thematic desire, no interest in deepening the mythology of personal demons, no concern for improving on the aesthetic. Nothing. Just the same old destruction porn.
The sense of wonder, the reach of curiosity, and an eye for excitement, curated with so much love by Del Toro gets trashed by fiscal minds out to grab some money, recycling spare parts of the original without any contemplation.
Guillermo del Toro’s heart beats for unfathomable dreams and nightmares. Pacific Rim was born out of one such childlike gleeful dream. DeKnight has turned the same dream into a stilted nightmare.
To see Pacific Rim Uprising is to miss the artistry that Del Toro could bring to clash-clank-boom harvests.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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