The bad news: it turns out Stacker Pentecost didn’t definitively cancel the apocalypse in Pacific Rim. The good news: his son, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), is mind-melding with a Jaeger for its upcoming sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising to take on a new Kaiju threat.
A new image from Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel in the latest issue of Empire shows Boyega’s young hero in action, ready to deliver a literal smackdown from the Conn-Pod of Gipsy Avenger, an amped-up version of the Gipsy Danger ‘bot from Guillermo del Toro’s original. While Boyega swapped out his Peckham accent for an American one in Star Wars, here he’s injecting more of himself.
“Steve gives me freedom to rewrite my lines, give them more seasoning,” he told Empire on the Uprising set. “I think Jake is a South London boy. So being a South London boy myself, I’d add a bit of that rudeness to it. Kaiju can’t hack South London.”
Read more about the film’s new Jaegers, re-designed Kaiju, and fresh approach to monster-on-machine combat in the new issue of Empire, which hits newsstands on Thursday January 25. Pacific Rim: Uprising will un-cancel, and then hopefully re-cancel, the apocalypse when it arrives in UK cinemas on March 23.
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