There’s a lot about the upcoming Pacific Rim: Uprising that’s got me extremely weary and on-guard about its potential direction. A lot of people (myself included) are presently excited by the fact that John Boyega is going to star as the “Son of Stacker Pentecost”, and some of the surrounding cast looks great.
I want to be excited for this movie, and some part of me is. But, right now, the place Legendary Pictures is in at the moment following the merger and their recent string of films, don’t have me confident. This post is basically just a few of the things that I've been pondering over and wanted to get off my chest, and in no particular order. This is basically just a stream of consciousness thing I sub-headed. There's probably a lot more stuff I could list, but I don't wanna be here all day. Pardon the length I tried to be as concise I possibly could.
The Reasoning[]
del Toro isn’t directing[]
Guillermo del Toro on the set of Pacific Rim (2013)
Guillermo del Toro as director can be a hit-or-miss kind’ve guy when it comes to the quality of films. Out of the bunch he’s filmed, I can easily say I have three favorites: Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, and Blade II. It’s undeniable that there is no film he worked on, either as a director or producer, that doesn’t have a theme or message that ties in with the political, the familial, or is homage to a particular subject that he loves. The execution of his message or homage leaves him with a very split audience.
Hellboy is arguably the only film he’s ever directed that has a sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army in 2008. Before that, he only ever directed a sequel to a film he was not involved in, Blade II, a sequel to Steven Norrington’s Blade from 1998. The sequel that became Uprising would’ve made Pacific Rim the second film he ever got to direct a sequel to.
But because of the usual wrench in the works, he’ll only be acting as producer. Given his less than stellar experience he always hints about during the production of Mimic in 1997, he understandably does not want to be an interference with someone’s directorial duties or vision, so he’s quite literally not involved in any facet of Uprising’s production that has nothing to do with promoting the film. He wrote the story, the baseline for the screenplay, and that’s it, and that's likely changed quite a bit since 2014.
I largely wanna blame the fact that del Toro isn’t directing on the financial blunders that Legendary Entertainment (under Thomas Tull, specifically) made over the last several years since Pacific Rim.
But, I can also acknowledge this is me, as a fan, simply being frustrated with how the industry tends to handle its business. del Toro, as a businessman and a director, knows the pitfalls of his line of work and probably isn’t entirely upset with the outcome, considering, when all is said and done, a sequel is being made and that’s what he wanted. And I can remember there was a point, when the sequel had been greenlit (before the first film released, even) where he really wasn’t being considered as director at all. He didn't know if he was going to direct it.
Pacific Rim is a niche film; del Toro knew that much and he wasn’t interested in appealing to a “wider audience” in any way that compromised his vision for the film. But, Legendary Entertainment’s promotion of the first film was abysmal. The film wasn’t really all that promoted domestically until almost a month before the film’s release in July 2013. And Legendry’s following film endeavors have been subpar, both in script and film quality. A lot of them were only saved by the international markets like China. Others just floundered domestically. This resulted in some in-house fighting.
The consequence of their financial failures on Tull’s watch result in the stalling of the sequel (that was otherwise well on its way into production stages with script writing and location scouting), is a prolonged merger that created a certainty that the sequel would never see the day of light. And, well, let’s face it, del Toro’s sequel won’t ever see the light of day, but DeKnight’s will.
I can’t blame del Toro for moving on to a project he knows will get finished: The Shape of Water. This is the same thing that happened with The Hobbit, and it’s the same thing that has happened with the other project he wanted to work on, At the Mountains of Madness, and I think Dark Justice League (or Justice League: Dark, whatever it was called). The studios the films were affiliated with constantly postponed the projects, or refused to get them started to the point wherein he simply left them. At the Mountains of Madness never got made (largely because they didn't want to produce an R-Rated film. I'm betting they might feel differently nowadays), and The Hobbit is a hollow adaptation of Tolkien's one-book adventure story by a guy who quite literally lost whatever spark that resulted in the stellar Lord of the Rings trilogy.
del Toro not directing Pacific Rim’s sequel means there will be no consistency between the two films, because the directors are different. This happened with the Harry Potter franchise. There was consistency between first two films, then it radically changed (for the better, I think) with Cuaron's directing The Prisoner of Azkaban, and then the latter movies suffered from a identity crisis with the last two directors. This, the loss of consistency, will happen with Uprising. The language, the visuals, cinematography, the logic, everything he and Travis Beacham established with the original film will likely vanish. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is not my favorite del Toro movie by any means, but it remained internally and externally consistent with its 2004 counterpart, Hellboy.
The only thing that really changed in that sequel that I think made it lesser than the original film is that Doug Jones did not reprise his role as Abe Sapien (but that’s because he valued David Hyde Pierce’s voice performance over his and gave the role to Pierce), the throwaway line about getting rid of John Myers (Rupert Evans) from the first film was kinda petty.
I realize Evans, like Hunnam, ended up being preoccupied with another project (a stage play called Kiss of the Spider Woman)[1], they could've handled that a little better. I mean, considering when it seemed like Myers and Hellboy were starting a friendship or partnership by the end of the movie, why have Hellboy go and be salty again and send him off to Antarctica?
It’s a Sequel to Pacific Rim[]
Mako and Raleigh at the end of Pacific Rim.
Pacific Rim is a movie with a beginning-middle-and-end. del Toro wisely chose not to focus on the beginning of the universe the film inhabits beyond establishing points: What happened, how it happened, and how the characters reacted to it. As a result, what information is doled out gradually through the film on a visual and oftentimes, verbal, manner, creates a much lived-in world.
Everything that ever mattered, that was considered important to the film’s narrative, happened before our eyes, and it happened at the very end of the conflict. And the end of the conflict was the end of the story as we know it.
Pacific Rim’s story ends with the closure of the Breach. Mako Mori achieves her dream to become a Jaeger pilot (and in some sense, coming further into her adulthood with the death of her father, Stacker Pentecost, who sacrifices his life so she can save the world), and Raleigh makes amends (to himself, largely) for not being able to save Yancy from Knifehead, by saving Mako’s life and almost dying to close Breach, but surviving to see the future without a war to fight and a partner at his side. Pacific Rim’s story is a circular journey and one that closes on a high note.
And because of that, and as time went on, I’ve always been against a sequel, even when people were clamoring for one four years ago. A sequel to Pacific Rim, more or less nullifies everything the first film went through to establish its universe and its mechanics. In order for a sequel to exist, you basically have to retcon everything that happens in the final moments of Pacific Rim, or even the premise of the film itself (it’s a finale, not a cliffhanger). And I believe that’s why, when a lot of people were talking about “a sequel”, they were all clamoring for “a prequel”, the very thing del Toro wasn’t interested in doing. I get why he wasn't interested, but, dude, your co-writer spent several months teasing the fanbase about characters you never included in your film or other media. I need them receipts.
I don't want the events of the first film to be rendered null and void with a “well, the Kaiju just opened another portal and restarted the war! Here are some new characters!”. And to this end, I’m not really interested in “well, maybe this, and maybe that” theorizing. Nothing can justify it, really. I mean, I’m aware Pacific Rim only has a sequel because it did financially well overseas, and nothing more. A sequel basically means the “end of the world” mentality of the first film was embarrassing premature, and I wish, if they were gunning for a sequel, that hadn't ended the movie with such finality.
The only thing that really kind’ve made me optimistic about the sequel was del Toro’s interest in seeing how a bankrupt world dealt with the recovery process following the Kaiju War, and the potential exploration further into the Anteverse and Precursors.
Obviously, I’m under no illusions that this film would’ve never included Kaiju, Jaegers, or battles between the two, but the fact that his central concern was the aftermath and that that focus was global instead of being centralized in one area was an interesting one. But, the aftermath of the postponement seems to have taken the sequel in a completely different direction. And in addition, Raleigh and Mako as our central characters has been abandoned, largely because of bad timing, and mostly because someone else is writing the script now.
Steven S. DeKnight is not a great director or writer[]
Steven S. DeKnight in all his tattooed glory.
Steven S. DeKnight’s reputation as a showrunner isn’t one I’m going to refute. I mean he’s good at that. He laid the groundwork for STARZ’s long running historical drama series, Spartacus (Blood and Sand, Gods of the Arena, etc.) and he more or less proved that Marvel Studio’s plans for Netflix driven television dramas without the constraints of ABC’s broadcasting standards could work with the first season of Daredevil. He’s a competent showrunner, but, I don’t think he is a great director or writer.
My argument is simply this: He has no real sense for visuals, everything he presents to the audience a static, or rather, basic image. Nothing jumps out as visually stimulating or interesting. And more to the point, his cinematography has often been for poorly lit television shows, that use grayscale and darkness to demonstrate their “maturity”, and that don’t know how to use color and light to their advantage.
If you were take a screencap of an episode for a show he’s directed, you’d have to Photoshop or GIMP the hell out of it get some semblance of color in the frame. On top of that I don’t think he’s a stellar action director (the episodes listed below are a perfect example of that). His directorial and written efforts for Daredevil’s first season finale (“Daredevil”) are the weakest in any finale episode I can remember as far as Marvel shows go after Agents of SHIELD’s first season finale.
In addition to that, he wrote and directed some of the weakest episodes in Smallville’s ten year run, “Justice” and “Ageless”, in two of the series weakest seasons, season six and season four. The same can be said of his directorial and written works for Angel: The Series, “Inside Out” (season 4), “Hell-Bound” (season five), and “Shells” (season five).
To put it lightly, none of DeKnight’s written or directorial efforts before Uprising proves that he’s the right man for the job. He's a genre writer, yeah, but when del Toro is your measuring stick, I feel like they could've done better? I figure he was likely chosen because he was the cheapest option available in a sea of budget directors for a sequel with even less of a budget than del Toro’s Pacific Rim. Could he prove me wrong? Absolutely, I’m not against being proven wrong, but those are my reservations with him.
Ramin Djawadi isn’t composing[]
Ramin Djawadi someplace, smiling and being cute.
Another huge part of Pacific Rim’s identity, next to del Toro as its director and co-writer, is its original score, which was composed by Ramin Djawadi. Djawadi is a member of Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions Company, and he mentored under Zimmer (IIRC). Of the composers who work under or out from Remote Control Productions, like Klaus Badelt, Lorne Balfe, and Junkie XL, Djawadi feels like the one composer (who isn’t Harry Gregson-Williams and James Newton Howard), that is the most disconnected from the "Zimmer sound" (cue Inception horn). Or rather, he took that sound and made it his own. He really created his own identity in a fashion that he can’t be called a “Hans Zimmer Clone” like the aforementioned composers. As far as television work, his score for Prison Break is what turned on to his music, and when he graduated from Marvel Studios with Iron Man in 2008 to HBO Game of Thrones in 2010, I was a certified fan of the guy.
I’m no fan of Game of Thrones (I rather hate it, and book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, in general), but the show would not be what it is without Djawadi’s score creating a sound that is inseparable from and cannot function without his interpretation of the characters and its story. This is one of the major mistakes that Marvel Studios made with the Iron Man franchise. Djawadi created this thematic identity that is undeniably Iron Man and Tony Stark; its arrogant, it’s heroic, and bombastic. It’s Iron Man.
And Marvel Studios ultimately failed to maintain any sort of consistency (and they do this a lot with all of their superheroes, not just Iron Man) by replacing him with composers John Debney (Iron Man 2) and Brian Tyler (Iron Man 3), both who created themes that never matched up with the personality of Tony Stark, let alone identity of Iron Man.
A movie like Pacific Rim usually only ends up with one type of score: It’s the kind David Arnold composed for Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Independence Day, or to use another Godzilla example, it’s the kind of score Alexandre Desplat composed for the 2014 Godzilla film. All of those scores are heavy on the classical orchestral elements, overly operatic, overly serious. Desplat’s aim works for whatever the director of the 2014 was aiming for (a serious movie with no sense of humor or joy), and Arnold, I like his work for ID and G1998, but his aim was with ID was "Adventure! Wonder! Triumphant!" like he did with Stargate, and largely “behold the titanic monster Godzilla!” with the 1998 Godzilla, and that film often didn’t know whether it wanted to be serious or action-comedy.
Ramin Djawadi, collaborating with Tom Morello, RZA, Blake Perlman, and Priscilla Ahn, kind’ve created this “counter-score” where the music was perfectly in tune with the genre Pacific Rim represented and the sound and themes he created were perfectly in tune with the tone of the movie (self-aware, arrogance, a sense of grandeur, joy and gravitas).
When the movie demanded drama, he could deliver it, and when the movie focused on characters like Hannibal Chau and Newton, you didn’t have overly goofy music playing the background, in the same way you didn’t have overly militaristic music playing whenever the PPDC was on-screen. It was the perfect balance of mood. What he did for Pacific Rim, is what he did for Prison Break and Iron Man. It’s what makes his Game of Thrones score so cinematic despite the fact that it’s produced for television.
To know he isn’t returning for the sequel (whether it was his choice, or he was preoccupied with Game of Thrones coming to an end, or DeKnight wanted to pack the production with as many people he knew as possible) is disappointing.
What’s worse about his not coming back is that he is being replaced by John Paesano. And what I’m getting at is that John Paesano as Djawadi’s replacement is a lot like Desplat and David Arnold when it comes to scoring for genre films or television. Only where Arnold is a bit more upscale in terms of overly operatic scores, Desplat is more on Paesano’s scale. I.E.. He’ll arguably turn out the most generic action score for Uprising in the history of generic action scores. Paesano is a composer who, thus far, hasn’t composed anything for television or film that registers on the scale of memorable or vaguely familiar. He’s as flat of a composer as you can get.
Uprising‘s Jaeger Designs Lack Personality[]
-02.jpg){kind=link}
[Muffled Transformers theme in the distance].
I’ve seen some discussions attempt to explain away the Uprising’s design manifesto with theorized explanations like “they’re next gen Jaegers” (Jaegers didn’t have a strict design template, only the internal tech gets updated. The external design is not dictated by Mark status ever), and “well, they just streamlined their designs!” But, when you just flat out attempt not to try in-universe explain away lackluster design, you just see it for what is: Lackluster design, and this is largely because they look like early concept designs, temporary designs, not something you actually decide on as your final product.
Behind the Scenes Featurettes for Industrial Light and Magic’s work on Pacific Rim and subsequent interviews with del Toro, give the more dedicated movie-going audience a look into their design process. del Toro made it explicitly clear that designers working on the Jaegers weren’t to take references directly or emulate established machines from the mech genre, but to create their own characters from scratch.
And for the most part, I think he and the ILM team managed to do well enough that none of the Jaegers in the film really look like carbon copies of any one machine, even with the knowledge that del Toro admitted that Cherno Alpha and Coyote Tango’s designs were inspired by the original Zaku and Guncanon from 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. The Jaegers of the original Pacific Rim can stand alone as unique designs in a long list of mech size comparison posters, and viewers aren't constantly saying “[blank] looks like [blank]” because there was an effort to avoid that.
More importantly, there was a huge emphasis on regional and country-based designs. I realize the big problem with Uprising at the moment is that they’ve revealed absolutely nothing about the Jaegers in that sense, so maybe that'll change, but that’s their fault. Cherno Alpha invokes Russian propaganda pop art, Crimson Typhoon is distinctly representative of pride and colors of China in its design; Striker Eureka was designed to look like a weapon in Australia’s military and invoke image of the Outback terrain vehicles.
Gipsy Danger is deliberately designed to look like a cross between art deco building and a World War II-era airplane, has the attitude of a French kick boxer, and invokes the old west images of John Wayne. Throw in its pejorative name, and you’ve got a true blue, 100% American representative in a mech. The viral marketing goes out of its way to present the blueprints of each Jaeger with cultural and language cues that let the viewer know, this is who the Jaeger fights for. The fact that you had to translate Coyote Tango, Cherno Alpha, and Crimson Typhoon’s blueprints to figure out what they were saying about their specs, really lent to the identities of the Jaeger.
"Gipsy Avenger"'s "blueprint" is a pristine and does not have any of the character of the original blueprint. Comparatively, even Striker Eureka's less worn and cleaner Blueprint is has far more character than the Blueprints for Uprising.
The Jaegers in Pacific Rim: Uprising, however? None of that is present in the designs of the Jaegers. Right off the bat, everyone was quick to compare the designs of at least Gipsy Avenger (ugh, that name) and Saber Athena (the Red Smurfette of the Jaegers) to Evangelion’s EVA Units. Before, the only thing Evangelion fans could say that Pacific Rim lifted from the show’s plot despite the final product being in no way comparable to Evangelion.
Where the original Jaegers we could see and read about were designed in such a way that viewers wouldn’t constantly be saying “it looks like this mech”, the Jaegers in Pacific Rim: Uprising don’t appear to be designed with that philosophy in mind. The most off-putting thing about their design is how dependent the designs are on the hourglass figure designs.
Every single Jaeger has a waist that looks as though Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit were their design bases. I look at Saber and Avenger and I see designs based heavily on Sideswipe or Mobile Police Patlabor mechs. The worse I could say about Titan Redeemer and Guardian Bravo is that they’re unremarkable beyond their color schemes (in the action figures, I’ve no idea if they’ll look that way in the film). I can’t stress enough that there’s nothing pulling me toward these Jaegers.
The promotional blueprints on gojaeger.com don’t give you any sense of their place in the world, the regions of the world they’re meant to defend. There’s no personality in the description, just a bland blue background with a blueprint texture and nothing that really informs about Jaegers in the same way the original blueprints did. To make a long story short, they don’t feel like machines that could exist in our world, and maybe that's simply an impression created by the overly-animated Comic-Con teaser, in which case, again, that's a failure on their part.
They feel and look like absolute fantasies, whereas the original Jaegers were designed to function in that manner that didn’t make them stick out in the film’s universe. Their statuesque in that sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if the loss of ILM as the central FX production team is the reason for that, on top of Uprising’s production team not appearing to follow del Toro’s philosophy for Jaeger design. The Titans in Titanfall 2 have more personality than Uprising’s Jaegers and I’m not really fan of most of Titanfall’s mech designs.
In addendum, I saw a lot of people speculating that the Jaeger designs for Uprising were designed in a such a way that they were meant to appeal to children as opposed to niche specialty collectors and what-not, because the original film "did well with little boys" (or something to that nature). I'm reluctant to believe that's the truth considering Tamashii Nations - high end figure manufactures - are responsible for the figures were getting next year. Kids can't afford that stuff.
"Gipsy Danger 2.0" is a walking redundancy[]
-01.png){kind=link}
I can't wait for the endless merch wave of Gipsy Danger: The Sequel.
Back when del Toro was talking about making a “Gipsy Danger 2.0”, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect. It smacked of a “brand merchandising” move, and moreover, erred on the side of favoritism to the tenth degree. The four years following the release of Pacific Rim saw a merchandising market over-saturated with Gipsy Danger action figures and collectibles, to the point wherein almost no Jaeger that wasn’t Striker Eureka or Cherno Alpha, was getting any real spotlight. Regrettably, this lasted that way up until NECA lost the rights to make action figures for the film. For lack of a better word, I am so tired of looking at Gipsy Danger.
I never wanted a Gipsy Danger 2.0., I thought the idea was redundant as hell and nullified what made the original “Hero Jaeger” unique: the fact that it might’ve been old, dangerous to the health of the pilots, and even retired, but it had what they needed in terms of last ditch resources that were at their immediate disposal. It’s nuclear reactor didn’t make it superior to the newer Jaegers, neither did its age. The film was more or less stating you can rely on the old and the retired; they are still reliable despite what society says about aging things.
Gipsy Danger’s destruction was like the death Stacker Pentecost. It was the end of an era and a machine that completed its objective when the resistance had their back to the wall. It’s age, durability, and the experience of its pilot aided in the end of the war. It descends down on the Precursors present like Jesus on a crucifix, a martyr for the PPDC’s cause. Following its “death”, Mako and Raleigh basically have to move on and cope with that loss.
And I think that’s what del Toro and everyone afterward should’ve done. There’s nothing new about Gipsy Avenger, there’s nothing cool about the fact that it has twice the power now to give its pilots radiation poisoning and cancer after exposure despite the obvious reinforcements they’ve made. There’s nothing cool about the fact that it’s a clone of Gipsy Danger without “Danger” in its name, there’s nothing cool about the fact that the writers decided to cling to the pejoratively named Jaeger instead of creating something new, something that divorced it from that particular brand of racism. Staring at Gipsy Avenger makes me wish they’d been bold enough to make an “original Jaeger”. Instead we get “Gipsy Danger, but not really in name only”.
International Actors May Be a Case of Typhoon and Alpha[]
.png){kind=link}
The partial cast of Pacific Rim: Uprising.
Pacific Rim made a big to do about how international its cast was, when the truth was probably murkier than that. Our American protagonist was a Brit from Newcastle, our Aussies were a Brit and a American actor with terrible accents (they could’ve just hired actual Aussie’s, like Simon Baker and Rose Byrne, for the duration of filming, because they were popular actors at the time).
Our Peruvian-Chinese character was portrayed by an German-Mexican; our German characters were portrayed by an American-born Brit and an American. The Russians were Canadian and French-Canadian. The only actors that seem to be properly represented were the Luu Brothers (Mark, Lance, and Charles), Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba, British, Chinese-Vietnamese-Canadian and Japanese actors who portrayed British, Chinese, and Japanese characters.
Strangely enough, and to its credit, Uprising actually appears to be over-compensating in this regard. They must've heard folk complaining about the Aussie characters, because now there are more true-blue Aussies in the cast of Uprising than a little (I’d say one too many, lmao), and there’s a Ukrainian actress in the film alongside a bunch of Chinese actors, with a side of order one new Japanese actor and a single South Korean actor. Thrown in your American born actors (Scott Eastwood for example), and you got the international cast the original really didn’t have out-of-universe as they did in-universe.
The problem is, that I'm concerned Uprising isn't actually going to deviate that far from how Pacific Rim handled their character roster. One of the biggest disappointments about Pacific Rim was how they easily discarded the pilots of Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha (characters who piloted the more charismatic looking Jaegers) after a brief introduction and a whole stretch of doing nothing for them beyond little character moments in the background. It never sat well with me that the Wei Tang Brothers were never expanded upon (esp. when Beacham was answering people's questions), or even a supporting role characters in the movie when the events of the film took place Hong Kong, where they were living.
The thing that gives me that impression the most is the inclusion of Jing Tian. This particular actress has been in two Legendary Entertainment pictures thus far (The Great Wall, and Kong Skull Island). Every time she’s appeared in a Legendary Pictures film, it’s basically been to appeal to the Chinese Market that Legendary got swallowed up by chasing international box office returns verses domestic box office returns for their films. Her characters rarely contribute anything to the narrative, nothing in the narratives really furthers her character’s arc, and her role in the films is often diminished by having the white male protagonists (Matt Damon and Tom Hiddileston) do almost everything plot-centric.
I figure this will be the fate of a lot of the Asian cast. Legendary makes a big deal about having them, but what are the chances that they’ll actually be allowed to be major characters in the film? A lot of them might end up being what the Wei Tang Brothers ended up being in the original film: Canon fodder and something the media can use for a brief “representation in media” reference, on top of appealing to the market where Pacific Rim made the most money. I hope that isn't true, I hope that this is at least one area that they improved in, but that's the dread.
On the other hand, I’m not expecting much of anyone who isn’t Jake Pentecost, Nate Lambert, and Amara, alongside maybe Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb, to get any real face time. I’m definitely not expecting Rinko as Mako to present in the film beyond a short appearance given how late in the production she was announced as a returning cast member.
I’m absolutely dreading the worse for Raleigh’s character, because they’ll probably do the same thing that del Toro did with Rupert Evan’s character in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, or worse, do what Independence Day: Resurgence did to Steven Hiller (Will Smith), and kill him off-screen. I will be so upset if they do that him.
Too many cooks in the writing kitchen[]
.jpg){kind=link}
Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro behind the scenes on Pacific Rim.
It’s a fact that when del Toro was chosen as director for Pacific Rim, Travis Beacham’s less-than-stellar script needed a great deal of work. Four screenwriters helped del Toro out with the rewriting process of the script (Neil Cross, Drew Pearce, Marcus Dunstan, and Patrick Melton). He was also given a few points from friends and fellow Mexican Directors, Alfonso Cuaron (he came up with Raleigh's line, "You're squeezing me too fight"), and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, in the editing process of the film itself. It was a huge process getting the movie as we know to where it is. However, much of the story we ended up getting came from two people: Travis Beacham and del Toro himself. The film, as a result, is coherent and much of the fat of the original script was removed completely for a clearer narrative.
del Toro’s sequel was written meant to be written by himself and Zak Penn, with Beacham acting as a writing consultant for the story as he said (at the time of the sequel’s announcement) that he was not an active writer for the script and he was preoccupied with another project at the time (Killing on Carnival Row, or The Curiosity). del Toro reportedly sent in at least one version of the script just let Legendary Know “I have something, I’m ready to go” and the rest from there, as we know, is history in a postponed drain.
The sequel as it is now, Uprising, has had six screenwriters working on what I'm assuming has been one single concurrent script with multiple revisions, and four – repeat, four screenwriters ared credited as the central as the head writers (DeKnight, Snyder, Carmichael, and Nowlin). Unlike the original film, whose details were at least knowable through the leaked script, we’ve heard nothing about what the actual plot is (they’ve literally been promoting the movie on the visage of John Boyega, who, god bless him, is a stellar actor, but has also appeared in some mediocre films as of late, Star Wars included among that roster.)
Now, I’m aware that it’s not untoward for film to have multiple screenwriters, but more often than not, a film (and certainly one that’s been postponed to death) with more than one or two writers will often have a multitude of problems, from consistently of the narrative, characters, and world building. Already, with what’s been shown or allowed to see by the public has numerous internal inconsistencies with the language used in Uprising’s promo material verses the original film.
- The 21 states under the United Nations are called “21 Warrior States” (why? what for?)
- “To Fight Monsters We Created Monster of Our Own” (which is more or less a commentary on how humanity lit. created an equivalent to the Kaiju, weapons built by the Precursors, to combat imperial colonialism) has been rewritten as “To Fight Monsters We Became Monsters” (???),
- Their timeline gets the year and date of the “Downfall” and the formation of the PPDC and United Nations meet flat out wrong.
- “Strike Group” has likely been replaced with “Jaeger Fleet”
- And then there’s the broken naming conventions: No Jaegers ever used the same phrasing in their names and this was likely to avoid redundancies. We have a “Gipsy” Danger” and an Echo “Saber”. Uprising simply ignores that, and now we have a “Gipsy” Avenger and “Saber” Athena.
It’s the little things on top of the number of screenwriters that have been involved in this project that don’t give me any confidence. For a short time I thought I could because Emily Carmichael (one of the screenwriters) mentions using the Pacific Rim Wiki as a reference, and top of having the canon bible at her fingertips (I'd assume. It's not like Travis Beacham ran off with it. Right?), these kinds of oversights just aren’t something I’m looking forward to having to manage when time comes to update the articles.
Additionally, a lot of the writing credits of the screenwriters are just not great? Carmichael is a literal unknown, so I don’t really know how her contributions will turn out. I’ve already addressed why I think DeKnight isn’t a great writer based on this previous credits, and I’ll just be brief when I say knowing that they hired someone who worked as a writer on The 100 (a subpar post-apocalyptic television series on TheCW) is a bit disheartening for me. T.S. Nowlin co-wrote the script for the underwhelming Maze Runner, and Jon Spaihts co-wrote the screenplay for the train-wreck that is The Mummy 2017 and Doctor Strange, and Derek Connelly co-wrote Jurassic World with Colin Trevorrow. There are just a lot of movies and shows there that I don't like or didn't enjoy. It just rather kills whatever excitement I might have about this script following the announcement that Boyega was going to be in it.
The Militarization of Pacific Rim: Uprising[]
- "We’re not an army anymore, Mr. Becket. We’re the resistance."
- —Stacker Pentecost
-0.png){kind=link}
The Proud. The Few. Rangers. Visit gojaeger.com to enlist.
So the original script for Pacific Rim was militarized in such a way that there was no real difference between the US Military (the heroes of the story) and the original incarnation of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps., the “Combined Special Defense Corps (COSDEC)”. When the script fell to the responsibility of Guillermo del Toro, he made it a point of divorce the PPDC as far from the military as possible, which includes with how he set the story for the organization up.
In a March 2013 interview with SFX Magazine, he says:
| “ | One of the things I said to the studio from the start is that I didn’t want to make a war movie, I want to make a movie about the resistance, people who are literally using their last resources. I don’t want military ranks and salutes, just people who go in there and raise the Jaegers. I didn’t want a generic approach to the material. I wanted a Japanese girl, an African-American guy, Australians, a Chinese-Peruvian guy. I wanted to say, “it’s us, we’re not going to being saved by a particular country”. | ” |
The Pan Pacific Defense Corps. by the time the movie starts is not a military organization. They're not even officially sanctioned by the United Nations at some point, they're operating on their own with whatever resources they have left. They are effectively a literal "resistance" group. The PPDC functions like a military organization, yeah, but for lack of a better word, it’s not a military. They have one purpose, beat up giant monsters from another dimension, and outside of that, they don't have any real connection with their respective region's military when the latter isn't playing ground support (likely).
Focusing on the end of Pacific Rim’s story divorced it from a the atypical genre war/soldier movie, like, say for example, Starship Troopers, Independence Day and the US Godzilla movies. Movies that place importance on the military, and in particular, the United States Military, who usually ends up being the savior either as an organization, or the one sole dude who represents the US Military.
Now, without a doubt the original Pacific Rim uses forms of military propaganda in its external media and the film itself. A lot about the world building surrounding the rise of the PPDC is based on how the United States Military convinced civilians to join the army, or ration as big companies and whatnot shoveled most of the food and supplies to troops during the Second World War.
The big difference, I think, is how Pacific Rim utilized that propaganda, esp. in the last stretch of the story’s arc. The urgency and immediacy of the threat wasn’t centralized around invading countries under the pretense of fighting of an aggressor (when most behind the scenes reasons for war have been financial gain). It wasn't even a "just in case" scenario, but the PPDC supported what was effectively a losing war that experienced a minor upswing against a colonizing aggressor that sought to wipe out humanity and would probably win.
There are key descriptors in Uprising’s brief and very vague description of the world post-Pacific Rim, and how it uses propaganda tends to give me Independence Day: Resurgence vibes. Thankfully the US Army isn't actually involved with PacRim, so it's not as malicious or questionable. The description is as follows:
| “ | It’s been ten years since The Battle of the Breach and the oceans are still, but restless. Vindicated by the victory at the Breach, the Jaeger program has evolved into the most powerful global defense force in human history. The PPDC now calls upon the best and brightest to rise up and become the next generation of heroes. When the Kaiju threat returns, we will be ready. | ” |
There’s great video essay on how IDR uses actual US Military propaganda to promote the film to really explain what I mean, but the plot for Uprising is basically: A): The Breach Didn't Close, B): The Precursors opened another Breach somewhere.
They’re quite literally saying that, despite the fact that multiple nations were going bankrupt trying keep the Jaeger Program afloat (and were content to damn humanity to death with an ineffectual wall to save money), and no longer had the means to build more Jaegers, they somehow found the money to re-start the Jaeger Program. What the description doesn't tell is when and where that happened.
So, in what could ostensibly be called a period of peace, wherein nothing happened and there was no threat, they advertise the Jaeger Program like it’s just another facet of the military (gojaeger.com is basically a url-play on the real-life site, goarmy.com), complete with a corny contemporary pop song (instead of "Awake" by Godsmack) and a shining military character (Jake Pentecost) standing in the middle of the screen like he’s promoting the US Marines. But, instead of saying “The Few. The Brave. The Marines” he’s telling people to “Join the Jaeger Uprising”.
What are they "uprising" against if they've effectively had no enemy to fight, and the only thing they've done is recruit civvies like a run-of-the-mill military organization, and stockpile weapons that they somehow found money to keep building when circumstances didn't call for them any longer? Why are the five Jaegers we've seen being described as though they've seen combat with Kaiju, when the teaser description posits otherwise, and why make another "Mark" where they're are simply only two Mark-5's and no threat to actually justify that upgrade?
The recruitment advertisement was never the central focus of the original film or its advertisement. The Viral Marketing website, panpacificdefense.com simulated it, yeah, but again, it wasn’t the focus of the film and the circumstances at the very least warranted it in-universe. Pacific Rim: Uprising on the other hand, the viral marketing website, in terms of in-universe, seems to be promoting an organization that was designed not to be military in the original Pacific Rim. Uprising seems to have the PPDC functioning like it is one in a time of peace and has been utilized as a generic "defense force" (like in those video games) when there's no real need for them?
Like, if the idea is that they've basically become a military force, the movie should probably comment on that? Because the idea of the entire world flipping on its head and pulling a Mobile Suit Gundam is particularly troubling when the point of Pacific Rim was "humans fighting giant monsters in giant robots... with heart".
Everything planned before it is pretty much shadows and dust[]
_Textless.jpg){kind=link}
Wanna read a comic book that introduces new characters with little explanation? Tales of the Drift is for you.
One of the things I looked forward to about del Toro’s sequel was the prospect of finally meeting all of the characters Travis Beacham mentioned or that we got see in the prologue or the early part of the war. Everything about the world building referenced in the prorogue intrigued me so much.
So, while I wasn’t totally keen on the sequel, I was definitely looking forward an animated series that explored the earlier point of the Kaiju War, and the ongoing comic book series that would’ve explored other Jaeger pilots, hopefully the ones we were all told about. That was the shiny star out of all of that apprehension.
Instead, Legendary Entertainment’s merger derailed the entire project, every project connected to del Toro’s sequel is just gone. The ongoing series got butchered into a lackluster miniseries, the animated series is pretty much cancelled. One of the most sobering things about keeping track of the production of the sequel is knowing the more interesting aspects of the sequel were abandoned.
Conclusion[]
Pacific Rim: Uprising is being helmed and produced by a lot of people I don’t like, actors, director and writers alike. On top of that, the things I was looking forward to didn’t happen, and the potential and growing loss of consistency (for an already really inconsistent universe) has me greatly concerned. I want to be proven wrong, so, I hope Uprising turns out alright, because my weariness toward the sequel isn't too different from how initially reacted to Pacific Rim being made at all when I saw the teaser back in December 2012. "The hell is this?" I believe were my exact words.