Uprising jumps a decade into the future and intends to reboot Pacific Rim the opposite way that Power Rangers movie did the original series last year. Of course, with this kind of sophomore slump effect weighing on the decision of whether or not to even continue the would-be franchise this second installment has come to us not from 'visionary' and now Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro nor does it star Charlie Hunnam or Idris Elba, but instead is co-written and directed by Netflix's Daredevil season one showrunner Steven DeKnight and enlists the fresh talent of Star Wars-breakout John Boyega as the son of Elba's fallen character from the first film.

Pacific Rim: Uprising is a five year-later sequel that no one in particular was necessarily looking for, but is here given the amount of dough that original ended up making in China ($411 million globally on a $190 million budget, $111 of which came from China-almost $10 million more than the film made domestically). This is to say that Uprising is so bombastically cheesy in its reliance on knowing exactly what it is and delivering on exactly what it promises that it's genuinely hard to fault the film for doing what it sells itself to be. This year, with Pacific Rim: Uprising what we have is what that movie might have been had it decided to go another route and play up the more cartoonish aspects of that super hero series. A year ago on this weekend a reboot of the nineties hit show Power Rangers was released and embraced a more moody and grounded tone than that of its source material.

Pacific rim movie cast