Running on the Rims

Sorry about the delay in posting. I had keyboard problems - but also a movie that I didn’t have much to say about. Of course we had to see Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) even if Guillermo del Toro wasn’t directing (it is Steven DeKnight’s feature debut). But we didn’t have high hopes.

It starts with John Boyega, son of the mighty Stacker Pentecost from PR1, leading a sketchy group to steal some tech from a Jaeger junkyard. But plucky little Cailee Spaeny got there first. She needs the part for her funky little one-pilot Jaeger. So we get a nice little three-way battle that ends with the police coming done and forcibly inducting them into the Jaeger forces, working with Scott Eastwood and Rinko Kikuichi.

So, only one returning character (Kikuchi). So I was pretty stoked when the two mad scientists, Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, showed up. Smarmy Day is working with some megacorp doing ethically ambiguous work on the kaiju. Gorman, more hunchbacked and lumpy than ever, is still working with the Jaeger forces.

I’m just going to cut to the spoiler and let you know: Day has a bit of kaiju cortex and he’s been having drift-sex with it. In fact, he may be married to it, it isn’t clear. But he’s definitely had his mind taken over.

A lot of the movie is about a plot by megacorp to replace Jaegers with drones, possibly drones with kaiju brains. Since the rift was closed in the last movie, there aren’t a lot of kaiju fights for most of the movie. Then Charlie Day and the kaiju brains start opening rifts everywhere, and then there are some fights.

The first movie was pretty much a fun piece of noise, fluff, and special effects. So is this one. I liked the traitor to humanity stuff, but the rest of the movie was not that original. So we had fun and immediately forgot it. We will probably rewatch and it may even improve with time. But it was better when del Toro did it.