It has been ten years since humanity used massive war machines known as Jagers to close an inter-dimensional rift and end the threat of the monstrous Kaiju that were emerging from it. Much of the world is still being rebuilt, however, and there are plenty of people who choose to live in those ruins and make their living from the resulting black market trade in leftover kaiju and jager parts.
When two such scavengers are arrested, their skill sets win them a reprieve from jail time if they agree to join the Pan-Pacific Defence Corps, the organisation dedicated to defending the Earth from any further kaiju invasion. Mind you, it seems like the PPDC is rather in more danger than the planet, as there is a proposal to replace the jagers with remote-piloted drones. Quite way so much time and effort is being spent on anti-kaiju defences when there hasn't been an attack for a decade is not a question the film will answer ... but you can bet that it's going to turn out to be a good thing it was!
I was a huge fan of the original Pacific Rim, to the point where it may well have been my favourite film of the decade, so as you might imagine, I was very keen to see the sequel. Unfortunately, the resulting film, while a reasonable enough giant robot vs giant monster romp, rather lacks the impact of its predecessor. I'll give points to the director for setting his action scenes in daylight, but I have to knock them straight back off for the way that potentially interesting character arcs aren't really followed through, and the lack of "weight" to both kaiju and jager alike. One of the things the original film got really, really right was making it feel like there really were massive, titanic creatures battling it out on screen, and I never got that impression here.
It's certainly not an awful way to spend a couple of hours, and I don't regret seeing it, but it's definitely a lesser imitation of the original.
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