2.267. Kaiju Take Two

I’m calling a mulligan on that last review. You fall asleep three times in ten minutes, you know what you put out there is junk. So, mulligan. Let’s take it from the top:

PacRim is a fairly well rendered action flick that gives us a taste of what we wanted but fails to deliver both in terms of exciting new action and engaging storyline. It was a good effort that fell short time and again.

I want to go back to the commercial; not the one from the film itself but the Microsoft commercial that slyly announced the film in terms of location. That was my introduction to the new film. I didn’t hear anything else tangible about it for the better part of six months. Then we heard whispers, eventually got a trailer, and no sense of what this film was trying to achieve. I don’t know that they knew. I still don’t. The film introduces us to the post-kaiju world very quickly and then thrusts us into a good deal of fighting and training and the arrival of the bad guys and… well, thats the end of the film. There is a climax, of course. There is not much of a story. We never fully fall into the protagonist’s story and the deuteragonist is at once the most compelling storyline and also the one most likely to be voted ‘campy’.

Essentially, PacRim Uprising didn’t know what it wanted to be. It felt like a handful of solid action sequences belt fed into a storyline that was largely incomplete and underwhelming. It felt like a story laying the groundwork for another story that could be more compelling if the telling is done right. That telling wasn’t done right here, so Part III has a lot to make up for before even getting started. If I were involved, I’d use social media platforms to create bridge story and build the world and recognition of the Jaegers before I released the film. I’d get my audience ready in a way that wasn’t done here and could have been. I’d go with game tie-in’s, VR based experiences, comics, books, and a heck of a lot more appearances along the con circuit. It would cost money, but maybe that would be money well spent. It takes a little to make a lot.