On a boiling hot Thursday in February, we took a bus out to Homebush, a sprawling suburb located about a 40 minutes drive out of the Sydney CBD on a good day. Pacific Rim: Uprising’s set here looked bare from a distance, bar the four 20-meter high bluescreens that will become the large submarine station that houses its Jaegers, the “Shatterdome”.
The set is a lot busier on closer look. Groups of military and scientists across multiple ethnicities stroll the same carefully choreographed route after every call of action. Trucks trundle across the tarmac, reverse, then do it again. Earth’s last line of defence has changed in the 10 years since the events of the first film, and Pan Pacific Defence Corps is now a humming homogeneous organisation, united across all countries in its efforts to defend humanity against the omnipresent threat of the Kaijus.
But that’s just scratching the surface. IGN sat down with Pacific Rim: Uprising’s cast and crew to get the brand new details on new director Steven DeKnight’s take on Guillemo del Toro’s distinctive monsters v robots universe.
The biggest criticism leveled at Pacific Rim was that its spectacular world was undermined by thin and forgettable characters, a flaw this sequel hopes to rectify. Yaeger pilots Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) and Lambert (Scott Eastwood), Yaeger mechanic Jules (Adria Arjona) and teenage scavenger Amara (Cailee Spaeny) aim to inject a new and vibrant dynamic alongside returning characters Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), Dr. Newt Geiszle (Charlie Day) and Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman). Scheduling conflicts have seen Charlie Hunnam, Pacific Rim’s protagonist, out of the picture.
“It's a lot more story driven and character driven,” says Arjona, a relative newcomer to blockbuster film who may be best known as True Detective’s Emily. “You're a lot more attached to the characters...and I think there's an emotional attachment to the Jaeger itself because there are two people that you really care for inside.”
DeKnight, who co-wrote the script, comes from the school of Joss Whedon (the filmmaker wrote for both Buffy and Angel), and promises the sort of nimble comedic dialogue one would expect from a graduate. “This time around we did we wanted it to have a bit of that Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, movies I grew up loving as a kid. That kind of rollicking adventure where you have dialogue, character base and you're never reaching for a joke or a punchline.”
The script is purposefully avoiding the broad character archetypes, says DeKnight, which del Toro purposefully included in the original. “He was going for archetypes that would be easily understood no matter where you were in world, which I think was very successful. But as an exercise there is the other side of it - you lose some of the complexity or nuance”.
Boyega agreed that complexity was key in Uprising, citing individuality of its new cadets and a deeper dive into its existing characters. “That's very, very important, because the great, grand robots in the big fights are a visual spectacle, but at the same time, you need the characters to really feel those scenes for those scenes to really hit you and for you to be invested.”
From ground level right up to the dizzying heights of a 300 foot high Jaeger, we’re promised that the action in Uprising will be tighter and faster. Technology has come far in ten years, and we’ll see this reflected in both the armour donned by the PPDC pilots and the movement of the giant robots themselves.
“Technology has jumped ahead” says on-set supervisor Dave Merritt, while showing us the more light-weight suits donned by Uprising’s pilots. “We wanted to be able to be lighter weight and more agile. I think he also wanted to add much more of the martial arts kind of feel to everything.”
Boyega, who shares a producing credit, is particularly invested in this fluidity. The actor admits that he found the movements of the original Jaegers a little too cumbersome, and has brought fight co-ordinator Liang Yang over from Star Wars: Rogue One and The Force Awakens to bring the aforementioned “martial arts feel” to Uprising.
“They were like, "What did you feel about the first film," and I told them straight up the stuff that I didn't like and the stuff I wanted to see more of,” says Bodega. “I wish the robots would hurry up, just hurry up.” Boyega and DeKnight’s talks also resulted in more of a connection between what’s going on in the Conn-Pod and the outside, so action sequences won’t jarringly jump from CG to something that’s been shot in the studio. “We have a way of blending those two worlds together,” says Boyega, “and once I heard that, I was like, "Okay, cool, that's going to be really, really good.”
“The way that Steven and [Executive Producer] Cale Boyter have been talking about it is that they want to have Borne Identity fights but with giant robots,” says Production Designer Stefan Dechant. ”There'll just be a much faster movement in there”. One of these new, faster Jaegers, Saber Athena, has rockets but also little air breaks so that it can be flipped, then it can jump back and forth. “There's that level of speed and momentum and that slickness,” says Dechant.
Both Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) are back in the sequel, though their drift with the kaiju in the original hasn’t left them unscathed. “The resonance of drifting or being mentally attached to the evil entity, going to another world, is certainly a big theme of this movie,” says Gorman. “There are big influences that sort of have their payday in number two because of that. That continues throughout the story, and how much have they been affected, it's a big part of the movie.”
Their friendship will be a lot more cautious this time around, says Gorman, since they stopped working together before reuniting in the wake of Uprising’s mysterious big ‘incident’. “I feel like we have a slightly more tender and more cautious relationship, because we're both a little more vulnerable and also I'm looking to really communicate, because I need his help, quite frankly. I need his help and his expertise. And I think I've missed him a bit. So, it actually, they, when you see them first, it's very much a sort of "Can you help me with this thing?" But throughout the film, we become ... Tender is the wrong word. There's actually, they meet on a much more grounded, human level.”
On the back of successful father-figure stories like Logan and The Last of Us, Pacific Rim: Uprising will feature a similar dynamic with the introduction of Caliee Spaeny’s Amara, an orphaned 15-year-old who finds her fate entwined with Jake’s. “She's a street rat,” says newcomer Spaeny. “She makes her own robots. She's very independent and she's grown up her whole life being that. She has to figure out how to work well with others because she likes it her way. And she definitely makes that clear.”
“At first, Jake just sees her as a little bug on your shoulder just to get rid of and she grows on him,” says Boyega, who’s roughing up his image in his portrayal of Uprising’s protagonist (and son of Pacific Rim’s Stacker), a pilot-drop-out who’s made a living stealing Jaegar parts and selling them off.
“Eventually he sees himself in her because she's going through the process he went through when he joined the cadets and when he went through Jaeger pilot training,” adds Boyega. “Then a change of heart leads him to have a brotherly, sibling love for her and he starts to back her up a tonne. That breaks him down and changes his character, finally, to become some form of a hero.”
“We're both these criminals off the streets,” says Spaeny. “It's like, you are no better than I am. And he thinks I'm just like a little kid, he doesn't want me there. Yeah, so it's cool to watch our friendship throughout the film and where it goes.”
Production Designer Stefan Dechant refers to the original Pacific Rim as the “technicolor” Pacific Rim for its hyper-saturated look. Uprising will have more verisimilitude, he says, albeit with cinematic sci-fi inspirations.
“Steven is going to some early Jim Cameron '80 references, or he's going into Ralph Mcquarrie or these things that we grew up together,” says Dechant. “We wanted to feel like ... If, in the '50s, you were looking at technicolour, when you go to the '70s, you're starting to see genre films that are sitting in reality.”
“The robots, vehicles, the interfaces, they're all a little bit more refined. Again, part of that is being in the future, and part of it's not being on the back foot, not feeling like, "This whole thing is going to hell, and we're the last guys that are going to stand against the apocalypse." Now you have a full functioning, supported system, and we just try to keep that technology as slick as possible in there.”
It’s only been 10 years since the catastrophic events of the original Pacific Rim, so the world is still very much in disarray. Uprising begins in Santa Monica, which Dechant describes as a wasteland. “It’s kind of this broken concrete, morning light coming in, rubble ... I don't want to go to any real place because that just seems tactless, but it's that kind of refugee kind of area.”
The action then moves to Sydney, which is very much rooted in a post-post-apocalypse. “We wanted to ground it in the reality of Sydney,” says Dechant. “Real buildings, real places and then we're adding ... we're saying there's a massive boom that goes on post-war, and we're adding about 25 to 30 percent new sky rises in there. Sydney will sit and feel very much like it is today but have the extension of it. It's almost if you were to go from New York in the '80s and then you went into New York now, you'd sense the New York of the '80s there, but you'd be surprised at this new architecture that's coming in. That's Sydney.”
Finally, Uprising hits ‘mega-Tokyo’, where the city will have a “juicy, anime, more-Tokyo-than-Tokyo” look. “As we move through there, we're kind of doing this gradation as we go dystopian, rounded reality of today, future of tomorrow. We're kind of doing an arc that way, visually, through the film.”
The jaegers will each have a special move to differentiate themselves, which the Uprising team are referring to as their “Y” button. “If you have a character in a video game, you have a Y button,” said Dechant. “They can do what nobody else can and then it's kind of breaking down, "Okay, what is our Y button for each one of these guys so that, if you line them up, that you're getting a cast of characters that you know specifically what they do." It's like our magnificent seven. That guy's good with a knife, that guy's good with a gun, this guy's good with a rope. They're kind of playing that iconography out, so it's very easy for the audience to track.”
Although everyone on set was hesistant to talk too much about the Kaiju, Dechant did reveal that they too will have their own Y buttons to help identify them as unique monsters.
“The kaiju will be faster moving, have different designs, different textures. They too have their own Y buttons, again, so that we have a clear iconography when we see them when they show up. We can track how they fold into the whole process.”
Pacific Rim: Uprising is due to hit theaters February 23, 2018.
Lucy O'Brien is Games & Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.
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