Pacific Rim: Uprising picks up ten years after Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) sealed the breach in the Pacific Ocean that connected the Kaiju world with our world.

Let’s face facts.

Pacific Rim’s sequel didn’t have much to build on given that the last film ended with a rather large full stop. Kaiju defeated, humanity victorious, end of story right?

Not entirely.

In the opening act of Uprising we learn what became of the world once the Kaiju had been defeated. While some areas were rebuilt areas known as relief zones remain untouched and largely unrepaired.

It’s in one of these relief zones under the remains of a Kaiju that we meet our heroes Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) and Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny).

Pentecost has turned his back on the military and his father’s legacy instead he kills time partaking in petty crimes. Namani, however, is a mechanic that just so happens to have built a Jaeger in her shed.

Through a series of events these two get picked up by the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC) which have relegated Jaegers to ordinary police work in the absence of the Kaiju threat.

Faced with a choice of prison or military service in the PPDC, Pentecost and Namani opt for the latter.

At this point we meet the rest of the cast including Ranger Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) who Pentecost will join in the Jaeger Gypsy Avenger. We also meet a number of cadets that Namani joins. Sadly, aside from cadet Viktoria (Ivanna Sakhno), the other cadets are extremely forgettable. We don’t really get to know them or who they are.

At this point we also see the return of Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) and Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day). The pair have split off and Geiszler is now working for a firm called Shao Industries which are creating Jaegers that can be operated remotely.

The movie is very slow up until we reach the Shatterdome. Aside from the PPDC policing robot and Namani’s little bot Scrapper, we don’t get to see much in the way of action which is poor considering the first film’s wall to wall action bonanza.

Thankfully in the second act things pick up and we get a bit more action with some plot development.

We don’t want to spoil too much here but the Kaiju have found a way to start sending huge aliens back to Earth and continue terraforming it for their own enjoyment. You know, once they’ve eliminated humanity.

The plot is really just a driving mechanism to bring huge robots face to face with Kaiju and this would be okay if the battles had some sort of weight to them. In the first film – aside from big dramatic set pieces – fights between the Jaeger and the Kaiju felt balanced. The Jaegers were powerful yes, but the Kaiju were just as strong and at times more well equipped.

This time around the Kaiju aren’t here to systematically wipe out major cities, they have one goal and once their intention is known it just becomes a matter of “stop the payload before it reaches its destination”.

The huge beasts even seem particularly clumsy this time around, at one point a Kaiju looks like it stumbles into a building. Aside from the screaming citizens and furrowed brows of the Jaeger pilots, We never felt any fear when a Kaiju appeared on screen.

Thankfully there are some great performances from the cast to keep your attention focused on the screen. Boyega delivers a stellar performance and is equal parts funny and endearing. His character progression through the movie is also very noticeable and we found ourselves hoping he didn’t meet the same fate as his father.

We also thoroughly enjoyed the added screen time given to Day and Gorman this time around but aside from the main characters we never really became invested in new ones.

The final sequence of the film is good but it also feels incredibly rushed. The action is great and the CGI is simply beautiful. The best part is that most of the fighting happens during the day so you can see the action scenes more clearly – a stark difference compared to the dark, rainy affairs of the first film.

So is Pacific Rim: Uprising worth your time? This sequel has a number of unexpected twists that actually serve to keep you more engaged with what is happening on screen. It isn’t what we’d call well refined, given the number of questions we have after the film.

What Pacific Rim: Uprising is, however, is a fun film. There is action, comedy, a number of plot twists and some stunning CGI, but it lacks the magic that the first film had.

We feel that this is somewhat due to the absence of original director Guillermo Del Toro, but Steven S. DeKnight did a decent job of forging a film that the fans wanted without much to go on.

With some friends and fresh popcorn this can be a fun film, but that’s all it is. If you’re looking for something memorable that will challenge your beliefs or make you question everything, this is obviously not the place to be.

But what do you really expect from a film about robots fighting aliens?