So I recently watched Pacific Rim for the first time last year before seeing this film. Although a lot of people swear by that film, I personally didn’t see the huge hype behind it. Sure it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything stellar either. As for this film.. this film was utter shi.. Oh, yes. PG. Got it.
Pacific Rim: Uprising is a 2018 action/sci-fi film directed by Steven S. DeKnight and stars John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny, Jing Tian, Adria Arjona, Zhang Jin, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, and Burn Gorman. The film follows Jake Pentecost—son of Stacker Pentecost—who reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots against a new Kaiju threat.
So this might be one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my entire life. I’m not joking, I’m not being overly dramatic, no—this film is absolutely awful. There was not a single piece of this movie that I thought, “Maybe this might have some redemptive properties to it.” Nope. Not a single thought. The only slightly positive thing about this movie was Boyega’s performance, but at this point nothing can save this film from itself. Although this cast is staked with some awesome talent, none of it pays off and none of it is worth a damn. Eastwood is textbook boring, and others like Gorman and Jing are just laughably awful.
I have to hijack a separate paragraph to talk about three characters in particular, so let’s start off with Cailee Spaeny. She annoyed the living crap out of me. Her dialog, character development, acting, everything. I haven’t been this annoyed by both a character and an actor since Talitha Eliana Bateman in Geostorm. My god. Her dialog was just plain awful. There’s a scene in this film where she begins puking exposition out on Boyega’s character like she’s a huge fan of whatever they’re doing, and the entire time while I was in the theater I could do nothing but roll my eyes and wish that I was watching something else. Another awful performance came from Ivanna Sakhno—you know, the discount Russian Kate McKinnon girl. Anyways, I hated this character. I understand you sometimes need some character conflict to promote growth, but a typical middle school bully is not the route to go. Her performance was terrible, character was terrible.. just terrible. Have I mentioned she was terrible? As for Charlie Day.. how do you mess up Charlie Day? Easy, you put him in this film, apparently. I won’t spoil anything for those who want to witness this piece-of-crap film themselves, but his character’s actions in this movie are laughably bad.
As for this film’s story, they obviously hired a second grader to write this film’s plot on a piece of used toilet paper, and it really shows. It’s predictable in ways that will make you sigh in utter annoyance, and bore you to the point where you wish you could make a drinking game out of this film’s awful elements. To even call this a film is offensive. Everything that the previous movie did right was just ignored and crapped on to the point where I wouldn’t even say this a sequel. It’s more like a really bad piece of fan-fiction, but even that would be insulting to the fan base of the original film. There is just no real story to this movie, and the little plot that it does have is just so boring and bland that you just can’t connect to it—leaving you either laughing or insulting it. There was a huge reveal towards the end of this movie that I was supposed to take seriously, but laughed so hard because it was so over the top ridiculous that I couldn’t keep a straight face.
As for this film’s visuals, you know what? Yeah, no. It wasn’t great. The VFX was unbelievable and did so little to suspend my belief. You can obviously tell that they used green screens in almost every other shot, and the worst part is that they seemed pretty proud of that. When visuals make me question how they managed to pull them off, I have some mad respect for those VFX teams. Films such as War for the Planet of the Apes, and Interstellar are the types of films that these studios should strive towards. As for Uprising I could totally tell that Todd over at SHT Design Studios animated this crap in Microsoft Paint. Although I’m just not one for giant robots and super sized monsters, I am a man of good taste, and this film’s main selling point—robots fighting giant sea monsters—just didn’t nail it in the visuals department.
This movie is just so bad. Like really bad. It’s movies like this that I question what film has become. Although not all film is supposed to be meaningful and have impact, its primary goal is to entertain you. The first Pacific Rim—although not my cup of tea—did just that for a lot of people. They had fun, they enjoyed their time. Uprising does absolutely none of that. It never takes itself seriously and just defecates all over a potentially successful film franchise. There is a reason why Guillermo del Toro didn’t have a single hand in this film. He obviously knew they were making this movie for all the wrong reasons.
That all being said, I had the pleasure of giving Pacific Rim: Uprising a “Very Bad” on theVade Review Bar. There is nothing worth saving from this film. It is without a doubt one of the worst movies I’ve had the awful pleasure of seeing, and I would enjoy nothing more than so see this film plunge itself into the depths of obscurity to never been seen or heard of again.
