Pacific Rim: Upselling

I have to get this off my chest before I talk about Pacific Rim: Upselling. I thought NPR could go no lower than the unfunny smug horseshit of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a show that caters to people who laugh because they think they’re smarter than everyone else. They sure as fuck aren’t laughing at the toothless, hack jokes. Yet, the tweed-coated dicks at NPR have outdone themselves with a shitshow I just heard called Ask Me Another. This “game” show works even harder to pat its listeners on the back, to assure them that their safe public radio cocoon is for very special people. It is nearly the same fucking show as Wait, Wait but with a heavy dependence on puns. As I have said before, puns are the last refuge of the humorless. This crap exactly what you would expect to hear if you were trapped in the lobby during intermission of a TED Talk. Fuck you, NPR. Stick to news or reruns of Car Talk.

On to Pacific Rim: Upselling (aka Uprising) a title was probably cooked up long before the script was written. There’s rehashing, for sure, but no uprising. The original was a Guillermo del Toro movie, and an ode to the monster and giant robot movies of yesteryear. The plot sucked the ass of a nun with a pronated anus, but the creatures and their battles were pretty fucking cool. Sometimes, all a movie needs is big, leathery and mechanical things busting shit up.

Upselling is more of the same, meaning diminishing returns. It’s like a Cleveland Steamer. Do it once and it’s a pleasant--if smelly--departure from the norm. Do it twice and you spend the whole time thinking how maybe it wasn’t so great after all. Plus, what’s the etiquette? Who’s responsible for clean-up, the shitter or the shittee? The movie introduces a few new people, mostly as void as the bowels of someone who ate Red Lobster an hour ago. There are plenty of robots, and plenty of people with the emotional depth of robots. But there are almost no characters. The only exception may be Charlie Day as a whiny bad guy with marginal motivations.

In the original Pacific Rim, monsters come up from fissures in the ocean floor, like farts in a hot tub. A bunch of countries band together to fight the creatures and save civilization. Their only idea how to do it is not advanced weapons, not nanotechnology or giant tranquilizers. It is to build fighting robots bigger than the monsters. It’s the drawings of a seven-year-old come to life. And I say that as a compliment.

Upselling is a Xerox of a kid’s drawing. The monsters that were vanquished in the original are dormant, but people keep building robots. Maybe this is a comment on the self-sustaining military-industrial complex, but I doubt it. I think it’s just shitty screenwriters with limited imagination trying to come up with ways for giant things to fight other things.

The previous generation of robots required at least two on-board humans to control the motions. Now, though, scientists in China are building replacements that operate as drones. As Taboola would say. “You’ll never believe what happens next!” Robots fight robots.

I thought maybe this would lead to a John Henry story showing how manpower and human intelligence is still better. A trite story, but at least one with a message. Upselling is not up to even that minimal level of thought. It has no message, no deep thought. Even when it attempts one, it immediately undermines it for a cheap twist. This would be okay, if the movie were original or so entertaining that I didn’t sit there wondering what the fuck was the point.

Instead of a story we get the clumsy insertion of a whiz-kid teen girl named Amara (Caillee Spaeny) who builds her own robot out of spares, and a petty thief with a past named Jake (John Boyega) get recruited into the elite academy that trains robot controllers. Amara is the obligatory and desperate attempt by Hollywood grassfuckers to insert a Young Adult heroine. Too bad nobody bothered to make her interesting, or even to bother using her much after the first act. Jake, on the other, hand, has a secret. He turned thief after flunking out of the academy before for having a bad attitude, and his dad was a famous robot controller. None of that matters, though. People and plots are as irrelevant to Uprising, as USDA saturated fat guidance is to a dude in parachute pants scarfing a heat-lamped cup of popcorn shrimp in the checkout line of Walmart.

There is only one robot-on-monster fight, at the end. The rest is robot-on-robot because a mad scientist (Charlie Day) has inexplicably been able to insert monster brains inside the drone robots. I have no idea how this was managed without anyone knowing. But, if it means anything, it is that drones are okay, and people are bad. Buildings collapse, and there are a few nice touches, like a robot with a magnetic whip as a weapon that he uses to mash up a ball of cars to hurl at his enemy. I can’t for the life of me, though, give a God damn goat’s nipple which robot is which, and a few decent moments are little reward for sitting through the repetition.

Only at the end do the monsters appear. Three of them, none notable. They quickly join together to form one giant beast, because Hollywood’s idea of better is always bigger. That is so much easier to cook up than a better solution. After a bit of fighting, the tri-monster heads for the top of Mount Fuji for some stupid-ass and uninteresting reason of getting to rare-earth metals. Artificial ticking timebomb set. Now, the humans must stop it.

If a monster climbing the side of a mountain while humans think of some way to stop it doesn’t sound very exciting, it’s because it isn’t. It’s fucking lame. And so is Pacific Rim: Upselling. It takes what was great about the first and apes it. When it veers from that formula it stumbles. It looks cheaper than the original, sort of like you bought the top trim level of a cheap Korean car: there are fancy touches, but it’s still plasticky and the leather is thin. You can see in the backgrounds and the action sequences exactly where the corners were cut.

Pacific Rim: Upselling also pitches a third movie in its waning moments. I don’t think they thought this through very well, but it proposes robots fighting tiny subterranean aliens and its sounds fucking fucking lame. Not to worry, though, since there will be no third movie after this pile of shit. Two Fingers.