Pacific Rim 2: Uprising

The story is senseless and is very poorly told. I just don't know who is who, who is good or who is bad. It is so silly to see the characters running inside the robot to make the robot run. If technology is so advanced, couldn't they just make a neural link? The only good thing is that this time the film is in daylight, so at least I can see what is happening.

Although I did enjoy this movie, and it was a joy to watch on the big screen, the overall tone, and mood are so different from the first. The difference between fight scenes at night vs broad daylight may not seem like a big deal, but for some reason it really stood out to me. It just feels like this one was more geared toward kids, and potentially selling action figures. I didn't hate it by any means, but it really lacked what made the first one so unique, and intriguing to me.

A sequel to a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. What was expected? Bigger robots fighting bigger monsters. The same thing with little tweaks - as most sequels do. What we got?

A product. A film generated by an AI. I wasn't there, but I assume it went something like this. The first meeting of the creators of this movie follows.

Ok, Google, what do modern kids like?

1. Robots (Transformers) 2. Scary cool monsters 3. Robots fighting monsters 4. Robots fighting robots 5. Memes from 2009 (Trololo sing) really? + memes from 2017 (the salt). 6. Horribly executed kid rebel subplots (Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger games whatever) 7. Action 8. Forced drama? 9. Bad jokes?

Ok, let's take The Independence Day Resurgence's basic plot and fail miserably at everything. Done.

In other words, there is nothing in this movie besides action scenes. The plot lives on its own, there are no characters, and even their substitutes are completely disconnected from the dead plot. Nothing they do matter, it just follows typical cliches until the end. It even gets confusing at some point, but then you see the light at the end of the tunnel. It rushes the ending knowing that by this point nobody cares.

All the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Most of the actors are just having fun knowing that there's no need to get invested into anything here. Sadly, Scott Eastwood's face is stuck in one emotion and is unable to display anything else.

CGI crews did a good job, I guess. Looks fine. There's even one creative action scene involving buildings. Other than that the action is generic, even IMAX can't make it feel better. Maybe it would've been more impressive but the overabundance of CGI city destruction in modern blockbusters seriously lowers the threshold for getting impressed by CGI.

I'd compare this to a long video game cut-scene, but modern games have more character development and creative visuals in their cut-scenes. For instance, pretty much all Blizzard cut-scenes are visual masterpieces.

Final verdict: not entertaining on the big screen and a total waste of time for home viewing.

Strangely enough, the quality of big blockbuster movies is reaching the point where they have the same level of quality as those of game cinematics. The acting part and the "story" are so forgettable that the CGI is all that remains. And the CGI is stupid. I mean, not bad, just completely dumb. I've seen this done real time in computer games. The creators of this movie bet big money on condescendingly telling their entire audience that they are cretins for watching and, of course, paying for this. The whole movie is stupid, not the CGI, the CGI is slightly more interesting.

And you might think that I am one of those haters, but I am not. I actually loved the actors and how they played. Imagine good actors, waiting and training their entire life to get into the big leagues, and when they get there they have to perform admirably... on a dumb script. I am not going through it, just consider this: the entire premise of the movie is that kaiju blood reacts violently with rare earth minerals. So all you need to do is shoot him with rare earth mineral bullets! It was that bad.

A film you have seen before but in different packaging. Giant robot annoying kids anti hero etc. Just wasn't good. A film to watch when there is nothing else to watch.