Pacific Rim: Uprising sheds some of the mystique that characterized the first movie, leaving us with a story about big robots, shattered skyscrapers, and two young heroes… wait, are we talking about Pacific Rim or Transformers?

The sequel to Pacific Rim, Pacific Rim: Uprising, just hit theaters, and its excited cult following was happy to see the story of humanity battling kaijus with massive jaegers return. But inevitably, Uprising shifted towards a more familiar kind of story in the universe Pacific Rim set up for it, which, although entertaining, did kind of have a Michael Bay-y feel to it.

Director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight, however, has high hopes for the future:

“When I was developing Uprising, I was jotting down a bunch of ideas and notes about a possible third movie. At one point, I think I was in pre-production in Sydney, and I typed them all up and sent them to Legendary (Pictures) to say, ‘Look, this is where I would take it.’ They seemed to like the idea. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to do a third one, if the audience shows up for this one, and hopefully I’ll be involved.

“I love the franchise. I think it’s so much fun and there’s so many different ways you could go with it. My idea was always to end the third movie by expanding the universe into a Star Wars/Star Trek style universe, where you could have standalones or you could follow the canon.”

At this point, it’s probably guaranteed that there’ll be a third movie, and perhaps even more after that. But the intersection of robots and space is already a well-trodden path. It leaves us with the question: How can Pacific Rim avoid becoming just another Transformers?

Placing focus on drifters, rather than jaegers

One of the first moments in Uprising that set it apart from the first movie is when you see a huge jaeger walking around the city with no focus on the people within it. It personifies the jaeger to a point that you end up doing a double take: what movie is this again? It looks strikingly like Transformers.

Battle scenes, now in broad daylight, put a lot of focus on the cool new accessories each jaeger has. Of course, this isn’t something new — Pacific Rim also had this — but there was a sense that the emotional journey of the characters held more of the camera’s focus than only the cool weapons of the jaegers (although they’re also awesome).

The jaegers felt more like tools in Pacific Rim. In Uprising, they seem like characters of their own.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but moving forward, it would be nice to return to focusing on the drifters. We already have Transformers if we want to see huge robots with wills of their own take down a city skyline. Pacific Rim has enough material to do something much deeper and richer than that, examining how humans and technology intersect in times of dire need.

Preserving the moodiness of the first movie

As funny and at times cliched as Pacific Rim was, there’s no denying that what made it a hit was the gritty sense of this-is-the-end-of-the-world that colored the entire backdrop of the story. We had battles in the ocean at night, characters who stood as humanity’s last hope, and a society that had developed all manner of illegal ways to make profit from tragedy.

Although comedy and even romance were interspersed through it all, it was human emotion that held the movie together, making it a unique combination of apocalyptic, action, and speculative movies.

Uprising shifted away somewhat from this approach, focusing more on the action and the reluctant hero’s journey we’re used to seeing in this genre. While it worked for an entertaining film, if Pacific Rim wants to avoid becoming a franchise with successively more vapid films, it needs to make sure it anchors itself in a more profound emotional struggle.

Highlighting its biggest strength: diversity

If there’s anything both Pacific Rim movies have done right, it’s bring in new actors of many genders and races to take part in a story about the world defending itself from destructive aliens. Whether or not it was their intention, Uprising is in some ways an excellent example of how to approach gender equality in film.

And there’s something particularly epic about having characters from all around the world work together, in many languages, to save the planet. While Transformers did have some of that, it felt undeniably, stereotypically American… which isn’t a bad thing, but kept the franchise from branching out to different characters and deeper storylines.

Pacific Rim is stronger because of the international relations that take place in the films themselves, and because it isn’t afraid to use different elements from different countries to make the story both visually and emotionally satisfying.

There’s a lot Pacific Rim can do that hasn’t been done before. But if it wants to properly exploit its potential, it needs to commit to more complex, original storylines, and not get carried away by visual effects we’ve already seen before.

We want to see more Pacific Rim. We already have enough Transformers movies.