It should surprise nobody who’s been her long enough that I don’t necessarily tow the “party line”. I defend Scrappy-Doo and other mascot characters. I think kids properties should remain kids properties even if they add things for the adults watching. I like things many on the internet in my circles don’t. I see “woke” as a symptom of a larger problem in entertainment. I’m willing to go against the group and have my own opinions, but I’m also willing to go along with the group if I agree with them.
Pacific Rim is one of those franchises where I don’t agree.
I saw the original movie just before the second came out, and while I liked it I did not have the same reaction as the rest of my circles. Everyone around me hyped the thing up so much nothing less that being the greatest giant monster movie I ever watched in my life would do, but I just didn’t see it. It was a great plot with great characters, but waiting for that mindblow everyone else experienced never elicited that result. Then I saw the sequel and actually enjoyed it more than the first because it was so anti-hyped that it had nowhere to go but up. It used John Boyega better than Star Wars did, I liked the rest of the cast, the one-piloted Scrapper was my favorite of the Jaeger mechs, and I had a better time because I wasn’t waiting for that mindblow like others who went to see it before me had and complained wasn’t there. Without the hype, and in fact actually had anti-hype for not being as good, I enjoyed watching Pacific Rim: Uprising more than the original movie.
Oh get off my case. It was at least better than Atlantic Rim, the Asylum knock-off. An easy goal to topple but Uprising was enjoyable for me.
It’s not what Guillermo del Toro wanted, though. Pacific Rim: Maelstrom was the intended sequel, but due to mistakes by the people in charge, working on The Shape Of Water, in which a woman hooks up with a fish man that’s more fish than man, and losing the movie’s star, Uprising was rushed together and put out. You can probably tell from the end result, but my opinion is unchanged. Yesterday I learned what the planned story was and…I’m going to fight the universe again by saying I’m kind of glad we never got it.
In an article for The Wrap to promote Nightmare Alley, del Tomo discusses why the movie didn’t follow his vision. Mostly because he wasn’t there to give it.
If you haven’t seen the ridiculously entertaining original film, it follows Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunman), the co-pilot of a giant robot known as a jaeger (since all the robots have cool names, the one he and his brother piloted was called Gipsy Danger). After his brother is killed in a kaiju battle, he goes off the grid, pulled back into service when a wave of increasingly destructive kaiju attacks requires a desperate need for pilots. He teams up with a young recruit, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to take down the kaiju (who we find out are controlled by little buggy beings in an alternate dimension called the Precursors) and save humanity … or so they thought. Clearly, del Toro had other plans.
“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. And then they realized that all his patents came to him one morning. And so little by little, they started putting together this and they said, ‘Oh, he got them from the precursors.’ The guys that control the kaiju. And then we found out that the precursors are us thousands of years in the future,” del Toro explained. “They’re trying to terraform, trying to re-harvest the earth to survive. Wow. And that we were in exo-bio-suits that looked alien, but they were not. We were inside. And it was a really interesting paradox.”
Okay, here’s the part that bothers me: the idea that the Precursors are human descendants whose big plan to restore the planet is “let’s send monsters into the past and have them get all the materials from there, thus killing the planet sooner so we’re never born, wasting resources we could use on terraforming to create giant organic monsters, and ignore every time travel no-no in history”. Yeah, there’s a plan that will end in good. Congratulations, you just made the Futurians from Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah look competent in relation, and my first video review was talking about how dumb they were. Media Zealot would be proud. Speaking of which and as far as this being the Precursor’s plans, he already took on the UN in this franchise. You can bet he’d call out the Precursors had this happened. As it is, “thrown a giant monster into a space rift and let them conquer the planet with an easily hacked organic control brain” is a bad idea, but ruining your own history and putting yourselves out of existence, thus creating a time paradox the Doctor couldn’t fix? As Tony Stark would say, “not a good plan”.
I don’t have Netflix so I only just heard about The Black, an animated series I hope didn’t go with this explanation, nor any of the tie-in comics and novels which I did know about but haven’t been able to check into. So why wasn’t del Toro’s version made? Bounding Into Comics explains:
The answers are more varied than you might think. Everybody has their reasons, especially Del Toro, who put the blame on the studio. To be fair, he was committed to The Shape of Water and that commitment paid dividends, but Del Toro was relying on people above his pay grade to get the required soundstage space in time. “We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do,” he recalled in a 2023 interview with Collider.
“Then what happened is — I mean, this is why life’s crazy, right? — they had to give a deposit for the stages at 5 p.m. or we would lose the stages in Toronto for many months. So, I said, ‘Don’t forget we’re gonna lose the stages,’ and five o’clock came and went, and we lost the stages. They said, ‘Well, we can shoot it in China.’ And I go, ‘What do you mean we?’ [Laughs] ‘I’ve gotta go do Shape of Water,’” Del Toro added.
As they say, ‘You had one job!’ And because the suits didn’t do theirs, the sequel went in a different direction than Del Toro intended. Although, (again, to be fair) he might not have known exactly what he was going to do either.
del Toro also hasn’t planned for Mako to die as he wanted her as the star of the second film, with Rinko Kikuchi returning to the role. Collider told that part of the story.
One key difference between del Toro’s “Pacific Rim 2” (rumored to be called “Pacific Rim: Maelstrom”) and the eventual “Pacific Rim: Uprising” concerned Mako Mori. In the film that was released she has a minor role and is killed in a pretty unceremonious way. It felt like something of a letdown to her character, an orphan whose parents are killed in a kaiju attack and who is raised by one of the leading jaeger pilots (played by Idris Elba). She is finally to align her emotions, exact revenge against the kaiju and then … dies off screen. This would have been the case in del Toro’s version.
Seeing Boyega’s character, Pentecost’s biological son, and Mako, his adopted daughter, learn to work together after overcoming differences, and hopefully closing the rift for good would have been a better story, though Jake Pentecost wasn’t in del Tomo’s vision at all. The script was changed because Charlie Hunnam, the other star, had started work on a passion project, a Papillon remake, while the suits were screwing everything up. I also was disappointed to see Mako go so soon so the new director and writer could bring in their own characters, although Amara Namani is my favorite character in the franchise. Sure, I wouldn’t have missed her because I wouldn’t know she existed, but I do and I would. She’s the intelligent but snarky girl genius Riri Williams wishes she was.
Something similar played out in Pacific Rim: Uprising when Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), a returning character from the first one, was corrupted by his drifts with a fragment of Kaiju brain. This decision didn’t go over well with a lot of fans (I certainly didn’t understand it)…
It didn’t bother me. It actually gave Geiszler and Burn Gorman’s Gottieb something different to do besides bicker for comedic relief and it tied well enough to what they were doing in the previous movie with the brain that Geiszler dived into, with all the warnings we were given for why it was a bad but desperate move. The brain doesn’t like to be hacked but it does want to control and destroy the world. So I guess this is another spot where the fans and I differ.
So that’s where I stand with this franchise. I kind of prefer the movie we got, though admittedly the first was the better film for the most part. Overhype ruined it for me so the underhyped sequel had more room to draw me in. I haven’t seen any of the tie-ins, but Maelstrom just doesn’t work for me as far as the Precursor’s motivations, plus that would make them Forerunners, not Precursors. The rest of the internet will tell me I’m wrong. Like that’s stopped me before.
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