Siblings Taylor and Hayley live out their lives in a hidden community, waiting for their Jaeger pilot parents to return. But a new discovery will turn their lives upside down.

Admittedly it’s been a little while since I last watched Pacific Rim, and I’ve yet to get to the John Boyega-starring sequel, but I have a fairly well embedded impression of what made the first film work. The colours were bright, the characters were over the top and the concept itself was ludicrous. But Del Toro took the whole thing absolutely seriously. The Jaegers had weight and heft to them, the Kaijus too. When the two clashed in the middle of sprawling metropolises, always at night and always in neon-drenched, rainy conditions, it looked incredible. There was a sense of real devastation being meted out, that the collateral damage of the fights was as important and impactful as the fights themselves.

I mention all this because Pacific Rim: The Black sort of drops the ball on that key front in this series opener. We start with the fall of Australia, abandoned by the Pan Pacific Defense Force because the Kaiju menace is unstoppable (even though we only get to see two Jaegers duking it out with a couple of Kaijus). The landscape in which they fight feels generic and a little barren. The Jaegers themselves a little off-the-peg, like someone watched the movie and said ‘Let’s make something familiar but sort of change a few surface details’. When one of the Jaegers is destroyed, there’s no real sense of loss because we’ve barely seen the thing, have no idea who its crew are or what they were like and it all feels a little flat.

A subsequent Kaiju fight takes place in the middle of a desert, giving even less reason to get really invested. Then an achingly stupid series of events takes place, ending with a bunch of kids being left to fend for themselves in a little oasis that just happens to be there.

Skip forward five years and the kids have made their own little commune. Travis is the dutiful older child who takes seriously his promise to his parents to look after his little sister. He’s grumpy, which is about as much characterisation as he gets. Hayley is the rebellious younger sibling who wants to find adventure, seek a way out of where they are and go because she thinks their parents are dead and never coming back.

At this point, crossed between the halfway point of Mad Max III and every other YA near future dystopia of the last few years, it feels like the thing can’t really get any sillier. Then it does. In fact, it’s at that point when this ‘adult anime show’ really stops even trying to be anything connected thematically to Pacific Rim the movie and becomes a sort of YA wish-fulfilment narrative written by a teenager. The movie was fairly tenuous in places with plot logic, but it did a good enough job of looking and sounding good that it could distract you. Here, with fairly generic animation coupled to sound FX and a score that keep reminding you how great the movie looked and sounded, it just can’t seem to muster the effort.

As the episode draws to a close, it’s obvious that the setup is going to be a sort of quest that takes our central characters through various adventures as they search for their lost parents. I suspect they’ll meet various other characters and probably some Kaijus and Jaegers along the way too, and probably learn about life, love and sibling rivalry. It’s hard to imagine that any of it will feel interesting or original enough to care though.

Verdict: A lightweight, hyper cartoonish and cliched use of the licence. Not a promising start. 4/10

Greg D. Smith