Review of Reverse FU - Pacific Rim: Uprising

Arrgh. That is the noise I associate with this film. Because you’re saying it in frustration or it’s the sound of the “bored snore”.

If you read my review of the first Pacific Rim, you’ll know that I really, really love that movie and I was so excited to see this movie. Having gone into it and come out a few degrees more cynical, I now go on IMDb and check the crew of any movie I see just to make sure I don’t walk into a committee-designed product again.

Let me clarify. You have a director making his feature-film debut on an enormously-budgeted movie, whose previous work has been stringently linked to TV and practical stuntwork rather than CGI. You have 7 goddamn producers credited, including the first film’s director, the star of your movie, and his agent. And your writers are an inexperienced director, a person who has only written low-budget short films before, the writer of The Maze Runner movie and someone who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. How did you expect your film to go, exactly?

This movie feels like a corporate product which is carefully planned by people who thought only of dollar signs, and came into work sad that they even had to put on clothes this morning. The Asian neon, anime action and beautiful camerawork of Guillermo del Toro has been replaced with sh#tty green screen, action consisting of mo-capped backyard wrestling, and cinematography from a recently-divorced Michael Bay. Why? Because no one on this film gave a sh*t.

Let’s talk actors. Aside from John Boyega, who at least provides some sort of effort in this movie, everyone in this movie feels like a college drama student hired at minimum wage with their only comforts being “enthusiasm”. The only other actors I even recognized in this movie were Scott Eastwood (who, like Jai Courtney, had his best performance in Suicide Squad as an incidental character) and Oscar-nominee Rinko Kikuchi, who appeared only to sort of connect the two Pacific Rim movies and then died after 5 minutes of screen time. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman return from the first Pacific Rim, to get high on cocaine and yell dramatically at the camera respectively.

And apparently, the son of Japanese screen legend Sonny Chiba is in this movie. Not the still-alive and awesome, unique Sonny Chiba, but his son, who’s a substandard grooming brand ambassador. Effectively sums up my opinion of this movie.

Not the wild burst of creativity and fun, but the calculated marketing decision.

Even the goddamn music and visual effects have been neglected in favour of blandly prostituting a license. Ramin Djawadi and Tom Morello did an incredible job on the first Pacific Rim (so incredible I even linked their music in the review – here it is again). But this time, they get replaced by Lorne Balfe, who is not a bad composer by any means (look at MI: Fallout and Ghost in the Shell), but he’s content to just repeat the generic bass of his teacher Hans Zimmer and call it a day, without any of Djawadi or Morello’s work remaining.

And the visual effects are just boring CGI robots without any of del Toro’s character or imagination. In fact, I actually saw an ad about Surface Pro laptops being used for rendering the VFX of this film, and in the ad, they just moved some posing robots to positions on photos of a field to create shots from the movie. No bull.

To sum up? F^%k this intolerable corporate product without any of the heart, sound, or fury that brought me to this franchise in the first place.

Anyway, what do you think of this film? I know someone saw it. Didn’t do much good for the box-office though (small mercies).