Spoilers for Pacific Rim Uprising.
–
Pacific Rim Uprising is a belated sequel that is at once obsessed with the original movie and feels as if the creators didn’t give it the full attention of a rewatch. By which we mean there’s a lot of effort made to build on the mythology of Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 Pacific Rim and retcon it to be a more suitable franchise building ground, and yet Uprising can’t avoid making one gigantic plot hole bigger than the breach by which Level 5 Kaiju burst through.
That we have a Pacific Rim 2 is by itself remarkable. The first movie technically broke even (it just made double its $190 million budget, which per Hollywood math constitutes a success) but did so with a below average domestic taking and overall apathy around the project despite the del Toro faithful. However, when rights-holder Legendary was bought by the China-based Wanda Group, everything flipped and the sequel moved ahead – the original was a sizeable hit there and the franchise had great potential in the market.
Related:How Pacific Rim’s Alternate Timeline & History Works
All of that is important because it reveals the real angling of the sequel: something more global and forward-thinking. So while it is very much a rock ’em sock ’em adventure (one fight move even seems to be directly evoking those toy robots), efforts are made to craft a forward-propulsing mythology. And here’s where the problem comes from.
This Page: The Precursor And Kaiju Motivations Change In Pacific Rim 2
What The Precursors Want In Pacific Rim
In Pacific Rim, any and all grander story motivation exists exclusively to enable mech-on-monster fights. Del Toro skips over much of the in-world logic to get to the existence of Jaeger’s and Kaiju (including the logic of why robots are the first form of defence), but as the movie gets on does use a subplot with Charlie Day and Burn Gorman to provide some semblance of motivation.
This isn’t just aimless monsters swanning out of the ocean to cause destruction but Stage 1 of a targeted world domination plan. Human-sized, extra-universe creatures known as the Precursors have built the Kaiju using bio-organic tech and send them over to other dimensions. The initial waves are hounds, checking the landscape and charting the world; next comes the exterminators, wiping out the indigenous population (in this case, humanity), before the creators themselves move over. Earth has been chosen due to its CO2-heavy atmosphere, a sly current affair tie-in that creates a more tangible global warming threat (it’s alleged an invasion was tried at the time of the dinosaurs but the climate wasn’t right).
We know all this thanks to the monster’s neural network; Day’s Newt and Gorman’s Gottlieb drift with a Kaiju brain and due to the massive cross-species connection are able to read deep in the Precursor plot. Now, technically we only have their interpretation as a guide, but the way the film presents it is pretty resolute.
Related: Pacific Rim 2 Has A Post-Credits Scene… At The Start Of The Credits
At the end, Pacific Rim did travel briefly over to the Anteverse and reveal a mysterious, day-glo land which seemed to confirm much of this, but that was really it. And it was all that was needed for a film whose best moment was a giant robot hitting a monster in the face with a boat.
What The Precursors Want In Uprising
On the surface, things are similar in Pacific Rim Uprising. The Precursor approach is altered due to the breach having been closed – much of the plot is about the Kaiju trying to use the neural network to manipulate humanity into reopening the rift between worlds – but once again they’re trying to take over our world for themselves.
However, this time the methodology is actually different: rather than using Kaiju to clear out the decks, they’re now living terraform-bombs. The blood inside the monsters is highly potent fuel – even used by Gottlieb to create Jaeger rockets – an incidental side note in the original but a key aspect of the Precursor plan this time; all Kaiju are on the same mission to throw themselves into active volcano Mount Fuji, starting a cataclysmic eruption that will fracture the entire pacific shelf and completely alter the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s stated explicitly this is to get the world ready for the Precursors.
Pacific Rim Uprising‘s plot hole should be immediately obvious: the goal of the Precursors has been changed from invasion to terraforming, with their decision to attack Earth due to its already suitable atmosphere completely changed. And while that could be explained away to misinterpretation on our part of their true motives, none of the proposed “clues” work.
The Kaiju Plan Plot Hole
Now, the location of the breach in the Pacific rim in the first film does fit with an assault on Japan. Unfortunately, what comes out of it does not. The Kaiju go in any which direction except Japan – San Francisco, Sydney, Hong Kong – which much more fits a random research attack than a targeted mission. And yet that’s exactly what Uprising wants us to believe: the heroes crack the truth by using the attack paths of prior Kaiju to deduce Mount Fuji was always the goal, with no evidence scouts slowly discovering it. This is a major realignment of what the Precursors are up to and the threat that defines the entire original movie.
Related: Breaking Down Pacific Rim 2’s Ending & Sequel Tease
But even within Uprising this goal isn’t consistent. The multiple new breaches from the Kaiju-infected drones are created all around the Pacific, some almost on the other side of the world from Fuji. There’s no logic or consideration of the suicide mission until it’s revealed in the film, almost revealing a haphazard scripting process.
The reason why this has happened is a mixture of poor storytelling in the movie and a bigger move to provide a simpler attack plan ahead of a threequel, something that’s understandable if not excusable. That’s doubly true considering how well the movie’s world-building is otherwise.
How Uprising Evolves (And Retcons) Pacific Rim
As already alluded to, Pacific Rim Uprising has made several retcons to the original’s mythology, and for the most part they’re highly successful. Perhaps the smartest move is working in drone brains. The biggest suspension of disbelief in the first film was that the united powers of the world decided manned mechs were the best first-response to monsters, despite all the inherent risks giant humanoids introduced. It doesn’t excuse them being fifteen years later but at least rounds out a world that felt bred on Transformers.
On a more human level, the filmmakers create a more variable nature to the mind-melding drift that allows pilots to command a Jaeger, creating a percentage score that deepens the level of connection between characters. And, of course, they give Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost a son, Jake. This is Uprising‘s smartest move, allowing it to essentially trade as a legacy-quel despite the previous movie only being five years old and few having strong memories of it. That they cast the unfathomably charismatic John Boyega in the role is a bonus.
But the biggest retcon is that attempt to grow the alien villains assaulting Earth, which is not only the most convoluted but also clearly sequel-focused. They get a name – the word Precursor isn’t used once in the original Pacific Rim – and have a clearer objective, yet in doing so Pacific Rim Uprising oversteps and we end up with it being both reductive – simple terraforming is overdone – and uninteresting. That it’s a plot hole is just an added problem.
–
Del Toro understood that exposition should be kept to a minimum and teased out to build plot around the monster fights. Pacific Rim Uprising likewise tries to keep things focused on the action, yet doesn’t have quite the same deft hand.
Next: Should Pacific Rim Join Kong & Godzilla In The MonsterVerse?
Key Release Dates
Pacific Rim: Uprising
Release Date:2018-03-23
