And then they realized that all his patents came to him one morning. Instead, Mako is unceremoniously removed from the picture, and it turns out that Shao was being made a fool of the whole time, because Newton “Newt” Geiszler (Charlie Day), who was on her payroll for his kaiju expertise, was actually the Precursor Emissary, his brain having been taken over by the Precursors thanks to his penchant for drifting with kaiju brains.“The villain was this tech guy that had invented basically sort of the internet 2.0. I was looking forward to the moment when the fate of the world would come down to these two Asian women. Mako is opposed, citing the fact that drones can be hacked, and that they will never be as improvisational as they can be with human pilots. Shao is obviously in favor: she’s running a corporation looking to profit, after all, and she’s also extremely proud of the tech she’s created. This is touched on briefly, but immediately dropped. (Because apparently, having two would be too much!) While Mako was still alive, I imagined that these two women would be coming to a head over their opposing views about drones. This leaves Shao as the only Asian woman in the film. Yes, she’s respected by her brother and everyone else as a hero … but she’s immediately sidelined by this dude whose “history” is imposed on us as an afterthought in order to make us care. Yes, Mako is the Secretary General of the PPDC. We need their stories from their point of view. In Uprising, Mako Mori is a clear example of why it’s not only important to have representation of “women in power” in film, but that we need more women to be central to the narrative. Now, suddenly, Mako has this younger brother with this deep connection and backstory in the Jaeger program? He used to be a Jaeger pilot? But he quit and became a thief, selling Jaeger parts on the black market? Becoming a mess that Mako, as the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps Secretary General, has to clean up, either by sending him to prison or returning him to the PPDC as an instructor to new cadets? As far as we knew, it was just Stacker and Mako. We’re introduced to John Boyega’s Jake Pentacost as Stacker Pentacost’s son -a son who’s never seen or even mentioned in the first film. Instead, she is criminally underutilized and dispatched in the most insulting of ways. When I saw that John Boyega and Scott Eastwood were cast, I assumed they would exist in relation to her, that hers would be the journey we’d follow from the first film (since I knew Charlie Hunnam wasn’t returning), and that even though these other big-name male stars were brought on to make the film more “bankable,” that she would solidly be the protagonist. To watch that story unfold with a woman at its center, even if she wasn’t the lead, was pretty incredible, and I love that she was always treated as competent and formidable, even though Pentacost was trying to protect her the way any father would want to protect their child.Īs she survived the first film, I imagined that Pacific Rim Uprising would be, in large part, about Mako stepping into her father’s shoes-or perhaps being called back to the Jaeger program for one last job. It was a story that’s usually given to father-son pairs: son must find his place in his father’s world as a means of coming-of-age. I was fascinated, not only by Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) in the first Pacific Rim film, but by her relationship with her adoptive father, General Stacker Pentacost (Idris Elba).
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