I saw Pacific Rim 2 last night. I don't think it was as good as the first one, and I think that was pretty much down to direction and, perhaps, writing. John Boyega and the rest of the cast were fine. But the pacing was off. The color palette and soundtrack weren't as effective as in the first one. The way I felt like the first one used camera angles and timing to give us more layers with the character interactions was missing this time around. It was a perfectly acceptable giant robots fighting giant, alien monsters movie. But it didn't transcend the genre. But, honestly, I'm generally there for robots vs alien monsters, so I didn't regret my choices.

So, Pacific Rim: Uprising. Slight but with things to enjoy, especially once Jaeger vs Kaiju action got going. John Boyega is always fun to watch, even when he has to bounce off an Actual Block of Wood that is Scott Eastwood. But as someone who unabashedly adored the first movie, this one was missing a lot of things that made that one so indelible.

The look of the film was missing that gloriously lurid neon dazzle of the first one -- that extra visual flair del Toro brings to his films. This one looked kinda Transformer-y. It didn't also hit me emotionally where I live like the first movie, but ah well. I am a bit unreasonable when it comes to Mako, and Mako and Stacker, and Mako and Raleigh. Boyega's character has a nice rapport with Amara, the young teenaged tech whiz he's paired with, but that relationship didn't quite reach the ridiculous sentimental high of baby Mako looking up at Stacker in his Jaeger 30 stories-high, backlit into heroic relief by the afternoon sun. But what relationship can, really.

I did like what they did with Hermann and Newt. My main beef is the fact that they brought back Mako only to kill her off unceremoniously. UGH, I am actually super cranky about it, and kinda wish they didn't bother bringing her back in the first place. Maaaaan.

That whitefonted bit hacked me off as well, Connie.

So I also just got back from Evangelion vs Godzilla II: Eva Harder

(I'm not even kidding, by the way, there were at least three major plot elements from the anime in there.)

I went in figuring it would be good if it had some cool action and a minimum of stuff that made me cringe, and I got that. DeKnight isn't as stylish a director as del Toro, but he got the job done and managed to keep the action reasonably clear. Plus Jake's Daddy issues didn't show up nearly as much as they made it sound.

So mostly positive from me, although I agree with Connie about what she whitefonted.

All of that, especially Connie ' whitefont, seals it for me. I won't be seeing Uprising.

Do you guys mean 'what Vonnie whitefonted?' 'Cause I don't see a post from Connie on PR2. Calli, yes, but not Connie. And Vonnie's whitefont made my decision about seeing it.

Ehh, no big. I mess up people's names all the time.

Despite the movie being a letdown, I kinda want it to do reasonable business because John Boyega has a producer credit and I want him to do well.

Even if you have no interest in seeing the movie, you should check out Glen Weldon's review of the film on NPR, which made me laugh until my kidneys hurt: [link]

I love how he describes del Toro's aesthetic in the first film:

CRITIC: Hm. Well, you know how all of del Toro's films, even ones coated in a thick yellow layer of cheesiness like Pacific Rim, still feel like him? There's a shambling quality to them, an organic messiness, a tonal ... what, funkiness, I guess. You look at a given scene, and it seems lived-in, rich, palpable; you can almost smell it, you know?

REPORTER #4: ... Uh.

CRITIC: Yeah, not so much here. Pacific Rim Uprising both suffers and benefits from the fact that the first film did all the heavy lifting of building its world, introducing all kinds of narrative processed-cheese-food like "The Drift" and "neural handshakes" and whatnot. The new film has some fun with that world, tweaking events from Pacific Rim in a way that nudges right up against the edge of full-on retcon, without doing that first film any real disservice. And it keeps the good stuff, like making sure we always know that the entire populace of a given city has evacuated to the safety of underground bunkers before the mech-on-monster mauling truly begins. (It's such a small thing, and it makes such a huge tonal difference.)

I'm about an hour into Molly's Game, and everyone who said it was exceptionally Sorkiny...wow. You were not kidding. I think Dan and Casey are somewhere on the sidelines, Rosencrantz and Guildensterning this thing.

I finally got myself out of the house to see A Wrinkle in Time at the theater. So pretty. I want all the dresses, all the wigs, all the make-up. Having just read it I noticed the major difference in story.

I think I was most thrown by the Murray house being in neighborhood and not in a wood and somewhat isolated.

I was so mad that PR2 fridged Mako Mori that I judged the rest of it possibly more harshly than it deserved, for a movie that's mostly about giant robots beating up giant robots. But I really hated it after that, so here goes:

One: if the kaiju were on their way to Mt Fuji the whole time, why would they ever have attacked the American West Coast? Did anyone look at a map before that pathetic retcon?

Two: whipped cream + sprinkles is not an unreasonable number of ice cream toppings. So shut up.

Three: YOU FUCKING FRIDGED MAKO MORI ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME IS THERE SOME KIND OF RULE THAT SAYS YOU CAN'T HAVE TWO BADASS ASIAN WOMEN ONSCREEN AT ONCE OR SOMETHING

Four: okay, so the kaiju is going to Mt Fuji because it's blood will interact with the lava and make it go boom and trigger an extinction event. And their plan to prevent this is to drop a nuclear bomb on it while it's climbing up the mountain? Is there not just a teensy amount of risk there that that would do the kaiju's job for it?

Five: In the first movie, 3 cat 4 kaiju took out all but two of the most experienced jaeger pilots the fleet had. This time, all the pilots were cadets and only one of them died? Aren't the stakes supposed to get higher the longer the story goes on? THIS IS SEQUEL 101 PEOPLE.

Six: good jaeger has a single blue sword, evil jaeger has two red ones. You know something is wrong when a move starts stealing ideas from The Phantom Menace.