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The sequel, Pacific Rim: Uprising, wasn’t as diligent in making its kaiju and Jaegers truly feel as big as they were meant to be, instead opting to speed things up for flashier action sequences. The first movie succeeded at making these towering metal machines and gargantuan glowing monsters feel like they actually were big and heavy they moved slowly because it takes time for something that big to move through space. When an animated robot steps on an animated street, we don’t innately register that the robot weighs hundreds of tons and that the pavement should be yielding to the immense pressure of a Jaeger's foot. One of the hardest things to get right in animation is a sense of weight because anything that’s animated, whether by hand or by a computer, literally weighs nothing. Yet, something about The Black feels cheap compared to Pacific Rim.
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It’s hard to be too harsh on anything that has a scene where a giant robot catches a deflected missile and then uses it to punch a giant monster right in its toothy maw. Taylor and Hayley have just enough going for them to make them more than stock anime protagonists, and there are some neat action beats. It’s not a bad premise, and The Black is confident in how it builds on the Pacific Rim world, both in terms of filling in gaps (we spend time with people who aren’t part of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and play with the logistics of needing to find Drift partners on the fly) and when it comes to adding new lore (the show introduces “small” kaiju, Jaeger-kaiju hybrids, and a big twist involving that mysterious boy).
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The Black is borderline post-apocalyptic, which is a slight bummer considering the first movie’s most iconic line. Together, the pair encounter kaiju of all sorts and sizes, a mysterious boy who seems to have some sort of link to the beasts, and other humans who are attempting to survive and make good in kaiju-run Australia - "The Black," as it’s known. When they haven’t returned after five years, Taylor and Hayley attempt to find help themselves with the assistance of an old training Jaeger they stumble across. The pair’s parents were Jaeger pilots who left them and a small band of survivors behind in the Australian Outback as they attempted to get help after the continent fell to the invading monsters. The Black follows Taylor and Hayley Travis - teen siblings whose names are “Taylor” and “Hayley” instead of something absurd and cool like “Stacker Pentecost” - as they try to escape a Land Down Under that’s been overrun by kaiju. Pacific Rim: The Black isn’t a bad Pacific Rim anime. It is, in part, a live-action anime, and yet it’s not really surprising that the new Pacific Rim anime on Netflix falls far short of the 2013 movie’s perfection. It builds on established genre tropes and transforms them into something new and distinct. Guillermo del Toro takes a frankly dumb premise (giant robots punching giant monsters) and executes it with so much care and passion that it becomes transcendent cinema. I simply will not hear any contrarian blasphemy suggesting otherwise. Before reading any further, please understand that Pacific Rim is a perfect movie.