The Giant Robot Design Uprising Got WRONG

[00:00:00]The people who made Pacific Rim Uprising will straight up tell you what they were going for. They wanted the Jagger to stop feeling like tanks and start feeling like fighter jets. That one little pivot right there is the whole reason the sequel feels the way it does.

[00:00:14]Yes, for this video, we're ignoring whether the sequel does or doesn't exist. I'm just calling it the sequel the whole video. Now, we already took the first film apart on this channel.

[00:00:23]The three rules that made a 2,000 ton robot actually move like it weighed 2,000 tons. This is what a giant robot looks like when the people building it decide that weight was the thing holding them back. So, how do you take a robot the size of an office building and make it move like it skipped every single leg day since 2013? Easy. You give yourself permission. But how'd they do that?

[00:00:47]Well, in the world of these films, about 10 years go by between the first movie and the second one. The war calms down, the program gets an upgrade, and the new joggers roll out with this new next-gen tech bolted on. Okay, fine, reasonable.

[00:01:00]Sequels do that. But one of those upgrades is the one that matters. The new machines are supposedly built out of some next level technology. Lighter frames, lighter metal. The whole selling point being that these things can now move way quicker than the old ones ever could. And look, on paper, that's kind of clever. It sounds like a decent sci-fi move. Technology marches on. The gear gets better. Of course, the robots get faster. Except pause for a moment and think about what they actually just did there. The entire reason the first film worked, the thing we spent a whole video on, no, no, wait, hang on, two whole videos on, was that the Jagger actually felt like they weighed something. Every step was a fight. The body was always losing a little argument with its own weight. That's where the believability lived. and Uprising looked at that and wrote itself a note, excusing it from class that day. The lighter metal is really just the film clearing its throat and going, "Don't worry about it. These things float around now. I mean, we swapped the metal. We're allowed." And once a movie hands itself a permission slip like that, it's going to use it like constantly. You'll see exactly how much it leans on that excuse the second one of these things stands up and moves. Cuz the metal is only the quote unquote blueprint. The real damage shows up in the shape. Do me a favor and put the two gypsies next to each other. Gypsy Danger from the first film and Gypsy Avenger from the second. I can only show parts of Uprising here because the second I show even a tiny frame of the original Pacific Rim, it'll get copyright claimed. I'm looking at you, Warner Bros. I hate but also love you. Back to the gypsies, though. Same name, basically the same character, 10 years apart. Just look at the outlines. Forget the detail for a sec. Just the shape.

[00:02:41]Gypsy Danger looks like somebody welded a battleship into the rough idea of a person. Wide, flat chest, heavy shoulders sitting low, legs that look like the support columns under a bridge.

[00:02:53]When she's just standing there doing nothing, you already believe she's heavy. Now, Gypsy Avenger. Slim waist.

[00:03:00]You can actually see where the hips pull in. The legs have these defined kneecaps, almost calves, like a whole leg shape that curves the way a person's leg curves. And her chest coming to a point. The whole thing smoothed over and polished like it rolled off a concept car floor at a motor show. And we all know those concept cars never make it into the production phase, but this one did. And your eyes immediately spot something. A thing that heavy shouldn't have a waist. Waists are for bending and turning for being quick. You put a narrow waist and a pair of sculpted kneecaps on something and every instinct you've got says that thing is light.

[00:03:36]That thing can move. which it's the exact opposite of what a giant robot is supposed to make you feel. Except maybe Gundam, but like anime. And they did it to nearly the whole roster. Racer Phoenix, Guardian Bravo, all of them slimmer, tapered, smoothed down into these clean, readable shapes that look fantastic as a drawing, but weigh absolutely nothing in your gut. Still, we haven't even watched one of these things move yet. They're standing dead still, and the weight's already gone.

[00:04:04]So, just imagine what happens the second they start running. And I don't mean they lumber forward. I mean they run full sprint, arms pumping, knees coming up, covering ground like something a fraction of their size. In the first film, a Jagger crossing a fight was an event. Gypsy Danger reaches down, grabs a cargo ship out of the harbor, and swings it like a baseball bat, and the whole thing groans with the weight of it, which again I can't show you any of.

[00:04:32]Please comment below to stand against Warner Bros. for this blasphemy. I mean, I just want to praise them and get people to watch the movie again. It's nothing more than that. Now, keep imagining that swing because we're going to Uprising next. They sprint, they leap, they throw flying kicks, actual jump in the air, tuck the knee, extend that leg, flying kicks. The kind of thing you'd throw in a martial arts movie where the guy weighs about 160 lbs. Or again, anime. Saber Athena bounces around doing these acrobatic spins and leaps, little jets in her arms and legs firing to make her quicker still. There's a whole stretch of them just flat out sprinting through a city to get to the fight. And every couple of fights, the movie does this thing I can only call the anime pause. Two giant machines clash together. There's a flurry and then everything goes dead still for a beat so you can admire the pose. The silhouette holds, the music swells, a freeze frame, beauty shot in the middle of a brawl between 2,000 toned objects, and all of it slams into one thing. Momentum. A heavy thing can't start fast and it can't stop fast.

[00:05:35]That's just what heavy is. The whole illusion of weight is built out of things being slow to get going and slow to quit. The wind up, the follow through, that second half where the fist keeps traveling after the body's already decided to stop. Uprising deleted all of that. These things start instantly, stop instantly, and change direction in the air like they're on wires. And the second a giant robot can stop on a dime, it's weightless physically, but also emotionally. Doesn't matter that the movie keeps screaming the height at you or parks it next to a skyscraper to prove it. It moves light, so it reads light. And that lightweight metal permission slip is right there the whole time, covering for every single one of these moves. It doesn't stop with the robots, though. It straight up wrecks two things you're not even looking at.

[00:06:24]One of them you can even see, hypothetically. It's the camera. The first film always set the camera down low at human height, looking up at something the size of a building. If it wasn't there, it put the camera where a person could actually stand. On a street, a rooftop, the side of a passing chopper. I just realized I repeat these points pretty often. I should get better at writing. It gives real perspective to the scale cuz you're a human in real life and you use that as a reference.

[00:06:50]Uprising lets the camera off the leash.

[00:06:53]It drifts up to the robot's eye level, swooping around the fight, chasing the machine through the air like it's bolted onto them. The second your camera can fly anywhere and keep pace with a robot in the sky, everything just shrinks. A camera with no weight makes everything it looks at weightless, too. That one you can at least see happening. This next one you mostly feel, which is exactly why it does more damage. Sound.

[00:07:19]Every footfall, which is the sound that you make when you make a footstep, used to be this low-end thud that hits you in the chest before your brain caught up to the picture. Every punch landed like a building falling onto another building.

[00:07:31]It was basically a kaiju fight's aftermath happening as a fight. Maybe that got away from me. But once the robots move lightly, that sound has nowhere left to go. You can't drop a chest caving base thud under a flying kick. It doesn't match. A sprint doesn't thud or make the same impact on the ground that a single heavy footstep does cuz there's just less weight on it. Same goes for a midair spin. You can't make that sound like a boom or something. The sound thins out to keep up with the bodies and all that low-end weight. The stuff you felt more than you heard that just disappears. So stack it up. The bodies move light. The camera floats and the sound lost its bottom end. Three of the exact things that made the first film work gone. Every one of them knocked over by a single call at the top. And then they built a robot that really combined all these metrics into one terrible mess. Who's that mess? It's Saber Athena. If you wanted to build one machine that sums up everything Uprising does wrong with its giant robots, you couldn't beat this one. And the best part is that you don't even have to make the case yourself. The official description does it for you. So, how do they describe her? Well, I'll repeat it word for word.

[00:08:48]The sleekst and most elegant Jagger ever created. The fastest in the fleet.

[00:08:54]wielding twin blades in hyperacrobatic combat. And oh dear viewers, please remember we're talking about a machine as tall as a skyscraper.

[00:09:03]Sleekst, most elegant. Those are words for a sports car or a phone, not for something that's meant to crack the ground when it stands up. Not for a building on stilts. And it keeps going.

[00:09:16]She's built on what they call an ultra light frame with high tensile muscle strands. And she's got little propulsion jets tucked under her arms and legs so she can move even faster. There are actual thrusters on this thing to help it dance. Even the weapons match a pair of thin, elegant swords mounted on her back that she whips around and snaps together into one bigger blade. Every single choice points the same way. Fast, light, graceful, acrobatic, like a freaking gymnast or my latest Dn D character. and not one of them belongs anywhere near something that's supposed to weigh 2,000 tons. The first film built machines that looked like a shipyard welded together for a war.

[00:09:56]Saber Athena looks like she was designed to win a talent show or again be piloted by someone in Gundam. Luckily, it's only the Joers that had gotten it. It's not like that bled into the monsters, too, right?

[00:10:10]Boy oh boy did it. We did a whole separate video on the monsters, the kaiju, and how the first film made every single one of them its own animal. I almost don't want to prompt you to watch it because of Warner Bros., but all right, I'll recap them quick here. You can tell them apart from the back in the rain, in the dark, off the silhouette alone. Uprising is about to undo all of it in the dumbest way possible. This whole part is going to sound very repetitive if you've seen both my earlier Pacific Rim videos, so uh sorry about that. Though at first, Uprising got it right. It hands you three brand new kaiju. Ryen, hakuja, and strikethorn. And they're good. Three distinct shapes, three different animals. Exactly the rule the first film laid down. For a little while, you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, somebody in this building still remembers how this works." And then the movie takes these three perfectly good monsters and drops them into a blender. They fuse into one thing called the Mega Kaiju.

[00:11:06]And it's about as bad as it sounds.

[00:11:08]Three separate creatures crushed into a single body. Something like 10 eyes, five down each side of its head with six legs. Couple of spiked tails flailing around back there. Three clean designs poured into one lump you couldn't draw if someone paid you to. Everything the monster rule was built on falls off in that one move. Remember reading a kaiju from its silhouette? Well, good luck.

[00:11:30]It's a knot of limbs and eyeballs now.

[00:11:33]And somehow making the monster three times bigger only managed to make it about a tenth as scary. And it moves exactly the way the robots do paradoxically. Weightless, bouncing around, light and floaty. The same switched off gravity feeling running through the monster half of a movie, too. Which is where it clicks that this was never a robot problem. It's the same brain making the same call everywhere it can. more, bigger, faster, flashier, sleeker, and uh clearly all of it better by default, right? Wait, constraint, believability, these are all optional.

[00:12:08]So, if this all came down to one decision, it's worth asking what that decision actually got wrong, cuz the first film wasn't slow by accident. Go back to the pivot we opened on. Tanks into fighter jets. Faster, sleeker, lighter. When the people making Uprising look at the first film, they see the slowness and read it as a flaw. This whole time that slowness was the exact thing doing all the work. Being slow to start and slow to stop is the whole thing that sells weight. That's the only reason your brain ever believes something weighs two tons, cuz it moves the way something two tons would actually move. Heavy and slow are the giant robot. So when Uprising sped everything up, they thought they were upgrading the Jagger. What they actually did was reach inside and downgrade the illusions. Then they wonder why everything felt hollow. All of it comes down to the tapered waist, the flying kicks, the anime poses, the thinned out sound, the floating camera, and the monster in a blender. Every one of those is downstream of a single misread.

[00:13:10]That's how you lose it. The effects in Uprising are expensive and clean, but that was never the issue. You lose it by looking at the best decision the first film ever made and thinking it was a mistake. Uprising inherited a finished blueprint. Somebody had already solved the giant robot problem in the same franchise with the same characters. The answer was sitting right there.

[00:13:32]Arguably, it had some sort of cultural masterpiece status among the sci-fi fans. But luckily, another franchise did pick up the slack. That was Godzilla.

[00:13:42]Because what they did in Minus one is look at everything that made Pacific Rim work and made it even better. Don't know what I mean? Well, click over here to find