Netflix's Pacific Rim Sequel Is So Good, It Makes Pacific Rim: Uprising Even Worse

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Published May 30, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

When Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim burst into theaters in the summer of 2013, it was love at first sight for me and many monster movie-obsessed teenagers like me. The script is nothing to write home about — it’s a very conventional sci-fi adventure, relying on very conventional tropes seen in dozens of other movies — but del Toro’s visual flair elevated that conventional script to something entirely unique and exciting.

Everything del Toro did right in the first movie, the sequel did wrong. Del Toro had truly captured the epic scope and scale of the kaiju battles, but Uprising just looked like a bunch of normal-sized people running around a miniature set; it didn’t have the weight or the size of del Toro’s compositions. And where del Toro’s cinematography is really interesting, with a lot of diverse shot types and color palettes, Uprising is technically rote and visually unspectacular.

Pacific Rim’s next offshoot made Uprising look even worse, because it was actually pretty darn good. Released on Netflix in 2021, Pacific Rim: The Black is an animated TV continuation of the franchise, and it recaptures the visual flair and excitement of del Toro’s original movie. It ran for two seasons, and it’s the sequel that Pacific Rim has always deserved.

Pacific Rim: The Black Is The Sequel Pacific Rim Deserved

Set in the same universe as the films but telling its own story entirely, Pacific Rim: The Black revolves around two teenage siblings who lose their parents when Mom and Dad go off to fight the kaiju and never come back. When they discover an old Jaeger model used for training, these siblings climb aboard and head out on a quest to find their missing parents. This show is the sequel that Uprising could’ve been. As a narrative, it’s more character-driven and emotionally engaging than even del Toro’s original film, let alone Uprising.

One of the biggest problems with Uprising is that it lacked the grit of del Toro’s original film. The first Pacific Rim movie has a grimy used-future aesthetic akin to Alien or Star Wars. It feels very dirty and lived-in. You really felt that society had collapsed, and that the remains of humanity were living in hastily constructed slums to hide from the sea creatures that had invaded the planet. The movie takes place across a lot of rainy nights and dark days of the soul. By contrast, Uprising looked much too clean and quaint; it has big fights playing out in broad daylight. The Black has that grit, as well as the diverse visuals and the impressive scale.

If there’s one downside, it’s that Pacific Rim: The Black lacks the humor of the original movie. Pacific Rim is one of del Toro’s funniest films. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone are much darker and more atmospheric, but Pacific Rim was del Toro’s first true attempt at a big, bombastic, Star Wars-style crowd-pleasing sci-fi action blockbuster, and he imbued it with plenty of quotable quips and funny one-liners (“We are cancellin’ the apocalypse,” delivered pitch-perfectly by Idris Elba, being a prime example). Pacific Rim: The Black may not have that comedy, but it has everything else that made Pacific Rim great.