‘Pacific Rim Uprising’ Did One Thing Right That ‘Jurassic World’ Did Very Wrong

Premiering November 16 on HBO is Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel to the 2013 Guillermo Del Toro monster movie that wanted to have “kaiju” and “jaeger” become household names. It didn’t happen, unfortunately. Pacific Rim was kind of a flop, and when it came time for Del Toro’s next movie, he made the fish-lover Best Picture-winner The Shape of Water and left the Pacific Rim sequel to former Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Steven S. DeKnight. While Pacific Rim was a dud in the States, it made triple its domestic box office overseas, which is why a sequel was inevitable, and again, that made nearly four times its domestic box office overseas.

But let’s assume that you don’t have a financial stake in Pacific Rim‘s box-office performance. You just want to know if it’s any good. And Pacific Rim Uprising definitely has some things going for it. John Boyega in the lead role of an action blockbuster is always going to be a good thing, and the fact that he’s playing the son of Idris “We’re Cancelling the Apocalypse” Elba’s character from the original is even better. He’s fighting alongside Scott Eastwood and Cailee Spaeny, and that’s all well and good. But Pacific Rim‘s best decision — the decision that another, far more lucrative blockbuster sequel never made — was what they did with Charlie Day’s character.

Day, the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star, played Dr. Dr. Newt Geiszler in the original Pacific Rim, serving as welcome comic relief while playing a scientist studying kaiju. Just this side of the stereotypical “mad scientist,” Newt was definitely the little guy on the ground working to understand the kaiju while the big tough guys were busy fighting them with their big robot warriors. Pacific Rim Uprising had the good sense to know what a good thing that had with Day and they brought him back. Not only that, they turned him into a weird hive-mind super genius who has an inside track on the kaiju brain.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, meanwhile, totally abandoned their own version of Charlie Day. That’s right: Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus as the control-center comic relief. Johnson and Lapkus’s characters were not scientists like Dr. Newt, so maybe there’s a bit of B.D. Wong’s Dr. Henry Wu in the mix, too. But we’re talking here about the characters to bring a spark to an action movie by having a jolt of comedic energy in their performances. Charlie Day certainly brought that back to Pacific Rim Uprising, and it’s exactly what Johnson and Lapkus brought to Jurassic World. And it was sorely lacking in Fallen Kingdom.

Did Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ultimately make a boatload more money than Pacific Rim Uprising did? Certainly. Does that mean that producers were correct in cutting out the two best characters from the original film? Heck no! Kudos to Pacific Rim Uprising for succeeding where its peers had failed before.

Where to stream Pacific Rim Uprising