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.

Seven: the SFX house apparently forgot which jaeger was which in the final battle, as Gypsy Avenger had a yellowish-orange sword that looked like Obsidian Fury's in that.

Eight: the Shao Corporation was pitching their remote-piloted drone jaegers to the world governments in the film. Yet rather than developing one or two prototype models, they had built an entire fleet large enough to devastate all the shatterdomes and their jaeger complements when the drones went rogue and open numerous breaches across the Pacific Rim with multiple drones required for each breach—all this apparently on the Shao Co. dime before getting the contract. In a movie about giant robots, giant monsters from another dimension, and someone deciding Scott Eastwood should be a leader in charge of motivating new recruits, THAT was the thing that made the least sense!

Welp, I'm now not going either. I have precious few dollars to spend on well, anything these days, and it sounds like I'm better off watching my DVD of the original and going to see Black Panther again.

That review was awesome, Vonnie.

Whoops! Sorry, Vonnie.

Matt: There was actually a line saying they'd yanked it out of one robot and put it in another.

From the NPR review:

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.

Yeah, no. This is Jessica's Point One above, and one of the Evangelion elements I mentioned. It basically contradicts what we see and hear of the kaijus' actions in the first movie. The annoying thing is, they didn't have to try and retcon it, they just could have said the bad guys had changed tactics.

Thanks Chris, I missed that they swapped glowy chainsaw swords. Wait, when did they have time to do that?

As for your point about the retcon, they could have easily said that drifting with Newt and Hermann's minds in the first movie gave the Precursors a treasure trove of information about current world geography, plate tectonics, human technology and resources, etc. that would have allowed them to come up with the quick terraforming plan whereas before they'd only had a kaiju's eye view of Earth in the present day.