Come for the giant robots. Stay for John Boyega attempting to pull off the same mustache Idris Elba valiantly wore in the first Pacific Rim. It’s all good.
All Images: Legendary/Universal via Entertainment Weekly
Ahead of tomorrow’s first full trailer for the movie, Entertainment Weekly has dropped a few new pictures of the cast and robots of the Pacific Rim sequel. Up top you can see John Boyega’s Jake Pentecost, the son of Idris Elba’s fallen hero Stacker from the first movie and the leader of the next generation of Jaeger pilots. Boyega told EW that despite the follicle familiarity he has with his father, Jake won’t start the movie out following in his dad’s footsteps. In fact, he actually left the Jaeger program after a falling out with its new leader, the returning hero from the first film, Mako Mori:
When we meet him, he is living in an abandoned mansion in Santa Monica, which is half a mansion anyway because there’s a big Kaiju claw-swipe that has crushed part of it. He sells and buys stolen goods, and some of that includes Jaeger parts.
The only thing he can do to compensate for his crimes is join the Jaeger program and teach the kids what he learned.
That brings Pentecost back in contact with his “drift-compatible” partner for piloting the giant, two-person mechsuits, Lambert (Scott Eastwood), as well as the glorious new Jaegers for the sequel, including the successor to the hero mecha from the first movie, dubbed the Gipsy Avenger. You can see her below in the foreground, along with the excellently named Saber Athena, Bracer Phoenix and Guardian Bravo (left to right in the image below):
We saw a few of these mechs in the video released at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, but it’s nice to see them in the movie-flesh, if you will. I’m already incredibly excited for the electro-sword robot to die seconds after it does something very cool with that aforementioned weapon, let me tell you.
Pacific Rim: Uprising hits theatres in the US May 2018.
[EW]