Pretty much everyone agrees Pacific Rim: Uprising wasn’t very good, but that wasn’t the sequel we were supposed to get. Guillermo del Toro, who directed the original, had signed aboard, written a script, and was getting ready to shoot the film when various studio shenanigans put it on hold. But del Toro, for the first time, has revealed his original plan for his sequel to Pacific Rim, and it sounds quite bizarre.
Speaking to The Wrap, del Toro summarized his story — kind of?
“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. And then they realised that all his patents came to him one morning. And so little by little, they started putting together this and they said, ‘Oh, he got them from the Precursors.’ The guys that control the kaiju. And then we found out that the Precursors are us thousands of years in the future. They’re trying to terraform, trying to re-harvest the earth to survive. Wow. And that we were in exo-bio-suits that looked alien, but they were not. We were inside. And it was a really interesting paradox.”
To tell you the truth, this is mostly incomprehensible to me other than the origin of the Precursors, along with the revelation that they should have been called the Postcursors. Had del Toro stuck around and made his film, it might have been marginally better than the Pacific Rim: Uprising movie we ended up getting. Although the Steven DeKnight-helmed sequel used del Toro’s idea that the Precursors had a secret agent on Earth and were dead-set on terraforming the planet so they could move in, Uprising also ditched most of the original characters, ignominiously killed the first movie’s hero Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), brought the obviously terrible idea of Kaiju-Jaegar hybrid drones, and made Charlie Day’s manic scientist into the traitor. For a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters, it was strangely joyless.
While del Toro would have almost certainly made a better sequel, his plan seems pretty much like a lateral move to me.