SPOILERS DOWN THE PATH; THE DISCUSSION BELOW WILL NOT BE COMPREHENSIVE WITHOUT IT.
TREAD CAREFULLY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
The best compliment about Pacific Rim: Uprising would be - it wasn't a severe headache.
Since John Boyega was one of the producers, we've got ourselves a protagonist who constantly praises himself of good looks and escapes any amount of fatal attacks. Physical stunts featuring actual people were messy. Although the visual effects based actions looked fine onscreen, jarring was how it appeared when human characters were pasted onto it. Despite being used solely to spew exposition after exposition, some of the word choices and monologues were well-written and thought of.
It took the plot a tedious setup before actually telling us what's the main goal. Up until then, we were left clueless about the stakes and most of the actions were weightless. How were we supposed to care for the story and characters? When Guillermo del Toro - a great director helmed the first movie, each and every supporting character's plot and motivations were tied harmoniously to the primary chase and theme. Here, the story was everywhere and characters were extraneous! This was exactly why when some of these roles died, we didn't give a crap about them. In fact, it actually helped honing down the plot, outputting it more focused. Absence of tough choices, strong motivations and imminent danger rendered these useless additions as mere vessels to move the very predictable narrative forward.
Over 2010s, we've been witnessing so many flicks like this one right here. Power Rangers, Transformers, you name the abominations. The first Pacific Rim was an excellent motion picture mainly because of a robust script, astute director and clear, concise geographical action choreography in terms of visual effects and cinematography. This sequel copied or paid homage to many elements from its predecessor, such as the giant mecha's feet nudging a vehicle's emergency alarm and flashback through neural handshake system. But that alone wouldn't make it a quality product, would it? Leveraging upon Salt-Bae's internet sensation, ripping off buildings and cars without any heads-up to the audiences whether there were civilians in it or not, characters breaking traits and abilities out of nowhere, entire world-saving Jaeger operations depending on a bunch of young and experienceless cadets to save the day, trainees who could handle mechas perfectly after only 1 practice shown, boundless single story arena resulting in fragmented and inorganic proceedings, maximum potential tensions plucked unripe and building new machines overnight which passed successfully in first testing were absolutely ridiculous!
To be just, there were positives. Battles among the Jaegers were fun to watch, especially the one in snowy Siberia. Mako's (Rinko Kikuchi) death was dramatically well shown. Some of the CGI were cool, such as the PPDC Kaiju archive and thematic film companies' logos. Part Kaiju, part Jaeger was an idea not bad, but the execution involving Charlie Day's character told a whole other thing. Nanobots merging multiple Kaijus into one and rocket attached to Gipsy Avengers' hand with Scrapper holding onto its back were nice. Not to forget, actress Cailee Spaeny as Amara was charming, and the way her self-created Scrapper landed after the climatic blowout was fantastically shot.