Disclaimer: I am a huge science fiction geek, and a massive fan of Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 summer blockbuster Pacific Rim. Anyone who knows me knows that the giant robots-versus-monsters film, a vibrant, larger-than-life tribute to Japanese kaiju films like Godzilla, has a special place in my heart. Make no mistake: Pacific Rim is no Transformers movie. Though Pacific Rim, like the infamous franchise, is very much in love with its Autobot-esque machines and visual effects, Pacific Rim’s story is made of stronger, heavier stuff.

At its core, Pacific Rim is about people banding together — no matter their ethnicity, age, or gender — with the help of technology to defend humanity. It's a film that celebrates our capacity for cooperation; the skyscraper-sized mechanoids, called Jaegers, are so gigantic that in order to operate them, at least two rangers are required to merge their consciousnesses with each other through a complex neural interface, allowing them to share the neural load of piloting. Merging their most intimate memories, and, in fact, their minds, is how they defeat the kaiju attacks. The film's heroes are the Pan Pacific Defense Corps — Mako Mori, a Japanese woman, and Raleigh Becket, an American man, who pilot Earth's last Jaeger together under the command of Marshal Stacker Pentecost, a black British man — and Mako’s adoptive father. With most science fiction films still dominated by white casts and technophobia, del Toro's film energetically embraces a multiracial world where technology will connect and save us, not damn us. And all this, unabashedly packaged in megatons of pure, jaw-dropping, alien-pummelling fun.

All this is to say that going into the cinema to watch Steven S. DeKnight's sequel to Pacific Rim, Pacific Rim Uprising, I had high hopes.

Unfortunately, Uprising fell flat. To my disappointment, much of what made Pacific Rim so awesome had been gutted: the heart, the steel spirit, the humanness of it all. What was left was a marginally popcorn-worthy, robot-versus-monsters film, but one that reminded me more of the rusted, neglected decommissioned Jaeger the protagonist attempts to ransack for parts in the first scene rather than a proper, gleaming fighting machine.

Set about ten years after the kaiju are defeated and Earth is declared apocalypse-free, Pacific Rim Uprising is centered on the redemption of Jaeger-pilot-turned-party-boy Jake Pentecost, played by science fiction darling, Star Wars’ John Boyega, the cast-aside wayward son of the Marshal Pentecost from the Kaiju Wars. When the kaiju threat surfaces again, Jake is given a final chance from his sister Mako, now a general in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, to forgo his partying and criminal ways and become a cadet trainer with his estranged former co-pilot, Nate Lambert (played by Scott Eastwood). Boyega does a decent job injecting the uninspired script with some genuine laughs, but the script never really gets us to root for Jake, even during his supposedly traumatic "turning point" when — spoiler alert — a central character from the original dies. Furthermore, much to the confusion of the first-time viewers in the row behind me, the script doesn't really explain how Jake, Stacker, and Mako Mori are related, undercutting the thematic resonance on family. In the original, it is revealed Stacker adopted Mako, since she was a Kaiju War refugee in Japan, but the original makes no mention of Jake. Other relationships in the film seem stiff and hollow. The cadets, with the exception of Cailee Spaeny's character, are given little to no backstory and are reduced to a pluralistically, uniformly diverse group of candidates.

Despite the promising casting choice of Boyega as Jake, who also serves as a producer on the film, I never got the sense that the motley cast of characters was really fleshed out beyond basic stock characters; the Love Interest, Rebellious Teenager, Bully, Party Boy, Mad Scientist, etc. While some of the characterization of the original was arguably campy, the co-pilot chemistry between Rinko Kikuchi’s determined Mako Mori and Charlie Hunnam’s beat-down Raleigh Becket gave the film a solid foundation that is never quite reached by Boyega’s Pentecost and his eventual co-pilot.

Or maybe it was the palpable absence of del Toro's directorial vision where Uprising stumbled, since del Toro, a famous monster-movie lover, demanded that the kaiju and Jaegers of the original be as memorable and fantastic as possible, whereas in the sequel the designs are flat and standardized. On the digital animation front, admittedly, the daylight rumbles are a refreshing change from nighttime fights and provide a satisfying level of city-smashing spectacle, but the smackdown is just that: a routine smackdown. No surprise moves, no signature styles. You could even call them budget Transformers scenes. While the original had the famous mind-blowing, entire- audience-gasp-inducing scene where the hero Jaeger cuts a kaiju in half using a sword in outer space, there was simply no battle scene here that was even remotely comparable. In Uprising, the star Jaegers and kaijus in the ring have no personality — a problem exacerbated by the fact that even the humans lack personality.

Don’t get me wrong, Uprising is still entertaining, if you just want what’s on the tin: robots versus monsters. But I could easily imagine how if, say, the dimensions of Mako and Jake's relationship were further explored, Uprising could have been a very different film. Keeping the return of the kaiju threat, the big battles in the broad daylight of Tokyo, and the ominous remote-operated Jaeger plot, but have Mako and Jake become the estranged co-pilots who must come together to save the world — again. Uprising could have wrestled more compelling, Goliath-level questions of how children relate to their parents, what happens to family after war and whether or not even the most advanced of mind-melding technology can truly help us understand one another. Give the shell of momentous battles a real mission, following in the footsteps of the original, and maybe Uprising could have actually compelled me to rise up and clap.