Pacific Rim Uprising
Mar. 29th, 2018 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackPrepare for rant! There's quite a lot I liked, but quite a lot I objected to.
I loved the first bit with the girl escaping in her mini homebuilt Jaeger. I hoped to like the school but there wasn't much of it. There was a lot of potential there that could have been but wasn't -- older students anxiously searching for their drift-partner, people fighting in different combinations, etc
I liked that the boring white guy wasn't the main character.
The film was really foreshadowing "drones are bad" (even though, if they kept the jaegers being run by same pilots and organisation, not losing pilots seems incredibly better), but it felt like an exciting twist when they weren't just a political problem but got taken over by Kaiju-flesh.
I loved that MM was all important and stuff now, even though really sad she was killed.
But I had a lot of problems with the second half. The first film jumped in with serious stakes from the start, but this film didn't really have anything important except for "will she escape arrest" until things started escalating, and then it just escalated all the way up to the end, it didn't feel like *many* things happened, it just felt like someone held up a piece of card saying "world in jeopardy now" and it didn't FEEL in jeopardy.
I'm not an expert author so I can't describe how to do this *right* but I can recognise when it's *wrong*, when you don't have ebbs and flows of tension, you just have one ninety minute fight scene, you don't feel like there's a whole world at war, you feel like you're watching a single robot fight.
It left out a lot of things you'd expect. Like, there wasn't what I'd really call an 'uprising'. THERE WASN'T A KAIJU INVASION. There was ONE jaeger/kaiju fight. ONE.
Executive A: We finished the Pacific Rim sequel!
Executive B: Are there giant robot/giant monster fights? That's the most important thing
Executive A: Fights? Fights plural?
And the ENTIRE PREMISE is that giant robots are better at fighting kaiju than dropping missiles on them from orbit. Which is a stretch, but the first film sensibly DIDN'T DWELL ON THIS so I was happy to let it ride and imagine good explanations for myself. But the second film, the dramatic climax is "the robot can't defeat the giant monster, lets drop an ad-hoc missile on it from orbit instead". That worked a lot better. Hey, maybe you should have been doing that more?
Lots of things in the middle seemed contrived. The kaiju have been gone for ten years. People suspect they're coming back but no-one's sure. So the PPDC have been doing... what? But apparently there was a sudden drone-kaiju-robot attack that neatly damaged all jaegers, killed ALL pilots but spared ALL cadets?
If there's a sequel I hope we learn more about the aliens. And that it has the character of the second film with the epic scope of the first one.
I loved the first bit with the girl escaping in her mini homebuilt Jaeger. I hoped to like the school but there wasn't much of it. There was a lot of potential there that could have been but wasn't -- older students anxiously searching for their drift-partner, people fighting in different combinations, etc
I liked that the boring white guy wasn't the main character.
The film was really foreshadowing "drones are bad" (even though, if they kept the jaegers being run by same pilots and organisation, not losing pilots seems incredibly better), but it felt like an exciting twist when they weren't just a political problem but got taken over by Kaiju-flesh.
I loved that MM was all important and stuff now, even though really sad she was killed.
But I had a lot of problems with the second half. The first film jumped in with serious stakes from the start, but this film didn't really have anything important except for "will she escape arrest" until things started escalating, and then it just escalated all the way up to the end, it didn't feel like *many* things happened, it just felt like someone held up a piece of card saying "world in jeopardy now" and it didn't FEEL in jeopardy.
I'm not an expert author so I can't describe how to do this *right* but I can recognise when it's *wrong*, when you don't have ebbs and flows of tension, you just have one ninety minute fight scene, you don't feel like there's a whole world at war, you feel like you're watching a single robot fight.
It left out a lot of things you'd expect. Like, there wasn't what I'd really call an 'uprising'. THERE WASN'T A KAIJU INVASION. There was ONE jaeger/kaiju fight. ONE.
Executive A: We finished the Pacific Rim sequel!
Executive B: Are there giant robot/giant monster fights? That's the most important thing
Executive A: Fights? Fights plural?
And the ENTIRE PREMISE is that giant robots are better at fighting kaiju than dropping missiles on them from orbit. Which is a stretch, but the first film sensibly DIDN'T DWELL ON THIS so I was happy to let it ride and imagine good explanations for myself. But the second film, the dramatic climax is "the robot can't defeat the giant monster, lets drop an ad-hoc missile on it from orbit instead". That worked a lot better. Hey, maybe you should have been doing that more?
Lots of things in the middle seemed contrived. The kaiju have been gone for ten years. People suspect they're coming back but no-one's sure. So the PPDC have been doing... what? But apparently there was a sudden drone-kaiju-robot attack that neatly damaged all jaegers, killed ALL pilots but spared ALL cadets?
If there's a sequel I hope we learn more about the aliens. And that it has the character of the second film with the epic scope of the first one.