That mystifying trend continues with the latest iteration of the franchise, the Netflix animated series Pacific Rim: The Black.
As a result, it was more efficient, but a lot less fun. Where Del Toro's film positively reveled in its knowing, grubby, fully intentional cheesiness, DeKnight's follow-up seemed to want to disavow the franchise's shlocky roots, and allowed less light and humor into the proceedings. There was, however, a palpable shift in tone between the original film and its sequel. This was a small thing, but it turned out to be hugely important, even essential, to our ability to enjoy the robot-on-monster whomping unspooling onscreen. The franchise was always careful to devote significant passages of screentime to showing us the residents of any given kaiju-threatened city fleeing to, and then safely ensconced in, impregnable underground bunkers. Sure, the formula had been tweaked with plasma cannons and mecha-swords and EMPs, and the balsawood buildings had been swapped out for pristine CGI cityscapes, but the effect was the same.Īnd while both Pacific Rim films were about the mass destruction of cities, you never got the feeling they were cynically trading on the emotional impact of Sept. The central, abiding cheesiness of it - the way so much money and effort had been spent to remount the low-fi afterschool UHF pleasures of Ultraman, The Space Giants, and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot - was the whole point. Pop Culture Happy Hour 'Pacific Rim Uprising' Serves Up Another Helping Of Mech And Cheeseīut all of that hilariously dense jargon and po-faced backstory served a purpose, or tried to - it centered the franchise within a context of an elaborately and carefully built world, so we could take it in and begin to half-convince ourselves that watching giant monsters punch giant robots, and vice versa, for two hours at a time was something more than what it was: a rich, gooey and delicious serving of mech and cheese. Lore, in this case, referring to the capacious and internecine in-story mythology the franchise created for itself, which featured but was not limited to: Kaiju (towering monsters bent on humanity's destruction) who came from The Breach (an interdimensional portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean) and who were sent by the Precursors (extraterrestrials who wish to terraform the Earth for colonization), and the Jaegers (towering mechs that represent humanity's last hope) which are powered by two or more pilots who must enter The Drift (a shared mental plane of existence) by establishing a Neural Handshake (pretty much what it sounds like, I'm not gonna do all the work, here, people) allowing them to share the mental strain of piloting the giant machines.Īnd all that's before you get to things like Hybrids (never mind) and Secondary Kaiju Brains (long story) and Mega-Kaiju (pretty self-explanatory, come on). DeKnight) thinking, "You know what that needed? More lore." No reasonable filmgoer came away from a screening of Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film Pacific Rim or its 2018 sequel (directed by Steven S. Taylor (voiced by Calum Worthy) and Hayley (voiced by Gideon Adlon) pilot a training Jaeger in the Netflix animated series Pacific Rim: The Black.