FADE IN:

EXT. PACIFIC RIM

JOHN BOYEGA (V.O.)

I was born into a world at war. Alien monsters called kaiju were coming through an interdimensional portal, and humans built giant robots called Jaegers to fight them. The monster fights were epic, but the characters and subplots were pretty stale and generic, and overall it was just kinda okay.

(pause)

The war ended ten years ago. Now people like me live in the abandoned ruins. I’m able to squat in a beachfront mansion with a giant monster skeleton running right through it, because obviously nobody else would want to live in the coolest fucking house on the face of the planet.

(pause)

I make my living as a scavenger, salvaging components of dead Jaegers. There are people out there paying top dollar in the hopes of building their own Jaegers. You know, like how in the wake of an earthquake, people scoop up all the rubble and build their own skyscrapers?

JOHN goes to steal some valuable JAEGER PART, only to find teenager CAILEE SPAENY is already in the act of stealing it. He chases her back to her place, where she instals it into a MINI-JAEGER.

CAILEE SPAENY

There, the last part of my Jaeger! Also, the only part I could possibly have put in place without the assistance of a crane which I don’t appear to have. I mean come on, most of these components are bigger than I am.

JOHN BOYEGA

Why the fuck did you build this thing?

CAILEE SPAENY

Because I believe the kaiju will be back one day, and when those ginormous skyscraper-sized monsters return, my teeny little robot will be ready for them! I'll just wait for them to double over with laughter, then POW, jump as high as I can and try to punch them in the nards.

Suddenly a REAL JAEGER shows up!

REAL JAEGER

Halt! You are in possession of an illegal Jaeger! You just powered it up for the first time ever thirty seconds ago, how the hell are we responding so quickly? Did this giant military robot just happen to be in the neighborhood?

CAILEE SPAENY

No problem, I’m sure my untested piece of junkyard scrap can outmaneuver the most sophisticated piece of hardware ever built.

(fails so hard)

JOHN BOYEGA

Listen to me Cailee, I’m a former Jaeger pilot myself, and as such I know better than anybody that what you’re attempting is dumb and impossible. Stop it before you get us both killed, you idiot wanna take over the controls and fail just as hard but in a slightly different way!

(fails fails fails)

They both get CAUGHT and ARRESTED.

INT. ARMY OFFICE

JOHN is brought before his adopted sister, big-brass army person RINKO KIKUCHI.

RINKO KIKUCHI

So John, you might remember that when you were a trainee pilot and we caught you dicking around irresponsibly in a Jaeger, the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps kicked you out. So now that we’ve caught you dicking around even more irresponsibly in a Jaeger, we’re UNkicking you out.

JOHN BOYEGA

Are you sure that’s how that works?

RINKO KIKUCHI

Look, ordinarily we’d punish you and Cailee for your criminal behavior rather than reward you, but we need every Jaeger pilot we can get in these desperate, haven’t-been-at-war-for-a-decade times!

JOHN BOYEGA

Well since I don’t want to go to jail, fine, you’ve forced me to take the highly prestigious and unfathomably awesome job of training people to pilot giant battle robots. You jerks.

JOHN is made a JAEGER TRAINER based on all his ZERO HOURS OF COMBAT EXPERIENCE, and CAILEE is made a TRAINEE PILOT.

CAILEE SPAENY

Well since the token antagonistic phase of our relationship is over, we might as well get to know each other and start the token bonding phase. My family was wiped out by a kaiju, and ever since then I’ve been obsessively preparing myself to avenge them. Kinda like Rinko in the first movie!

JOHN BOYEGA

Whereas I’m a burnout pilot, traumatized by the death of an immediate family member, who’s been brought reluctantly back into the Jaeger program. Kinda like Charlie Hunnam in the first movie!

CAILEE SPAENY

Really, of all the elements of the first movie to recreate, we’re copying the boring-ass cardboard-cutout protagonists? At least tell me we’re not doing the same sexual tension as well, I look like I’m about fourteen.

JOHN BOYEGA

Nah, I don’t really have a love interest this time around-

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Hey John, it’s me, your old partner. I’m still upset at your betrayal all those years ago, but over the course of this movie hopefully we can reforge our close, close bond.

(smolders)

JOHN BOYEGA

That... doesn’t count.

(pause)

I’m pretty sure.

INT. JINGCORP

Elsewhere, JING TIAN is a CEO of a company that makes JAEGER DRONES, and CHARLIE DAY is her HEAD SCIENCE GUY.

JING TIAN

I hope the government decides to order my remote-controlled single-pilot Jaegers. The Jaeger pilots sure aren’t happy about it. Apparently the idea of doubling their effectiveness while eliminating the risk to their lives pisses them off, because they’re idiots.

CHARLIE DAY

Maybe they’ve just seen any movie ever where soldiers get replaced by newfangled machines, and are counting down the seconds until these drones inevitably go rogue?

JING TIAN

Maybe. What do I care, as a businesswoman in one of those movies I’m at best incompetent, at worst pure evil!

BURN GORMAN comes in to talk to CHARLIE.

BURN GORMAN

Charlie, I had a great idea for how to deploy Jaegers faster. Rocket boots! Yes we’d need some kind of made-up super fuel for that to work, but it just so happens that Jaeger blood is pretty much rocket fuel, and I suppose we have like ten thousand gallons of that stuff on hand!

(smiles)

Fun fact: did you know that screenwriters can just make up whatever the fuck they want and nobody can stop them?

CHARLIE DAY

Listen Burn, I’ve been meaning to ask you: what the fuck kind of scientist are you, exactly? Last movie you were a computer-programming robot designer and an expert in interdimensional portals. Now you’re talking about alien biochemistry and rocket science. What’s your discipline, dude?

BURN GORMAN

I dunno... I guess I got a degree in physics as well as a degree in xenobiology, then also got a third degree in General Inventing Shit? That’s why they call me Third Degree Burn! (Remember, kids, it’s www.nothingbutburngormanjokesplusmilfs.net!)

EXT. SYDNEY

JOHN and SCOTT train up CAILEE and an indeterminate number of additional human-shaped blobs, then take one of the JAEGERS to a sort of PR THING in SYDNEY. But then a mysterious OTHER JAEGER emerges from the OCEAN and ATTACKS!

JOHN BOYEGA

Oh sure, when Cailee builds a toy-sized Jaeger in some garage in the slums, the government knows instantly. But this three-hundred-foot tall weapon of mass destruction traipses right into a major metropolis and suddenly it’s all “DWAH? WHERE DID THIS THING COME FROM?!?”

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Okay, we just had like twenty seconds of footage of people running away, clearly that means the entire city is evacuated now and we can start smashing buildings apart without having a whole Man of Steel thing going on.

JOHN and SCOTT start making their JAEGER fight the OTHER ONE, all ROCK ’EM SOCK ’EM ROBOTS STYLE!

JOHN BOYEGA

And unlike last movie, we’re not dumb enough to forget about our giant honkin’ sword! Nope, we’re gonna whip it out right in the first fight!

(extends sword)

Aw yeah, can’t think of any better way to arm a Jaeger than to have precisely one of its arms be able to convert into an unstoppable murderblade-

The OTHER JAEGER converts BOTH OF ITS ARMS into UNSTOPPABLE MURDERBLADES.

JOHN BOYEGA

WOOOAAAHHH YOU JUST BLEW MY MIIIIND

The EVIL JAEGER pushes the GOOD JAEGER over into the mud, KICKS IT in the BALLS and TEABAGS IT, then for the final insult it KNOCKS RINKO’S HELICOPTER out of the SKY.

RINKO KIKUCHI

Neat, contractual obligation fulfilled! Still wish I knew how Charlie Hunnam managed to get out of this one.

(crashes, dies)

INT. JAEGER SCHOOL

The good guys regroup.

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Where the hell did that Jaeger come from? I’m sure it wasn’t Jingcorp, i.e. the only people who aren’t us that are even capable of constructing full-size Jaegers. And who just got their juicy government contract as a direct result of the Jaeger attack.

JOHN BOYEGA

Wait, they did? You mean, people decided “Those Jaeger pilots lost that fight, therefore we should spend trillions on a bunch of different Jaegers controlled by the exact same pilots”?

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Something like that. But in the meantime we need to find that rogue Jaeger. Fortunately Rinko’s helicopter was outfitted with like, Jaeger-scanning tech? Which could analyze the mystery Jaeger and detect some kind of... Zemlya-ness? As in, it was made in an abandoned Jaeger factory in Zemlya and, uh, that Zemlya factory apparently gave it some unique quality which was detectable by helicopter scan.

(frowns)

Then before she died, Rinko sent us a message which was not the name of the factory, not GPS coordinates, but a drawing of what the location looks like from the sky.

JOHN BOYEGA

Holy shit. How is it that the robot-vs-monster fights are never the dumbest parts of these movies?

EXT. JAEGER FACTORY

JOHN and SCOTT pilot their JAEGER towards the ABANDONED FACTORY.

JOHN BOYEGA

Wouldn’t it have been a lot faster to just come here in a jet? We’ve already made a plot point of how long it takes to deploy these things.

SCOTT EASTWOOD

What if we run into that rogue Jaeger again, though?

JOHN BOYEGA

Oh come on, do you really think that thing has already managed to walk through sixteen thousand miles of ocean to get from Sydney to the Arctic Circle? This movie is dumb, but surely it’s not THAT dumb.

EVIL JAEGER

(showing up)

You’d think so, but...

(blows up factory)

There, that gets rid of that pesky evidence! You’d think we would have done that right after I got built. Would have saved me the trip all the way back here.

The JAEGERS FIGHT AGAIN, and this time the GOOD JAEGER WINS!

JOHN BOYEGA

And now, Mr. “Evil Jaeger”, let’s see who you really are!

(pulls off mask)

Aha! If it isn’t Old Man... Giant Lump of Snotflesh? Wait, what the hell?

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Holy shit, that thing was being piloted by a genetically-engineered kaiju brain! There must be somebody somewhere deliberately creating alien monster/giant mech hybrids! Umbrella maybe? That sounds like an extremely Umbrella thing to do.

They take the EVIL JAEGER back to the LAB.

INT. JAEGER LAB

CAILEE and some other, impossible-to-care-about STUDENT PILOTS sneak into the EVIL JAEGER to POKE AROUND.

CAILEE SPAENY

Holy shit, look at this: this thing has parts with the Jingcorp logo on it! Seems like if you’re secretly building a giant robot to attack a major city and win you a government contract, NOT having your company logo stamped on in would be a sensible move. I mean, what if it had lost the fight in Sydney? Or just had bits of it knocked off when the good Jaeger was hitting it with enough firepower to level Chicago?

Unfortunately, then some CORROSIVE CHEMICAL gets on one of the SUPERFLUOUS STUDENTS, badly injuring them!

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Hey Cailee, remember how we hired you because we found you dangerously dicking around with broken Jaegers? Well now for dangerously dicking around with a broken Jaeger, you’re fired!

CAILEE SPAENY

That’s okay, I’ll probably just go find some other Jaeger to do irresponsible stuff with and get immediately rehired, as that kind of thing seems to toggle pilot status on and off in this movie.

(pause)

By the way, now that we know that Jing Tian is evil and has been stuffing her drones with kaiju brains, we’ve cancelled the delivery of those drones to all the PPDC bases, right?

SCOTT EASTWOOD

Eh. We’ll get around to it.

EXT. ALL THE PPDC BASES

A bunch of JINGCORP DRONES are delivered to PPDC bases around the Pacific Rim. But then they start FLIPPING OUT and MUTATING!

KAIJU JAEGER

(growing claws and muscles and stuff)

Aw yeah, time to start generating ten million tons of flesh out of literally nothing! Honestly at this stage we’re just curious to see what level of physics-defying bullshit we can get away with.

JAEGER KAIJU

(having a big monster jaw sticking out of its robot head and looking silly)

I wonder if this same process could have been used to, say, create massive quantities of kaiju blood and dump it all into Mount Fuji? Without needing an incredibly convoluted, decade-spanning plan to get said blood to said location? Just citing a purely hypothetical idea which I’m sure won’t ever become relevant.

BASE COMMANDER

They’re kaiju AND Jaegers? Fuck, we’re gonna need an even MORE ridiculous naming system to keep track of these guys! Let’s see, we’ll call that one Destiny Bloodfist Epoch, and that one Shrimp Cocktail Clawhammer Paradigm, and that one-

(smashed)

INT. JINGCORP

BURN runs in to talk to CHARLIE.

BURN GORMAN

Welp turns out Tian falls firmly on the “evil” end of the evil/incompetent executive spectrum! Isn’t there anything you can do?

CHARLIE DAY

There sure is! I can go over to this computer and PRESS THE BIG “MAKE EVIL PLAN HAPPEN” BUTTON! You’d think from the behavior of the kaijaegers that I’d already done that, but apparently not?

BURN GORMAN

Wait - the bad guy behind all this isn’t Tian, it’s YOU?!

CHARLIE DAY

That’s right! Jaeger construction is so automated I was able to do whatever I wanted without anybody noticing! Yes we already had automated facilities which could grow and instal alien brains, WHY WOULDN’T WE?

BURN GORMAN

I don’t know what to say. This is legitimately surprising! No, really, I totally didn’t see this twist coming!

(pause)

Mostly because what self-respecting action movie would have Charlie Fucking Day as the main villain? I mean, can you even be intimidating?

CHARLIE DAY

I don’t know. Let’s find out!

(yells comically)

Nope. Oh well, I can at least do the villain exposition speech! Remember that kaiju brain we mind melded with last movie? It’s taken over my brain and made me a slave of the kaiju-making dudes.

BURN GORMAN

Since we both crotchswallowed the kaiju brain, wouldn’t it make more sense to have swapped our roles and have me be the one who turned evil? I could have pulled it off, I mean I basically look like a Bond villain waiting to happen.

CHARLIE DAY

Either way, the plan is to use the kaijaegers to create a bunch of new interdimensional breaches, and then have a whole lot of new kaiju come out! And yes, building and installing portal-creating lasers into the Jaegers is ALSO something that Jingcorp’s facilities were automated to do, SHUT UP.

BURN GORMAN

So wait, the aliens have known all along how to make new breaches? Then why didn’t they just do that from their side right after we closed the first one? They could have attacked us when all our Jaegers were scrap metal and we were sitting ducks-

CHARLIE DAY

I SAID SHUT UP! Now, as for the reason why the aliens sent kaiju here in the first place, the idea was to get them to Mount Fuji, where they could jump into the active volcano and make their rocket-fuel blood blow up and destroy the entire Earth’s atmosphere, killing humans and terraforming Earth for the aliens! That’s what the kaiju were doing last movie, they were just smashing through cities on their way to get to Japan.

BURN GORMAN

(pause)

(looks at map of the world)

(remembers pretty much any given scene of Pacific Rim)

...Are you fucking kidding me?

CHARLIE DAY

Nope! For instance, the one attacking the coast of Alaska at the beginning of the first movie? It was just trying to make its way from the breach - which was off the coast of China, near Guam - to Japan. By going through Alaska.

BURN GORMAN

...No, seriously, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

CHARLIE DAY

I absolutely am not! In fact we’re going to straight-up show a computer simulation of the paths that the kaiju took first movie, and show them all starting from different locations and heading towards the same place, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE.

BURN GORMAN

WHAT. KIND. OF. FUCKING. GRRRARRGGH!!

(searches building for table to flip)

(flips table)

CHARLIE DAY

Look at the bright side, this means that THIS kaiju movie is going to have a scene set in FUCKING TOKYO for crying out loud.

EXT. FUCKING TOKYO

Three KAIJU are making their way to MOUNT FUJI. The few JAEGERS that weren’t destroyed in the DRONE ATTACK are being piloted by JOHN, SCOTT, CAILEE and the other GENERIC PLACEHOLDER CHARACTERS.

JOHN BOYEGA

So shit has hit the fan and the only ones available to save the day are a bunch of rookies still in training, including one main cadet who was already kicked out of the program for being a renegade. Let’s go out there and kick ass, whilst trying not to think about the fact that this exact same climax was already done in the original Police Academy!

CAILEE SPAENY

Thank fuck, the movie’s nearly over, it’s ABOUT TIME we had even one scene where a robot fights a monster!!

The JAEGERS fight the KAIJU! There’s a lot of general CLOBBERING and SHOOTING and a CHARACTER DIES but since it’s one of the OTHER ONES who cares.

JOHN BOYEGA

Oh no, we’re losing ground, we’d better pull out our big move and join together!

CAILEE SPAENY

Awesome! We’re gonna Voltron these things? What an epic homage to-

JOHN BOYEGA

Oh, wait, I lost my place in the script. That was the kaiju’s line.

CAILEE SPAENY

Say what now?

The three KAIJU build themselves together into ONE GIANT KAIJU.

CAILEE SPAENY

...That is at once the most stupidly ridiculous and the most stupidly awesome thing I have ever seen.

JOHN BOYEGA

CRAP, NOW INSTEAD OF THREE SEPARATE MONSTERS TO FIGHT, THE FOUR JAEGERS HAVE JUST ONE BIG MONSTER TO CONCENTRATE ALL THEIR FIREPOWER ON, WE’RE FUUUUCKED

The MEGA-KAIJU starts KICKING THE JAEGERS’ ASSES, then goes and CLIMBS MOUNT FUJI.

JOHN BOYEGA

Cailee, we have one functional Jaeger and two functional pilots left, so we need to make one last-ditch effort to kill that thing. Let’s use those Jaeger-rockets Burn invented to fly ourselves up to the stratosphere, then come down and land on the mega-kaiju, killing it!

CAILEE SPAENY

Great idea! Not only does it allow us to win, but also by having our Jaeger “rise up” like that, we technically have anything at all in this movie which qualifies as an “uprising”!

They BLAST UP INTO THE SKY, but then as they’re FALLING and getting ready to EJECT, their ESCAPE POD MALFUNCTIONS!

CAILEE SPAENY

It’s okay, we have my tiny little Jaeger attached to this one for reasons too convoluted to go into here, we can just climb into that and use it as our escape pod!

JOHN BOYEGA

Because you installed tech in it which negates the laws of inertia?

CAILEE SPAENY

Relax, I hardly think real-world science is gonna poke its head into this movie this late in the game.

They safely EJECT and the JAEGER successfully obliterates the MEGA-KAIJU!

JOHN BOYEGA

Hooray, we won! We ended the kaiju invasion!

CAILEE SPAENY

Yes, the kaiju invasion which started earlier today and consisted of exactly three kaiju! The first movie had the world being attacked by an ancient evil from another world, and saw a team of experienced generals, brilliant scientists and war-torn soldiers end a years-spanning war. This one had the world being attacked by Charlie Day, and saw a handful of kids mop it up in one afternoon.

JOHN BOYEGA

Sequels are supposed to lower the stakes to almost nothing, right?

END.

INT. POST-CREDITS SCENE

JOHN BOYEGA

Now that we know more about the aliens’ intentions and have access to breach technology, we’re gonna go take on the aliens on their home turf in the next movie!

(sees empty theatre)

GODDAMN IT, NOT AGAIN