Maybe it was for the best to not make anymore movies with jaegers and kaiju duking it out in the various cities on the Pacific Ocean. Uprising proved the old adage with sequels…more is less, especially when the producers are blatantly bending over backwards to kiss China’s ass.
Uprising is ten years after our victory over the kaiju and life has mostly returned to normal. There’s a construction boom fueling numerous economies since the threat is gone. However, the prosperity isn’t spread out equally, some coastal cities remain abandoned like Santa Monica, thanks to a giant kaiju skeleton being a reminder. But amongst the ruins is General Pentecost’s son Jake hustling broken jaeger parts for whatever fancies him (food, booze, etc). Obviously, he is drawn back into the academy because the PPDC has built new jaegers should the monsters return and only he can train a ragtag group of early teens to be the new pilots. The argument is that younger people can merge their minds into the drift better than adults.
Time is running out though. A “benevolent” Chinese corporation has perfected a better solution. Instead of human pilots, have the jaegers crewed by drones. Then every major city can have a quartet of jaegers ready to defend at a moment’s notice, thus the problem of not enough human pilots is solved. Again, all these things are being done as a precaution. General Pentecost gave his life to permanently stop the kaiju and it has been ten years.
Of course we wouldn’t have a movie if the kaiju didn’t return. The how and why is both a spoiler and a predictable let down covered in Chinese ass kissing. It’s a good thing del Toro passed on this to win an Oscar® for making Grinding Nemo.
I have couple quick complaints on Uprising for starters. If the kaiju are gone, why do the cops have a jaeger to chase small-time thieves as per the opening act of the movie. In the original, the giant robots were being phased out due to their costs. With no more enemy, I doubt a police department could get the funding to resurrect a broken one. The other, bigger gripe is the cliché, pre-teen wunderkind who manages to build a smaller jaeger from salvaged parts and it almost behaves like an annoying Transformer, rolling around in a ball as if it were cybernetic armadillo.
All Uprising has going for it are the giant robot fights and Charlie Day’s wacky professor character. Not much of an incentive to spend money on when Netflix and Hulu carry anime featuring Gundams and other more impressive battles.
Alamo Extras: A lame Sixties robot toy, Rock’emSock’em Robots and Mattel’s Shogun Warriors commercials; Gammarah, Godzilla (the original and the one with Raymond Burr), War of the Gargantuans and Inframan trailers; other monster attack alongside UltraMan scenes; a how-to video for operating a real-life Gundam called a Kurata; scenes from a movie called Love on Delivery; the opening to Voltron (the dog robot version); scenes from Evangelion; and a funny Japanese commercial of a monster that pitches wiffle balls to bat back.