Pacific Rim Uprising Movie Review: Stop These Absurdly Overblown Hollywood Orgies

Pacific  Rim Uprising

Starring John Boyega, Cailee Spaeny

Directed by Steven S DeKnight

Rating: *(1 star)

The  BHFS, Big Hollywood Franchise Spectacle,is fast running out of steam. After the insipid  Tomb Raiders  last week there  is  the criminally vapid  Pacific Rim Uprising  this week to reckon  with the one more intolerable than the  other. In both the cases I came out of the traumatic ordeal wondering what was the need for a sequel to a bad film in the  first place.

 Could it be that Hollywood actually enjoys torturing  its global devotees by whipping up snapshots  of  worldwide devastation that not only bring a bad  name to apocalypse but also to filmmaking in general? Does this pantomime  to  futuristic feel-awful cinema, even  qualify as  cinema?

These belated sequels are as unwelcome  as torrential rain during an election campaign. Even if  America loves bearing through these tortuously  indecipherable  plots  about brave men, braver machines and their fight against global destruction, why must we be inflicted with their fruits of  vanity?

This film has some sharply  designed scenes  of Tokyo’s skyscrapers  being plundered by giant robots  emerging from the sea in waves of unseasonal stormtrooping  .The  principal characters  align themselves into projecting a parody  of forces  of Nature exuding a kind  of ungracious and vulgar optical  extravagance that  is plainly irrelevant and unwanted.

 I think  Pacific Rim  Uprising marks a  kind  of watershed in the chequered history of Hollywood’s apocalyptic  cinema. It is  a work of shameful superfluousness and tasteless vulgarity. The  characters are  interwoven  into a pan-global cultural mash-up with a Chinese heroine(Rinki Kickochi) running the show with a commandeering sneer.There  is an Indian  character too,played by KaranBrar who hardly  gets to speak two lines.

 The hero is a Black American Jake Pantecost(John Boyega, bearable if  you can take  his sneering contempt  for  rules) who is  a bit of a rogue-hero .Jake is tormented  by the memories of a gallant  father and within no time he is supposed to be  grieving  for  his dead Chinese half-sister. However the emotions, even before they begin to flow, get flummoxed and smothered in the sheer  bigness of presentation which the director flaunts in childish glee , bathing the  frames  in a kind of whiplash grandeur that is as impressive as  a molar extraction done  to  the  encouraging sound of  symphonic  music.

The mounting is  impressive. But the execution is clumsy and  cantankerous. The narrative is wobbly and  scattered , moving from one over-written episode to another. What makes the journey of  tedium even more unbearable  is the stilted acting. The actors are all amateurish over-eager to  blend into  the  mood  of vehement  vigour.

The narrative  displays  no restraint . There are  no fullstops in this journey into digital Armageddon.The  biggest  blunder in this bludgeoning tribute  to the spirit of regurgitated  grandeur is  to  substitute  a genuine emotional  core with a surplus  of robotichijinks which are as seductive as  a bar dance  performed  in a dry state.

The  Hollywood  spectacle  has run out  of steam.RIP.

 It is running on  a fantasy fuel that creates an illusion of grandiosity. This film flatters  to deceive. And the deception is so expansive and  overblown that you wish its creators  would be crowned the biggest scamsters  of franchise filmmaking since Man invented the Sequel.

 It’s time  Hollywood stopped  binging on  bilge.We are  not  interested.