Oh my...I am watching this right now. Not happy with this one so far. No spoilers. The writing is terrible so far, and the characters are mostly all cutouts. The leadership role which was filled by Pentacost has no counterpart in this movie. His son, Jake Pentacost (John Boyega) does a decent job, but the dialogue they give everyone in the film is wooden. Mako is in it (the original actress), but she does not take any leadership role. She has more than a cameo role in the film and it was good to see her. They have introduced a new main character, Namani, but she is overdone and makes things feel more like Transformers with a female in the role of Sam Witwicky. But not. Hard to describe how she changes it, but she does in a big way. The new team leader is a dickish character, and he and Jake are frenemies. Both the eccentric doctors make it into this film, but one of them has been changed in his personality and is no longer that cool like he was in the first movie (the frantic doc with the tattoos).
The major difference in this movie is well...the Jaegers and the Kaiju. The Jaegers all behave like transformer beings, and when they are hurt they actually clutch themselves as if actually injured. They also show the jaeger pilots in the cockpit in drifting mode, during the battles. Still, you feel a distinct disconnect between the fighting jaegers and the pilots. All the Jaegers have themselves become personalities with their own names (like in the first movie), but now they are like car models, and this new Namani gushes over them. To tell you more about how the Jaegers "interact", I would have to spoil it, so I won't. The kaiju scenes were good, in the classic Kaiju way. The Jaegers though, especially fighting as a team, are irritatingly close to Power Rangers. At one point, they are dropped from helicopters one at a time as if to introduce them, and the last one literally SLIDES into place (like a baseball player sliding into first). There is a pause while all four of them are lined up in a classic power rangers posed stance.
There is CGI overload in this thing. Hologram this, flames that, beams and floating interactive displays, everything is maxed out to the hilt and is at times distracting. There is a lot of harking back to the first movie and it's story elements (reminiscing about daddy Pentacost and his adopted sister, Mako). By the end of the movie, Namani and Jake have a relationship similar to Finn and Rey in Star Wars (groan). There is lots of action, destruction, explosions and battling in this movie. So, it's a great popcorn flick. But it does not carry the same feel as Pacific Rim did, even if most of the elements are still in place.
I'm not sure what else to say at this point until others here have seen it. All in all, it's worth a look, and perhaps a theater ticket if you just want to have a movie night.
