Pacific Rim: Uprising is a 2018 sequel to Pacific Rim (2013), set ten years after the Battle of the Breach — an in-story gap, since the film’s own timeline places the action in 2035. Steven S. DeKnight directs and shares writing credit with Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T. S. Nowlin. The result keeps the furniture — the Jaegers, the Kaiju, the Shatterdome — and loses the pulse.
John Boyega plays Jake Pentecost, son of Marshal Stacker Pentecost, scraping a living in Santa Monica by stealing and selling Jaeger parts on the black market. He is not his father. The film says so more than once.
Trailer, via Legendary.
Jake Pentecost and the Stolen Power Core
Jake tracks a disabled Jaeger’s power core to a secret workshop belonging to Amara Namani, a fifteen-year-old Jaeger enthusiast played by Cailee Spaeny. Amara has built a small single-pilot Jaeger called Scrapper. When law enforcement’s November Ajax arrives, Scrapper fights it. Both Jake and Amara end up in the custody of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps.
Rinko Kikuchi returns as Mako Mori, now a Senator running the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. She offers Jake a way out of prison: come back as an instructor. Amara comes with him as his recruit. At the China Shatterdome, Jake trains cadets alongside Nate Lambert, played by Scott Eastwood, his estranged former co-pilot.
The casting is the film’s clearest inheritance. Boyega has charisma to spare and, in this paper’s view, nothing to aim it at. Eastwood plays the straight man and plays him straight into the floor. Spaeny, given the film’s only real arc about wanting in, gets the closest thing to a scene that lands.
Shao Industries and the Drone Program
The plot turns on a policy fight. Shao Industries, run by CEO Liwen Shao (Jing Tian), wants to mass-produce Jaeger drones developed with Dr. Newton “Newt” Geiszler, Charlie Day returning from the first film. The Jaeger program, the film says, is threatened by this. Mako is due to deliver a final assessment on the drones at a Pan Pacific Defense Corps council meeting in Sydney.
Then a rogue Jaeger called Obsidian Fury attacks the city. Jake and Nate pilot Gipsy Avenger against it. Mako is killed. Obsidian Fury escapes into the ocean before backup Jaegers can stop it.
Her death is the film’s one genuine swing, and it is spent almost immediately. The council authorizes the drones. Before she died, Mako transmitted the location of a defunct Jaeger production facility in Severnaya Zemlya. Jake and Nate fly there in Gipsy Avenger. Obsidian Fury destroys the complex and fights them.
It has been ten years since The Battle of the Breach and the oceans are still, but restless.
That is the synopsis, and it is the film’s best writing. The actual tagline is two words: “Rise up.”
What Pacific Rim: Uprising Inherits
The first film, in this paper’s reading, worked because its Jaeger-Kaiju fights played as physical events. Machines had weight. Pilots had to share a mind to move them. The sequel keeps the shared-mind mechanic, and in our view mostly forgets to make it mean anything.
Burn Gorman returns as Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. Kikuchi returns as Mako and is dead before the film’s back half. Charlie Hunnam, the first film’s lead, does not appear — he could not join because of scheduling conflicts with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. The absence is felt, though the film does not fill it with anything better than plot.
Here is how the two films line up on the terms the source gives us:
| Element | Pacific Rim (2013) | Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Not given in the source | Steven S. DeKnight |
| Lead | Charlie Hunnam | John Boyega |
| Returning cast | — | Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman |
| Setting | The Battle of the Breach era | 2035, ten years later |
| Reception | — | Mixed; largely deemed inferior |
| Box office | — | $291 million against a $150–176 million budget |
The source records the film as a box-office disappointment. That reading is hard to argue with, and this paper shares it: a $291 million gross against a $150–176 million budget is not a franchise-launching number.
The China Shatterdome and the Cadets
The film wants a new generation. It assembles cadets — Karan Brar as Suresh Khuran, Ivanna Sakhno as Viktoriya Malikova — and, to our eye, gives them almost nothing to do but stand in formation and take orders. Adria Arjona appears as Jules Reyes. Zhang Jin appears as Marshal Quan. Both read as names on a call sheet more than characters.
DeKnight can stage a fight. The Obsidian Fury sequences have scale, and the Severnaya Zemlya battle has a cold, ugly setting that the rest of the film lacks. But scale is not stakes. When Gipsy Avenger takes a hit, the film has not earned the flinch.
The drone program is the closest the script comes to an idea: a future where pilots are replaced by machines, and the people who fly them are obsolete. That is a real question for a franchise about people who fly machines. Pacific Rim: Uprising raises it, then drops it for a third-act brawl.
The Verdict on Pacific Rim: Uprising
Pacific Rim: Uprising is a sequel that mistakes continuity for meaning. It brings back Mako, Gottlieb and Geiszler. It puts Boyega in the cockpit and gives him a dead father to measure against. Then it lets all of that sit while the plot moves.
The film’s biggest problem is not the Kaiju. It is that nothing costs anything. Mako dies and the plot absorbs it in a scene. Jake’s black-market past is a costume he takes off. Amara’s workshop, the one place with texture, is abandoned by the second act.
There is a version of this movie about inheritance — about a son who does not want the name and a program that does not need him. Boyega could carry it. The film keeps gesturing at it and never commits.
What survives is the machinery. The Jaegers look right. The fights are legible. The China Shatterdome is a real set with real scale, and the Severnaya Zemlya sequence is the one time the film feels like it is in a place rather than on a schedule.
Everything else is a placeholder for a franchise that did not arrive. The film was followed by an animated television series in 2021, which tells you where the property went next, and in this paper’s view the move reads as a retreat from the theatrical bet that did not pay.
Pacific Rim: Uprising is not a disaster. It is worse in a way — a competent, well-cast, well-funded film with no reason to exist beyond the first film’s receipts. It premiered in Hollywood on March 15, 2018, and opened in the United States on March 23. Principal photography began in November 2016 in Queensland, Australia. The film had time. Time was not the problem.
The problem is that Pacific Rim: Uprising keeps telling us the Kaiju threat has returned without ever making us feel it. The oceans are still, but restless. The movie is neither.
Published critical score: 4.5/10 (Metacritic 45/100).
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