Headscratchers / Pacific Rim: Uprising

New entries on the bottom.

Raleigh

• Where is he? He gets mentioned offhand once, but there's no detail on what happened to him, and if he's dead than why isn't his picture on the wall?
  • Given that the world is recovering after the breach was sealed, Raleigh might have retired from the PPDC to help rebuild cities during peacetime. He was a construction worker for a while in the first movie, after all.
  • In Pacific Rim Ascension it's revealed he succumbed to the radiation poisoning he got from being so close to the reactor meltdown in the end
  • The director, however, has said the movie is intentionally vague to allow the possibility for him to return in the role for a future movie.

Mako's Island

• How did she get the coordinates for the island from studying Obsidian Fury? And why did she send a map of it rather than geographic coordinates, which would presumably be less data?
  • She detected strange power readings in Obsidian Fury, compiled some data, then sent everything she had. Because of the jamming, the transmission was garbled, and all they got was a few megabytes of the map.
  • Mako recognized the energy signature of its power core. Presumably this is a case of insider knowledge being able to recognize a small but meaningful detail and like how you can tell where Uranium came from by certain chemical markers or mining techniques used it seems Jager power cores assembled by certain plants have specific power signatures. As for why not send specific coordinates, she was in a crashing helicopter which probably makes a panicked desperate move understandable.
  • Or just a hasty "Send All" rather than picking and choosing. Probably there was a ton of text in the original transmission, but the garbling was such that the only part of the data-dump Gottlieb's recovery attempt could unpick from the snarl was the small portion of it that was in an image-file format instead of document, i.e. the appended map.

The abandoned factory

• What was the point of the island entirely? Is it supposed to be the factory where Obsidian Fury was built? This isn't made clear. If so, was it built by an automated factory like the drones?
  • Yes. That's why Obsidian Fury destroyed it, to prevent any evidence from being discovered. Obviously Obsidian Fury was supposed to win the fight against Gipsy, which would have left absolutely no evidence behind. But since it lost, that let the heroes find out about the Jaeger/Kaiju hybrids, and made them believe Shao was responsible.
    • Why couldn't Obsidian Fury simply destroy it as soon as it was completed?
    • Because it was also being used to build the drone cores. And, probably, in case Obsidian Fury needed repairs.
    • It's unlikely it was being used to build the drone cores officially, otherwise it wouldn't have been known to be abandoned. You could argue that maybe it was to increase production rates but that's a stretch.
  • Seems likely Newt had the plant used to produce a power core since it was out of the way where nobody would see it. Then when he realized that Mako had gotten her message out anyway sent Obsidian Fury to destroy it so nobody could put the pieces together that someone was putting together Jager from bits and pieces manufactured all over the world to keep anyone from noticing.

Mount Fuji plan all along

• The idea of Kaiju setting of the Pacific RIM ablaze makes more sense than rampaging trough the coastal cities, but fails totally in trying to retroactively put it in events of first movie. If Kaijus were really going for Mt. Fuji, they would always make landfall in Japan. From the breach to Japan, straight line. Why bother with USA? Even if the went for other volcanoes, why just not avoid cities? It's said it took several days, constant pounding and TWO nukes to kill the Trespasser (first Kaiju). If he just went straight for volcano, he could end it in an instant.
  • Presumedly, the plan wasn't to just attack Mt. Fuji. The kaiju would head to the nearest potential volcano. It just happens that the surviving kaiju were near Japan. And then they used data from previous attacks in the area to confirm.
  • That is possible, but as I stated: It took two days to kill the Trespasser (First Kaiju, no Jaegers) since it made landfall, thats plenty of time to throw itself to volcano. Also, if it avoided the cities, army might not even engage at first. Also, San Francisco is really far from the original breach. If Trespasser just made landfall in Japan, avoided cities and went straight to mount Fuji (one of the closest volcanoes to the breach), Precursors would succeed in first go, no Kaiju war happening. In first movies, Kaiju were explicitly attacking the cities, there is no way around it to shoehorn in the volcanoes plot.
  • This is WMG territory, but perhaps the Precursors didn't know where the nearest volcanos were until they had a man on inside (Newt). The Earth looks a lot different than it did during the time of the dinosaurs, after all. And as advanced the Precursors were, the Kaiju still seem to be large beasts, albeit ones grown in factories. Perhaps they got distracted by the "smell" of human cities and took a detour.
    • Following from this as they got more intel over time, presumably though the Kaiju they modified the plan to attack highly active volcanic points with some Kaiju and major settlements with others. By the time they found an suiteable candidates for the plan the local military had adapted to the point of kicking the crud out of their terror beasts so an attempt to cripple them was warranted to the point that it started to overtake the apocalypse plan. Almost worked to if you think about it, if they'd kept it up without the sudden nuke on the base they'd have found no defenders and made a rush for the mountain.
  • Except the film explicitly states that Mt. Fuji was where the kaiju - demonstrated by at least half a dozen previous examples in the hologram - were aiming for all along, well before the Precursors got inside Newt's head. Previously, Lambert comments on how little sense the existing presumption of the Precursors' strategy made, with the Mt. Fuji reveal intended as the solution to that seemingly inefficient proposal. Further adding to the nonsense, several of those examples are shown as coming from the Asian mainland, even though the Breach of the first film was a singular location that, as mentioned, should have had the Kaiju travelling to Japan in a straight line right to the mountain. Not converging on it from every direction.
    • Of major note, it's not just any volcano, but a volcano rich in rare earth metals, which most are not. Also this could be just one possible win condition, simple military victory/trampling all resistance would also suffice no doubt.
    • That isn't the point, the point is that the movie explicitly claims that all of the Kaiju were heading towards Mt Fuji, even the ones from the first Breach. This is impossible since, as mentioned above, the first set of Kaiju spread out from the Breach to attack many different locations. The only way this makes sense is if you treat it as a retcon and assume that every single Kaiju battle in the first movie actually happened along the way from the first Breach to Mt Fuji.
  • Certainly all the kaiju can't have been headed for Mt. Fuji, else the ones that attacked sites like California, Sydney, Anchorage or Lima swam thousands of miles in the wrong freaking direction. But it's plausible that a significant percentage of them did head in that direction, and the hologram only showed the ones that didn't get sidetracked.

Tokyo isn't evacuated despite the PPDC knowing Kaiju would attack in two days

• The PPDC knew the Kaiju were going to attack Japan and specifically aim for Mount Fuji, yet when the film actually shows the Kaiju landing in Tokyo, the city is functioning as normal and hastily evacuated. Why weren't they warned earlier? Also the idea that one of the most heavily populated cities in the world could completely evacuate in the short time portrayed in the film is outlandish. How could they possibly have moved all the sick and elderly?
  • The closest to an explanation is a passing mention by Gottlieb that they haven't been able to reach anybody. Which in itself is ridiculous, even if every piece of communications equipment in the Shatterdome was destroyed in the attack, surely somobody in Hong Kong would be able to lend a radio or a phone during those several hours of proparations. And speaking of that, why did it take the Kaiju so long to reach Japan? From the first movie we know that they are frightening fast swimmers. It took Leatherback and Otachi a couple of hours to swim from the Breach in the Challenger Deep to Hong Kong.
  • The communication in the local Shatterdome isn't the only problem. The drones were being delivered to all the Shatterdomes. The one we see is probably the only one lucky enough to still have anything operational after the attack.
    • That doesn't solve the original problem. Somebody, anybody, could have called somebody in the Japanese government and said "hey some Kaiju are showing up and we can't stop it". You can argue that they didn't know where they would appear on land, after all, landing in Tokyo proper is actually a horrible place to land if you just wanted to get to Mount Fuji; it's roughly 100km away and would involve swimming the wrong way from the volcano into Tokyo Bay.
  • If you like your Wild Mass Guessing really dark, possibly the pilots were only told that the evacuation was total so they'd go ahead and fight as ferociously as they needed to, without hesitating to smash through buildings or set off rockets and plasma blasts with civilians in the crossfire.

The Jaegers not fighting when the merge is happening

• Four operational jagers just stand there and watch while Newt uses swarm tactics to merge the kaiju. Why not kill it while it's still transforming? The swarm also seems like a better idea to defeat the jagers in the first place.
  • Transformation Is a Free Action. It's a pretty standard Acceptable Break from Reality. If you really need an in-universe explanation, call it shock and surprise, since such a thing has never happened before. As for whether the swarmers would have been better used attacking the jaegers directly, it's doubtful they would have been more than an annoyance. The mega-kaiju, on the other hand, was basically immune to all the jaeger attacks, and got taken out by a completely unanticipated tactic.
  • Also, they don't have as clear a view of what's happening as the film permits its audience to have. Possibly, so far as they could tell, the swarming robo-critters were destroying the kaiju via dismemberment, rather than reconstructing them as one massive Frankensteined monster. It's not as if the smaller drones had "We Work For Evil Newt" logos stamped on them: the Jaeger pilots might've thought they were some kind of fallback defense built by Japan in secret, or prototype drone tech that Shao had deployed as a last resort.

The Drift

• In the first film a huge deal is made about pilots being 'drift compatible' - Raleigh goes through about ten potential candidates before finding that he's drift compatible with Mako. In Uprising, the trainees drift with one another, drift with the practice brain, Jake drifts with Nate, then with Amara without any mention of the need for 'drift compatibility.' In particular Bracer Phoenix relies on a three pilot system, something in the original film that was exclusive to Crimson Typhoon because the Wei triplets were the first pilots to manage a three person neural handshake (seemingly owing to the fact they were triplets). Understandably technology might have taken a leap forwards in terms of drift compatibility and the neural handshake in the interim ten years but isn't that something worth mentioning when the first film put so much emphasis on how rare drift compatibility is (especially between non-familial pairings)?
  • Drift compatibility is still a thing. In fact, a very large point of the drones is that they don't have to worry about finding compatible pairings and can just have a single pilot with a quantum brain to help shoulder the neural load. It's mentioned that the reason Rangers start training as kids is because they make deeper connections more easily, and Amara (who, not coincidentally, is the newest recruit) has a lot of trouble with it. As for Bracer Phoenix, it's unclear if the third pilot is actually drifting with the others. She seemed to be only in control of the turret, and wasn't mirroring their movements.
  • Drift Compatibility is not an ingrained trait you either have or you don't, it's a connection you can develop with someone. Raleigh didn't "find out" he was compatible with Mako, he selected her because they understood each other almost immediately. Similarly, Stacker was easily able to step in piloting with Chuck because, in his own words, he doesn't hide anything. You can drift with anyone, but being compatible takes time and in the context of the first film they didn't have months to find the right pairing for the very limited number of Jaegers, which is why they were typically family members. In the context of Uprising, they had plenty of time to set up training academies and have a pool of recruits ready to take over. The film also made it especially clear that Jake and Nate in Sydney were operating at the bare minimum for a stable drift, as they were still dealing with their interpersonal issues. After working it out, they were much more in sync.
  • Plus, it's been 10 years. It's not out of the question that Drift technology has gotten better and more streamlined, making it easier for pilots to sync up without having as good of a match as was needed in the original film.
  • The Drift is based on memories and shared experiences. The closer your bond, the better you fight. Well, take a bunch of teenagers, house them together in a barracks, then put them through training from hell together. What have you got at the end? A squad of trained soldiers bonded by their shared experience who've all spent years together and made memories. Its probable by the end of the training program every pilot is drift compatible with every other pilot.
    • The original program didn't have this advantage because there was no time. They had to start with people who were drift-compatible and then train them to be pilots. The new program is going the other direction: taking people who show promise as pilot and then training them to be drift-compatible.

Amara's backstory doesn't fit the timeline

• Amara seems to bee between 15 and 18 years old in the movie. There was a 10 years between the movies. In her memory flashback, she is about 5 years old, which means it happened either directly before the first movie, or 3 years before it, tops. Either way, the pier incident had to happen in final stages of first Kaiju war and after the Anchorage prologue of the first movie. And as we saw in the prologue, at the time, breach and Kaijus were monitored, and Jaegers send to intercept. So, how is it possible the kaiju took everyone by total surprise? The pier should have been evacuated hours ago, and there should be Jaeger holding the miracle mile. Also, with frequency of Kaiju incursions, people would probably not even spend quality time on Pacific shore anymore, and there should already be kaiju wall in construction.
  • It was a memory distorted by fear, like Mako's in the first movie. It's extremely doubtful that the kaiju got that close to her, or that it directly stomped her family, or that no one saw it coming, but that's what she remembers. Because she was a terrified little girl under attack by a giant monster.
  • Remember the situation toward the end of the war — that the Kaiju were starting to overwhelm and beat the Jaegers and were coming more and more rapidly. It's possible the Jaeger designated to protect that area had recently beaten one back, meaning A. it was being repaired and B. people in the area would've had a (false) sense of security, "knowing" that another Kaiju wouldn't pop through the breach for a while.

The Mega Kaiju

• How exactly was the Mega Kaiju formed? It's made clear that bisection and mutilation kills a Kaiju, so how exactly do Hakuja, Raijin and Shrikethorn survive being cut into pieces by tiny drones and stitched together into a single creature?
  • Also, which parts of which kaiju were used to build the Mega Kaiju? The final result just looks like a much bigger Shrikethorn with Hakuja's tusks and parts of Raijin's head armor on its chest.
  • If you recall the Kaiju drift scenes in the first film, we saw how a Kaiju is built. Their living tissue is stitched in place by machines like needle and thread. The mini-drones were like the Precursors' factories or a surgeons knife. They cut in very precise places with specially designed tools then reattached what they took off as soon as possible. Since the Kaiju are artificial lifeforms to begin with, it's likely part of their design to be taken apart and put back together (say, to replace a missing limb after an attack).

Newt's brain girlfriend

• How exactly does Newt have a whole and living Kaiju brain in his bedroom? Did he grow it himself? Is it the preserved brain of Mutavore from the first film, or perhaps that of Baby Otachi?
  • Its the same piece of Kaiju brain he had at the beginning of the first movie, which he had his first drift with. Its even the very same prop, and you can see it looks pretty out of place in this movie, since it dropped the used future aesthetic.

Terraforming

• If Newt said in the first film that due to pollution "we practically terraformed the Earth for them", then why were they trying to "terraform" it AGAIN by reacting kaiju blood with Mount Fuji's earth metals?
  • Simple: detonating the Ring of Fire would have exterminated most of the indigenous life forms, allowing the Precursors to easily colonize the planet.

Living bombs

• Also, if the Kaiju's sole purpose was to act as living bombs, then why do they attack cities in the first place? Why didn't Trespasser, the first kaiju, simply seek out a volcano and jump in, triggering the reaction before humans could even invent Jaegers?
  • According to Newt in the first movie, waves 1-4 of the kaiju were meant to soften up humanity's defenses (fail). Any kaiju above category 5 was meant to trigger the detonation. However, it was also noted in the first movie that the breach was something of a squeeze point, and that it opened wider over time. Most likely, category 5 kaiju and above wouldn't have fit through when the breach first opened.
  • The caveat here, of course, is that this movie states all previous kaiju were heading towards Mount Fuji, an obvious ret-con in order to quickly coordinate the resistance at the end.

Which parts of the kaiju were put together

• The Mega-Kaiju's design looks a bit of a mess, given that its component parts are barely identifiable from the overall creature. The tails are clearly Shrikethorn's, and Raijin's head armor can be seen forming the MK's crests and breastplate, but what about the other parts? The front arms are shaped like Shrikethorn's, but discharge attacks like Raijin, and the two pairs of hind legs belong to Hakuja or Shrikethorn? And what happened to Raijin's head?

Trololo...really?

• Of all humorous songs/memes they could have used to try and add some levity, what possessed them to use one that's almost entirely about saying that you just trolled someone? Especially at such a critical, dramatic moment in the film, with Precursor-possessed Newton still at large and potentially in a position to ruin this last-ditch effort to save the world?
  • Director De Knight did mention it was not his idea. Possible studio-input.

• Also about the Trololo song. When it first starts playing the co-pilot asks him about it. But due to the drift, the co-pilot should already know what he's thinking and the reason why he chose that song.
  • Just because you can discern that your Drift-partner likes a song doesn't necessarily mean that their preference makes any sense to your own tastes.