Everybody has their thing. Lots of
people like vampire movies despite vampires being generally a pretty dull and
predictable antagonist. Zombie movies are now ten-a-penny and the genre has
diluted itself to a stagnant little cess pit of body parts, mostly thanks to
The Walking Dead and its ongoing mission to bring tedium to our televisions and
social media feeds. I've never figured out quite why, but there are people out
there who actually enjoy Rom-Coms, but then again there are enough people out
there who thing The Big Bang Theory is funny enough to be on its eleventh
season so I suppose anything is possible. God, that show is an affront, but
that's an entirely separate blog altogether. Personally, I imagine it would
take quite a lot for me to get fed up of giant monsters, robots and their
associated movies, despite everything Michael Bay has done to ensure that they
simultaneously stay in the public eye but are so awful that all they do is draw
scorn. That's quite a feat, he should be terribly proud (rather than his
default state of proudly terrible). I haven't found a hard limit yet so I guess
that ceiling is quite a high one; the last Transformers movie was an ordeal,
but we came out basically unscathed, ready and waiting for the next wave of
oversized action figure tie-ins to stomp into view over the beleaguered
horizon. Rampage is out soon and that looks like it might hit the spot but
before that we get a fairly perplexing attempt to extend Pacific Rim's
universe.
I use the
term perplexing advised here not because this is a mystery of Conan Doyle proportions or a Sci Fi brain-melter like Predestination, but more because if you've seen the first movie you might
recall it was fairly well rounded off and finished by the end. There were no cliff-hangers,
implicit or otherwise to suggest that the story had anywhere else to go, a
summation that at least half of the surviving cast agreed with seeing as they
didn't sign up for the re-match. I've long since given up asking why people make
these sequels, because the answer more often than not is "money" and
for me that's probably the worst reason to do something creative I can think
of.
Despite the
Breach being sealed and a nuclear bomb going off on the other side (which
looked pretty terminal to me) it seems that somehow the story continues. Not
only are they still training Jaeger pilots for a threat they supposedly sorted
out, but they're improving the tech and even random members of the public are
seemingly mechanically savvy enough to build their own. I'm all for more girls
getting into STEM, but frankly the prospect of any 16 year old of any gender
putting together a fully functional Mech from scrap parts is remote at best,
let alone being able to pilot it flawlessly the first time it gets turned on.
What you're more likely to get there is a half-finished hunk of bits that
explodes the moment you wire it to the battery and vaporises your entire
neighbourhood. Nobody is going to thank you for that, or hand out any sort of scholarship at MIT. It doesn't get less silly from here on out.
There is an
attempt at least to keep you guessing; you're supposed to think there's a rogue
Jaeger causing havoc, then the Kaiju make an appearance and you're supposed to
wonder how and who's doing it, (actually you're specifically pushed towards
thinking it’s the evil corporation and spoiler alert: it might or might not be)
and I will admit that I didn't see one particular twist coming until just
before hand. I'm still stuck on the very flimsy justification for why there are still Jaegers knocking about, which basicaly amounts to 'reasons'.
There's an
uneven keel to what we're supposed to focus on as an audience. Is it the mostly
superfluous raw recruits we're meant to be engaging with or is it the disgraced
son of a hero and his awkwardly clichéd bromance with Clint Eastwood's
doppelganger offspring? We get snippets from both story arcs but neither is
particularly fulfilling. There's conflict there in both, true enough, but if
you thought for a moment it wasn't all going to be resolved in time for Japan
to get a good monster stomping and the day to be saved then I might politely
ask what rock you've been hiding under all these years. The upshot is that when
the casualties do start racking up, you're hard pushed to remember their names
and even harder pushed to care whether they live or die. The one thing I will say
is that for the most part the Jaegers are fairly easily distinguishable from
one another, unlike certain other giant robot franchises I could mention, but
the fact that they're all new, all shiny and incredibly marketable just makes
me think this whole thing was primarily a two hour long action figure advert.
I'd love to be able to say that the storyline doesn't only exist to transition
between giant robot fight sequences, but that would make me a horrible liar;
you could strip out the petty squabbles between Kids Club Jaeger Pilots that
miraculously and predictably end up solved in time for them to jump in a big
old robot together and not haemorrhage their little brains out; you could
excise the scrap-heap, home-built, mini-Mech saving the day; do we need the
well-trodden path where the urchin and the hero end up being drift compatible
because if they weren't the whole thing would go pear shaped? Is the wildly
inconsistent ret-conned reason for the Kaiju being here in the first place
necessary other than as the sole reason we're here at all? The answer is of
course, no; it wouldn't make a shred of difference.
Put it this
way; if you go into this expecting a bunch of animated fight scenes reminiscent
of Godzilla vs Transformers loosely held together by a bunch of ropey dialogue
and that's your bag, you'll have fun with this. Otherwise, it's probably
telling that the best bit is the cheap pop where they re-use the theme from the
original about three quarters of the way through.
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