Everyone loves Pacific Rim (the movie to which this, if you were unaware, is the sequel). They like it for one obvious reason: it has huge robots using swords and fists to punch huge kaiju in the face, and it isn't shy about showing them.

There is allegedly a plot, with some human characters with their own boring little backstories that no one cares about, but they MOSTLY don't overstay their welcome (except the main pair), and it gets out of the way of itself and lets its colossal live action anime imports fight each other to the death. It has a bunch of zany little side characters who do zany little worldbuilding exercises for comic relief, but mostly it's just Idris Elba scowling at his team to cancel culture the apocalypse, go Punch some Godzillas, and maybe use a full size freighter as a baseball bat.

Now, I don't love it as much as most seem to; and I feel like as a result I don't hate this one as much as most, because to be honest it mostly feels the same, except just a little bit worse. The characters are a little worse, the jokes are a little worse, the worldbuilding is a little worse, and so on all the way down the list. Until you get to one crucial, utterly critical item: a Kaiju does not attack anyone until minute SEVENTY EIGHT. It still does its thing when it arrives, and sure, there's a big robot fight or two before that, but you simply cannot follow up a movie which everyone liked because Robot Fight Monster and then not have Monster until the final act of the film. It tips the scale from "worth watching" to "not worth watching" even when everything else is ultimately pretty similar.

Score: 4/10

IMDb: Pacific Rim Uprising

PS: How much would it cost to build a Jaeger in real life? The big ones are over a hundred meters tall and they are INCREDIBLY complex. The Pacific Rim wiki estimates $100b, but I think that's a lowball. These things would be OUTRAGEOUS sources of profit for military contractors. One of the moments in this film I found funniest (but wasn't a joke) was when they recruit the little girl character to help repair their fleet rapidly, and they show her personally lifting some piece of metal into place. There is simply no way these things could be hand-constructed to begin with!