The Force Awakens star John Boyega is suited, booted and ready to pilot a Jaeger in this brand new set photo for Pacific Rim: Uprising.
First spotted by Instagram user ‘tessalucyy’ (via Twitter), the pic was taken in Sydney, Australia where Uprising is filming, and offers up our first look at Boyega – or perhaps his stunt double – decked out in battle gear as the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost. In the 2013 original, Elba commanded the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, leaving Boyega’s character with some mighty shoes to fill. Thankfully, he’s a pilot, and will surely have access to Jaeger technology throughout the course of Pacific Rim: Uprising – heck, this pic all but confirms it.
Little is known about the story arc of Uprising, but Guillermo del Toro – director on the original who has since passed the mantle on to Daredevil‘s Steven S. DeKnight – did previously tease that the 2018 sequel takes places a few years after its forebear, in a world where the Jaeger program has fallen foul to corruption. With the Kaiju rumored to be extinct, the governments of the world deploy those towering weapons of mass destruction against one another, and it’s only when those alien monsters stage an Uprising that the Powers That Be reboot the Jaeger program for the good. On board to help cancel another apocalypse are Lana Candor, Scott Eastwood, Jing Tian, Cailee Spaeny, Ivanna Sakhno and Adria Arjona.
Emerging from a maelstrom of production woes and creative setbacks – during which time Steven S. DeKnight’s upcoming creature feature was actually called Maelstrom – Pacific Rim: Uprising will stomp into theaters on February 23, 2018.
