The question in the back of everyone's mind when this sequel was announced was whether or not it had any chance of working without Guillermo del Toro in the cockpit. I mean we're talking about a movie where giant robots fought giant monsters and absurd plot devices were floating all over the place. The only reason it succeeded was because of del Toro's passion for the project. With Uprising he serves only as a producer and his lack of presence is most certainly felt. This is a huge step back in quality and one of the most baffling films I've ever seen. The first Pacific Rim had a pretty definitive ending and you can tell the writers really struggled to come up with some way to keep things going. The story is simply a mess. There are some massive plot holes and moments that take suspension of disbelief an entirely new dimension. Sometimes all I could do was look at the screen and say "WHAT?". To top things off it's not all that interesting either. The whole thing comes off as an incredibly boring and convoluted anime filler arc. Something went wrong with the editing as well. Uprising has some of the most jarring transitions I've ever seen. There's a scene in here where a character is hanging up a coat and then out of nowhere a huge battle is taking place. I ended up rewinding because I thought the DVD skipped. This kind of thing happens several times, making the narrative much less cohesive. A lot more work should have gone into the characters. The majority of the cast gets almost zero screen time. Even the main love interest is only in like two scenes. So just about everyone goes underdeveloped. John Boyega is the one saving grace of the movie. It really shouldn't have taken him as long as Star Wars to get famous. I swear it's like nobody but me and Nina Gold watched Attack the Block. Nice to see they gave him a better haircut than the one he has as Finn. His costar Scott Eastwood has apparently mastered the "who farted?" face. It's his only expression in the entire film. The amount of representation onscreen is great. So nice to see such a large Asian presence in a big Hollywood release. For a movie all about grand creature battles the action isn't even that good. It does look nice. The environments have a distinct anime feel and the destruction is reminiscent of a Power Rangers Megazord fight. The Kaiju also look great. Still having that distinctly imaginative del Toro style. There's just nothing all that memorable to the showdowns. There are a few scenes where moves are reused from earlier in the film. Such as the motion Boyega and Eastwood use activate their Jaegers' retractable sword. It's a little too obvious to just be me nitpicking. I didn't think Uprising would live up to it's predecessor, but I did at least expect to have a decent time with some glorious destruction the way I do with most mindless blockbusters. Never could I have imagined it being this bad. It's so poorly written and shoddily put together that I find it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that it actually saw a wide-release. Much less the fact that it's meant to be the start of a new cinematic universe. This is last year's The Mummy happening all over again, only slightly less terrible. If you really need your Kaiju fix and can't wait for American Godzilla's return next year then allow me to recommend Rampage over this as it is by far the better of this year's two giant monster movies.