Cranky T-Rex's Blog

For a while there it didn't seem like we'd actually get a sequel to Pacific Rim despite its obvious sequel potential, and then along came Uprising with its new cast and more importantly, new giant robots. The original Pacific Rim is by no means a great film, but it is the kind of fun, popcorn shlock that makes for a nice night out at the theater with your friends, so on the whole I enjoyed it. After all, where else can you watch a giant mech smash a Godzilla-wannabe with a boat like a baseball bat? Even the Transformer movies don't get that creative with their giant robot battles. That's not to say the idea of a sequel to Pacific Rim thrilled me, but I had hoped with all the setup out of the way, we might have time for a more interesting story. To some extent, I got that, but unfortunately the movie falls down in a few other important ways that makes this one far less fun than its predecessor. Here's some of the reasons Pacific Rim: Uprising just doesn...

One city shall stand, one shall fall. (Image by Sarjex - Check out her  store ) Much has been said about Michael Bay and the Transformers franchise under his watch, and I’m certainly no stranger to opining about the writers that normally are in charge of these films. Fortunately Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have gone on to ruin somebody else’s franchise, and Ehren Kruger who previously played third fiddle to them has taken the reigns. With them gone, we finally get to see how much the dreaded duo influenced the direction of these movies, and how much stemmed from Michael Bay just wanting to blow stuff up. At the core of Transformers: Age of Extinction there’s a really great movie about an altruistic alien race of transforming robots whose spirit has been broken by the willingness of humans to screw them over, and the single dad who restores that spirit after a chance encounter with their leader. Or there’s a story about a cynical government bureaucrat stuck in an “us...