After the fun of the first film, and with a few misgivings, I sat my kids and me down to watch the sequel.
As with the first film, you get kaiju (giant monsters a la Godzilla), giant robots, tons of action and great SFX. It's an adrenaline ride full of thrills and spills.
For anyone who watched the first one, though, you start early being able to predict what will happen and who the bad guys are because the movie makes it just a little bit too easy, even if you haven't seen the first one. I found that disappointing.
In this film, the giant robots are still out there and there are theories that the kaiju will return someday. Dr. Newton is working for a Chinese company that is making drones to supplant the Jaegar ("hunter" robots), while Dr. Herman is still working with those who run the Kaiju. The plot has more twists than the first film but it boils down to a more dramatic, less humorous film than the first one. The kaiju return in a most unexpected way, half kaiju and half robot, and start to open multiple breaches around the Pacific rim. Several plot twists later, we see the climax on top of Mt. Fuji. There's a great deal of ethnic diversity, with Indian, Asian, Caucasian, Black, and more gender diversity, although the film keeps it simple by sticking to the binary gender division. I do like the fact that the most important characters in the film are a black man and a white girl. A pity what happens to his sister, but shhhh...I don't want to spoil it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I get that the old-style kaiju music in the film is a tip-of-the-hat to the early films from the 60s and 70s, and so was staging the final battle in Tokyo, but it did irritate me just the tiniest bit. Unfortunately, as with the first film, you'll have to suspend your analytical side to enjoy this film because there are even more gaffes. Aside from the recurring morony of using humans instead of advanced AIs to pilot, and that only in the second movie do humans have the intellect to use remote control when drones have been around for decades and RC toys have been around for twice that time, this movie just dishes, I was repeatedly irked by the tendency of this film to be adolescent in its plot and not well thought-out. Perhaps, as with most of the Star Wars, they were targeting teens and young adults, because this film is not certainly appropriate for pre-teens, like the first, because of violence, language, and alien blood. Even my teen daughter was irritated by the morony of this film, which was degrees greater than the first film.
You may have a somewhat harder time watching this film because of the number of sci-fi errors, lapses in judgement and stupid plot twists, but if you can turn off your left brain, you should be okay to enjoy the great special effects, drama and action, action and more action!
Personally, it was like watching the decay of the Starship Trooper films.
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