Welcome back to Sound Off!, a semi-regular column where members of Speculative Chic gather together to chat about the latest BIG THING in entertainment. This time, hop into your Jaeger and discuss Pacific Rim: Uprising, which premiered in the United States on Friday, March 23, 2018.

Sound Off! is meant to be a reaction, but not necessarily a review. After all, while we are all individuals, even mutual love of something (or hate) can come from different places: you may find everything from critique to fangirling to maybe even hate-watching.

Now, join J.L. Gribble, Erica Hildebrand, and Merrin as they talk about Pacific Rim: Uprising. [Note: Watch for progressive spoilers after the giant red warnings!]

J.L.: I could make a crack here about how I don’t think the original Pacific Rim was the perfect movie people make it out to be and that I’d lose my feminist nerd cred for saying so, but that’s gatekeeping and Speculative Chic doesn’t roll that way. Instead, I’ll acknowledge that Pacific Rim was a shockingly excellent film for what it is. And remind readers that it’s highly unlikely that the stars would align twice and give us another giant robots versus giant aliens movie with that level of story-telling quality.

So, I went into Pacific Rim: Uprising expecting fun giant robots versus giant aliens with some pretty actors, some quippy dialogue, and all the rampant city destruction I could handle. On that front, I was not disappointed.

Because this is a sequel, obviously some of the expected plot points were hit: adult child attempting to live up to the expectations/reputation of a deceased parent, the ill-timed death of a favorite from the original film, and a scrappy youngster whose story arc is fueled by tragic backstory. Because this is a Pacific Rim sequel, we also got robot on robot action and multiple robots fighting multiple aliens. The stakes have to get higher in any sequel, and this is no exception.

Buried under the spectacle and expected plot points were a few surprises, however. John Boyega continues to shine in every role he’s given (not a surprise), but his character’s relationships with other characters did not always follow the other expectations of sequels everywhere. His strongest relationship was with the scrappy youngster, whose character was nowhere near as annoying as I expected from the trailers. The possible romantic triangle thread set up at the very beginning did not end up taking time away from the main story, because the three characters are adults with jobs to do who have bigger problems than “does he/does she?” angst. It also would have been quite easy for the first big bad to be exactly what it seems on the tin, rather than turning into a delightfully convoluted (and hysterically ridiculous) journey to who the real villain is.

Is this as terrible a sequel as Independence Day: Resurgence? Not by a long shot. But temper your expectations, enjoy a matinee with lots of explosions and a bit of humor, and remember that this is really what we could have gotten from the first Pacific Rim all along.

~MINOR SPOILERS BELOW~

Erica: Something you should know about me: I’m a kaiju groupie. The original Pacific Rim is one of my favorite movies of all time. Gipsy Danger, Romeo Blue, and Mutavore all sit on my shelves. I use Stacker Pentecost’s “last man standing” monologue to psyche myself up in professional situations. I wore my Pan-Pacific Defense Corps shirt to the theater.

I want to establish context for how much I was looking forward to Uprising, and also in fearing it was going to be a huge let-down.

Y’all, there are two ways this can go. If you expect it to rise up to the quality of the original, you will be disappointed. But if you can let go of that expectation, Uprising definitely has some charm to offer. I let go when the movie opened on a group of tech scroungers chasing each other through the guts of a decommissioned Jaeger.

Uprising is a runaway freight train of enjoyable ridiculousness, from the acting to the Jaeger fights to the stakes. I think it recognizes that it’s the second-string sequel to the sequel we never got because we lost original director Guillermo Del Toro to scheduling conflicts.

I regret Del Toro not being at the helm. You feel his absence. There was storytelling deftness and emotional weight in Pacific Rim that Uprising just doesn’t understand. But I think Uprising is aware of this fact about itself, and leans into it. The pacing is such a sprint that it never gives important moments a chance to land, because there’s so much STUFF being thrown at you that there just isn’t any time for that. And, weirdly, that’s okay. Because it’s still so fun.

We’ve returned to the Hong Kong Shatterdome! Newt and Gottlieb and Mako Mori are back!

John Boyega shines as Jake Pentecost, Mako’s little brother. Scott Eastwood is a glass of lukewarm milk in comparison, but he serves as a foil for some of Boyega’s humor. There are a handful of young Ranger cadets, the new guard, but they get such sparse screen time that we don’t see them get to form their bonds. Which is disappointing, because as the original taught us, an emotional bond between its pilots is what drives a Jaeger.

It’s also what allows a Jaeger to present as its own character, a giant walking amalgam of its pilots’ relationship. The Mark Six Jaegers are pretty, but ultimately I didn’t get invested in them.

This movie needed more kaiju. I adored the new designs, but wanted to see more of them. And when they descended on Tokyo, of all places, I hoped Godzilla would rise up from the sea in a “not on my watch!” crossover twist, but alas, that did not happen.

In the original Pacific Rim director’s commentary, Del Toro put an emphasis on using visual development as “eye protein” to help tell a story. Uprising, by contrast, is pure eye candy. It missed the mark of its predecessor, but I walked away with a delightful sugar rush.

~MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW~

Merrin: I hated this movie, and I want to be really honest about why. I normally try to be really careful about spoilers, but I can’t be honest without spoiling it. So fair warning, I’m about to spoil literally everything.

First, the script is awful. Like it is laughably, terribly awful. Newt and Gottlieb are in a room together for the first time in presumably a while and Newt spends fully half of the scene reminding the audience in a really sloppy manner about their history in the one movie that’s come before this in the series. The movie that it’s a safe bet anyone seeing this will have already seen.

Gottlieb spends time in this scene telling Newt about how volatile the kaiju blood is when mixed with rare earth elements, which isn’t a thing that was in the first movie, and is doubly weird since Gottlieb was the tech guy in the first movie, and Newt was the one that was a kaiju groupie and always interested in cutting them up and studying them. This comes back at the end when it’s revealed that all of the kaiju, from the first movie included, were actually headed to Mount Fuji in Japan because it’s full of those rare earth elements and will explode and destroy Earth’s atmosphere and terraform it for the aliens.

Like. What.

First of all. FRICKING FIRST OF ALL. The kaiju were crawling out of a rift in the Pacific Ocean. If they ended up making landfall in Australia, New Zealand, and literally anywhere in North America, WHICH THEY FRICKING DID, there’s no way any of them were headed for Japan. Like. That’s the wrong way, my dude.

There’s a coastal defense force that includes currently working Jaegers, when the last ones were destroyed closing the rift. And you’re telling me, when world leaders couldn’t be bothered to fund the construction of Jaegers when monsters were actively climbing out of the ocean every couple of weeks, that they’re still funding this project ten years down the line? Enough that a Japanese company would be working on spending trillions on a fully automated drone version? Enough that there are hangers full of Jaegers around the world, with actively recruited cadets? Why?

But all of this doesn’t even touch the actual problem with this film, which is that it fridged Mako Mori. (If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s the word for killing/maiming/raping a female character for the sole purpose of serving as an impetus to advance the [usually male] hero’s plot line.) (Editor’s Note: More info can be found here at TVTropes.)  Mako Mori dies, completely needlessly, as her brother narrowly misses catching her in his Jaeger. But it convinces him to stick around and get payback from whoever was piloting the Jaeger that killed her, so it’s all fine, right?

Look, if I had realized prior to going to see this movie that Guillermo Del Toro’s sole hand in it was as a producer, that he didn’t write or direct it, I would not have bothered. This film was awful, and it should be ashamed of itself.