Now, I'm not saying that Pacific Rim: Uprising is derivative of vast swathes of pop culture, but it opens with John Boyega living in a post-war wasteland, scavenging derelict hulks for parts which he can trade for food, while fighting off other wasters trying to do the same. Or to put it more simply, Finn is Rey now. And not even the cool kickass Rey, but the Rey in a vaguely unambitious spinoff comic.
So after a botched attempt at retrieving a power cell (or something) from the shell of a destroyed Jaeger robot-suit, we move to FinnJake having a bit of a rumble in a mini-Jaeger courtesy of Cailee Spaeny's Amara, then they're both picked up by the robot police and escorted to military school for some Ender's-Game-style 'no, we have to train the kids to do it' antics, some Iron-Man-2-style 'automated defence technology is clearly a terrible idea' capers, and some Lethal-Weapon-style reluctant buddy-cop shenanigans with Scott Eastwood, the appearance of whom makes the audience start pining for the emoting ability of a 500 foot tall armoured war machine.
Pacific Rim: Uprising is, make no bones about it, A Summer Movie™. And not a particularly good one. The fact that Universal have shoved the film out in March suggests much about their faith in its ability to compete in the blockbuster-marketplace. While I didn't find the script as cringe-inducing as the first installment's, the whole thing is far more boring; devoid of the corny personality which at least had a thing for massive robots last time*1.
Charlie Day and Burn Gorman return as the comic relief and closest things the screenplay has to a macguffin, their roles interacting with everyone else's to the point where they could be assembled using out-takes from 2013. Imagine taking five years and coming up with this, though. It's like a Transformers film, if the only thing which changes is the audience's proximity to a migraine.
A two-hour effects-reel, when The Giant Robots are fighting The Giant Monsters, it's basically fine. Although for a film about giant robots fighting giant monsters, the audience spends a lot of time not watching giant robots fighting giant monsters.
Pacific Rim: Uprising is the perfect cinematic equivalent of popcorn; expensive, messy, and while it'd probably save you from starvation in a pinch - you wouldn't want to try and live off it…
*1 And I see there's still no feasible explanation of why a battle-suit shaped like one human requires two humans to control it. The whole left-brain/right-brain thing doesn't really wash when both pilots are doing largely the same things in unison, and when each of those humans manages to get around outside the suit using only one brain themselves. The mind-meld itself is an interesting concept, but imagine pairing up with Scott Eastwood for a mission. It'd be like being trapped in a flatpack wardrobe... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see? As long as someone gets beaten to death with a tape-dispenser and all the office-workers in the audience grin and silently fist-bump. Greg McLean's The Belko Experiment is a non-supernatural horror movie which is not for the faint of heart (relatively few films actually get an 18-certificate these days).
During an apparently normal working day, a seven-story building full of administrators for the mysterious Belko Corportation is put on enforced lockdown, whereby employees are informed by an unknown agency that they're to begin systematically reducing their numbers by any means possible. With no particularly favourable way out, the group begins dividing into leaders and followers, survivors and compliers, killers and victims.
The Belko Experiment is exactly the film it sounds like, and is all the better for it. The opening scenes are packed with background exposition and visual-callback setups, but at a lean 89 minutes, it wastes absolutely no time in getting to the starting line of having eighty colleagues holed up and panicking. The film's not particularly incisive with its social satire, and it's not even trying to be that clever. It's just gleefully amoral and nihilistic, not offering any solutions, just underlining the problem which has always been humanity's biggest enemy: other humans*1. Much like The Walking Dead, the plot-structure means that pretty much any of the characters can die at pretty much any point, without warning or justification (albeit often with ecstatic poetic licence).
Given the outlandish nature of the movie in general, it's fairly solidly performed all round, with strong leads from John Gallagher Jr, Adria Arjona and Tony Goldwin, a fairly easy paycheck for Michael Rooker (although the employees aren't going to stay trapped in the building for long with the amount of scenery John C. McGinley's chewing his way through, surely?). And when the James Gunn-penned flick opens with José Prieto's Yo Vivire, you just know this is going to be fun. Outside of the orchestrated score, the film's song-selection is often camp, always arch and never over-egged. Oh, and bonus point for the old-school Orion Pictures ident, too. Fantastic stuff.
The Belko Experiment was never going to redefine the genre, but if you get no enjoyment out of it then you obviously don't spend forty hours a week trapped in a building with beige electronics and idiots…
Don't know if I'd go quite that far, not that it makes the film any less glorious.
No.
No.
Level 2: This flick's got that Michael Rooker in it, and he was in 2008's Jumper alongside Hayden 'Skywalker' Christensen.
*1 Although it's 2017 for crying out loud, if the film's sharpest stick is 'people are awful by default', that's hardly a point which needs reinforcing, now is it?[ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
