The Most Disappointing Sci-Fi Sequel Of All Time Is A Streaming Hit On HBO Max

By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated 3 minutes ago

Once a movie is available on streaming, does it matter if it’s good? Netflix’s recent foray into low-budget Lifetime thrillers is a sign that no, the quality of the movie doesn’t matter one bit. The best example isn’t The Body in the Locker, it’s the movie currently number four on HBO Max. For some reason, Pacific Rim: Uprising has reappeared on the top 10 most popular list, not because it’s a good movie, it isn’t, it’s horrible, but because it has the name “Pacific Rim” and everyone already subscribed to the service can easily take a look at the worst sequel ever made.

Pacific Rim: Uprising Has None Of The Original’s Charm

Pacific Rim is a flawed movie. There’s small issues with the pacing, characters, and dialogue, but what it does right, is the gigantic set piece battles pitting giant mechs against kaiju. Watch Gipsy Danger walk through the city with a container ship as a baseball bat while the deep bass of Bear McCreary’s theme song is pulsing with every giant step and you can tell why it was a hit. Pacific Rim: Uprising decided to leave out both the kaiju and that sense of weight behind the mechs. Instead of heavy, plodding, meaningful movements, we have mechs doing flips.

Pacific Rim: Uprising made the bold choice to leave out the kaiju and instead focus on drone-Jaegers with implanted kaiju brains, which naturally, turns them evil. A new generation of Jaeger pilots have to stop the drones from triggering an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. The discovery that kaiju blood is highly explosive comes up multiple times, there’s the introduction of the Precursors (or rather, an explanation for what the alien race at the end of the first movie is), and far more backstory than a movie about giant mechs ever needed.

John Boyega, in the middle of his breakout run on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, takes the lead as the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost (brief aside, but is that the coolest name ever? It is, isn’t it?), Jake Pentecost, a former Jaegar pilot turned scrapper. Boyega is not the problem with Pacific Rim: Uprising. He was done dirty by the script and VFX while putting on a better performance than Charlie Hunnam’s in the original. Speaking of, Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, and Charlie Day are the only returning cast from the original as, respectively, Mako, Herman, and Newt.

Fans Are Still Waiting For A Pacific Rim Sequel

Despite all of the problems with Pacific Rim: Uprising, and there’s a lot of them, it wasn’t a complete flop in theaters. It brought in $291 million against a budget of $150 million. That was significantly less than the original’s $411 million, and clearly, everyone who skipped seeing it on the big screen is now responsible for the incredible streaming numbers it’s racking up. It’s the only explanation why the flippy Jaeger film is getting far more views than it deserves.

Pacific Rim fans joke that they are still waiting for a sequel. Bring up Pacific Rim: Uprising and it’s discussed as a fan film. The way it altered everything about how the Jaegers move and fight, which seems small but to mech fans, that’s a huge deal, and then shifting the focus to the humans instead of giant kaiju, makes it inferior to even the anime spinoff, Pacific Rim: The Black. HBO Max viewers are discovering they’d be better off watching the original for the 30th time than watching a film that puts mechs on an ice sheet … and it doesn’t break immediately.