Pacific Rim is a great movie. It’s dumb fun without being a dumb movie. You can’t get any better than that. Its formula is tried and true. Pacific Rim: Uprising takes that formula, and uses it to produce another great movie.

Everyone had low expectations for Uprising. Mostly because it was easier to compare it to the bad Transformer movies than to actually watch it. Which is dumb. Don’t compare them just because they both have robots. So it came to anyone who saw the movie, including myself surprise that it didn’t dip in quality. That’s because the Pacific Rim movies are tied to the Gundam genre from Japanese anime. It’s hard to mess it up. It’s giant robots fighting giant monsters. You can have a bad story in one, but that’s ok if the action is able to distract you from it. Pacific Rim had a decent story with some good lore, with AMAZING action that complemented the story. (Really the only anime able to balance good story and good action is Neon Genesis Evangelion, but that’s in a league of its own.)

The movie is the sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 movie Pacific Rim. It stars John Boyega (best known for playing Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi), as Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, Jian Tian as Liwen Shao, and Scott Eastwood as Lambert.

Uprising too had a decent story with even better-expanding lore with, again, great action that complements the movie. So I say give this movie a chance. But not before watching the first film. Watch that then Uprising, and I promise you won’t be disappointed.