#scientists are still baffled! physicists hate him!

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i had to

[rationalisms]

list of reasons why i hated pacific rim: uprising

this is gonna be a long post so i apologize in advance. it will also have spoilers for the plot of pacific rim: uprising so tread carefully.

look sorry to be That Film Graduate but it was just so hideous... i didn't expect them to be able to replicate del toro's excellent visual work but it's still disappointing that they didn't even try to the point where the two films don't even look like they belong in the same franchise. but more than that, it wasn't even visually appealing on its own terms. the CGI was an absolute mess (you know that "shitty grey rubber tubes flaping around in the ocean" post? that's what the kaiju looked like. like, i literally couldn't even enjoy the giant lizards because they looked so dumb and plastic toy like). the colour grading was so muddy and monotone. apart from the constant misapplied slow mo shots there was zero interesting or unique editing work going on. all of it looked factory processed and boring and that's an absolute shame considering the original was so fantastic partly because it was so successful visually.

apart from that... look, i know pacific rim took money from the military too and was in some ways a pro military plot but uprising really takes the cake. when they showed jaegers being used for law enforcement against civilians (!!!) i figured they were going for a corrupt ppdc villain figure but no, instead we're apparently supposed to think that's a good thing and that the ppdc are still heroes??the jaegers are meant to be a symbol of human ingenuity and spirit and most importantly a symbol of defiance against a predicated fate. to make them into weapons of law enforcement shits on the spirit of the original in every way. and unsurprisingly both protagonists start out not wanting to be part of the military but end up loving it and realizing that it's Family and Good and the entire time we're hit over the head with how reasonable and nice the military people are and with how difficult and obstinate the protags are being for not seeing that. it's a propaganda wet dream and it was actually sickening to watch.

perhaps the most insulting thing was the way they turned mako into an extension of that. she was never just a “cog in the machine” character who passively accepted hierarchies and orders and making her a representative figure of that in uprising is a huge misunderstanding of her character. (also, speaking of mistreating old characters, why the hell is hermann a chemist now?? he's a computer scientist, (quantum) physicist and mathematician and honestly that's already enough specializations. plus, he always looked on the "life sciences" somewhat with disdain. it really just feels like they used him as the stand-in for the Weird Science Guy every sci-fi film needs to have rather than treating him as his own character and it really shows in the writing of him as well, which feels flat and littered with clichés.)

that apologism doesn't just extend to the military sector either but extends to the private sector characters too. while we're initially meant to see liwen shao as an antagonist, it's later revealed she was an innocent pawn of newt's/the precursor's machinations and she gets to have her big hero moment where she saves the protagonists and aww, isn't she a nice lovely lady. a nice lovely lady who wants to fill the world with jaeger drones who, again, act as law enforcement against civilians, as if that wasn't a dystopian nightmare, but hey, nobody cares about that! look at her smile! it's just horrifying? i realize that this sort of propaganda is par for the course in hollywood but uprising puts it on so thickly that it makes you feel like you're choking on it. it borders on parody at times and made me intensely uncomfortable watching it.

the film also suffers badly from overpopulation especially as most of the newly introduced characters are incredibly one-dimensional. there wasn't enough time to focus on all of them enough to make them feel like real people and as a result i didn't care about their fates. i literally can't remember their names for the most part. i thought there couldn't be a more bland and boring blond white guy lead in pacific rim than raleigh becket but scott eastwood's character really takes the cake. did he have a personality? who knows! special shout-out to the female character literally only added as a love interest for the protags (yes, both) who genuinely had absolutely no other role to play otherwise. not even one unrelated scene. g-d, i hate this film.

speaking of that, the film suffered from bad tonal issues not only as a result of the above but also because of incredibly baffling pacing. multiple times there's big dramatic moments where we're meant to care about some characters fate, peaking in one of the cadets dying in the final fight, but none of the people i was with couldn't muster up any energy to care because, again, we didn't even know their names or anything about them and their life. but worse than that, the film doesn't seem to care either. it gives you a few seconds with sad violins and then immediately moves on and the tragic event just never comes up again. perhaps most insultingly this happens when mako dies, for which i still cannot find a reason honestly. it certainly wasn't to change anything about jake's disposition because her death isn't even the pivotal character changing moment for him. we get one short scene of him mourning and then she's literally never mentioned again and it's right back to badly written quips and jokes in the next scene. no one ever brings her up again even though there's several characters who knew her and worked with her. it's an insult to her character and the original film and she deserved better than that.

speaking of insults to the original film, the fights really felt that way too. the mindless property destruction and complete lack of care was so antithetical to pacific rim which always valued life above all. one short line by hermann that the civilians were all in underground shelters now so run wild i guess was all the reference to it we got, even though we literally saw many civilians not make it into the shelters in time in the scene before that. but nobody cared. the original film was precise about fights which took place in cities. the number one goal was always the preservation of life, luring them back into the water, getting them away from the coast line. when destruction happened it did so for dramatic effect. in uprising it just felt fetishistic. we were treated to scenes in which the jaegers used their environment as weapons completely carelessly and the amount of smashed buildings and destroyed property bordered on the ludicrous. that really feels like it misunderstands the point and spirit of kaiju films and tbh it's something that americans have never gotten about the genre anyway.

apart from that the plot was ridiculous. the handwavey retcon of the first film that posits the kaiju's goal as "rare earth minerals" (lol) which obviously only exist on mt. fuji is hilariously bad. look, i don't need a complex plot from my monster movies, pacrim wasn't shy about being a pretense for big robots punching big lizards either. but at least when pacrim used science they actually put some effort into at least making it sound believable. the paper thin plot of uprising which is riddled with holes just seems insulting to the viewer. that's the difference between the two films, really. uprising tries to be as carefree about being a dumb sci-fi film as pacrim was, but fails to understand that pacrim still took the genre and its viewers seriously. it didn't try to be anything more than a monster movie, but it didn't treat the trappings of the genre as if they don't matter or can just be background noise. that's fundamentally why uprising fails imo. because it doesn't seem to understand that pacific rim worked, not by not taking itself seriously, but by taking itself seriously enough.

anyway, i could list more but at this point i have honestly written enough. i am happy for the people who enjoyed the film and hope they have fun with it but i am going to pretend the sequel remained cancelled. charlie out.