Back in 2013, director Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim hit theaters.

A love-letter to movies featuring giant monsters (or Kaiju) and giant robots (or Jaegers, in this universe). It was a glorious mashup of long running tropes, matched with a depth of universe, a consideration of a greater world.

I loved every second of it - it was hard not to, you could feel the joy in every frame.

Now, nearly five years later, the unexpected sequel, Pacific Rim Uprising has arrived in theaters, and I have to say - it very much left me wanting.

Note that phrase I used above? “Love-letter"? That’s pretty key to what’s missing from Pacific Rim Uprising.

In Pacific Rim, you felt the reverence del Toro had for both what had come before and what he created. Every segment lived and breathed, from the training to become a pilot, to the elaborate launching montages, to the treatment of Jaegers and Kaiju like some sort of battling Gods - forces of an incredible nature.

By comparison, Steven DeKnight’s Pacific Rim Uprising isn’t really quite as interested in worshiping what came before it.

Set 10 years after the events of Pacific Rim, our story follows some standard beats. We’ve got Jake Pentacost (John Boyega), the son of fallen hero Stacker Pentacost (that’s Idris Elba’s character from the first film) - he’s spending his days living in hedonism, making his way as an illegal trader of both Kaiju and Jaeger goods, avoiding living in his father’s shadow as a military hero. He encounters young scrapper Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), someone who is prepping for when - not if - the Kaiju return. She even built a scrappy Jaeger of her own! As I’m sure you’re already imagining, this - of course - leads to these two characters ending up under the side of good, but who ever said that we were in to these films for their unique plots?

The issue, however, is if it weren’t for the massive charisma of John Boyega - delivering on everything we’ve seen of him in Attack the Block and the latest Star Wars Trilogy - this would feel like a movie by numbers. Thankfully, his larger-than-life superstardom in training helps propel the movie forward…even when he’s paired with who can best be described as a charisma black hole, Scott Eastwood, playing a character whose name I’ve already forgotten, continuing to somehow have a career due to who his father is. Eastwood appears to come from the same Hollywood cloning factory who gave careers to people such as Sam Worthington, Garret Hedlund, Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney, in a successful attempt to distill the random-white-dude-action-hero into its most diluted, milquetoast form.

Thankfully, the movie also seems to be aware of how not great it is to that point, as the second half is an absolute blast, mixing in characters from the original Pacific Rim (Charlie Day’s Newt Geiszler and Burn Gorman’s Hermann Gottlieb get to take focus, especially Newt), focusing on monsters fighting robots, and delivering the closest a Hollywood motion picture has ever gotten to matching the sheer ballistic fun of Japanese anime.

The end result means that Pacific Rim Uprising is not really the greatest film in the world. If you’re a fan of the original, great! If you’ve never seen the first - yeah, you’ll need to see it, because this sequel has no interest in explaining anything to you. But it winds up being just a fun lark, a decent matinee, a movie to be re-run on cable which you’ll stick around for the last 20 minutes of.

The perfect analogy for what this sequel is comes with the film’s score. Composed by Lorne Balfe, following in the footsteps of Ramin Djawadi’s guitar heavy themes from the first film, none of the music is memorable in the least - but then come the moments where the main theme from the first film is revisited. Sure, the original version sounded better, but there’s just enough moments in this remix to get you 75% of the way there. That’s Pacific Rim Uprising in a nutshell.

Pacific Rim Uprising is in theaters now. You can get tickets via Fandango, or pre-order digitally via iTunes.