Day 34. 91 pages, 40,540 words.

Today’s review was brought to you by Red Dwarf.

Sat down to watch this last night. It was … meh.

First of all, it lost a lot by not having Idris Elba and Ron Perlman in it. But the same can be said about just about everything in the universe, so maybe we should focus on the small victories – like Pacific Rim which managed to have them both in. Or Hellboy, which had Ron Perlman, or The Dark Tower which had Idris Elba.

But now I’m just listing things that were better than this movie, and that’s not fair.

Yes, there were some great giant robot fights and some cool giant-robot-on-kaiju action. I’m not sure how, or if, I’m going to work this into my Glenn continuity, but I’ll work on it. This time it seemed as though they were going to terraform[1] Earth to kaiju / precursor standard by jumping into Mount Fuji and using Rare Earth Elements™ to become super explosive or something. Which – okay, why go to Mount Fuji? Aren’t there more convenient volcanoes or volcanic vents? Like for example, right down in the Pacific riftal area where they came through before? More rare elements there I think. But okay.

[1] For a full explanation of what terraforming is, see Man of Steel. A fairly evenly-matched movie with Pacific Rim: Uprising in terms of quality.

That wasn’t even the most complicated part of their plan, though. Because we also had the creepy kaiju-drifted human kaiju hybrid thing, and his use of kaiju technology in jaeger drones which turned them into kaiju jaegers and opened a new rift, and also the mini-jaegers who managed to mash three kaiju into a single super-kaiju. And all that could have been done in a way tidier manner.

Don’t get me wrong, I really loved the post-kaiju world with its scavenging culture and assorted rogue jaegers, jaeger-police, and covert kaiju research. It was very cool. They just went a bit overboard with it. The “using this tech will turn our tech into theirs and open a rift” idea was nice, but handled weirdly. The “human drifting with kaiju and becoming kaiju” was also cool, but handled weirdly. He could very easily have been re-written into a more obvious kaiju-segment-in-hiding long-game kind of character.

Boyega did alright, and Spaeny (who played the young girl pilot / engineer) was cool. But none of the actors had anywhere to go in this movie. They honestly did the best they could but … well, the humans have always been a bit superfluous in these movies, haven’t they? But even so. The love triangle / boys-compete-over-girl trope was just painfully awkward and pointless[2], and Boyega just seemed nonplussed by the whole thing. And the shady corporation with its jaeger drone thing … where did that whole industry even come from in the absence of any kaiju for ten years?

[2] Passed the Bechdel Test though, so … yay?

That said, it was fun to watch (eight-year-old Wump kept on laughing and replaying the “hilarious” comedic scenes, and it almost held her attention all the way through which the original did not, possibly because she was only five or something when we last watched it), and – like Independence Day – if they ever make a third movie where they go out and kick some serious alien ass … I mean serious kaiju keister … then I’m all in.

– Posted from home in the wee small hours.