My take on the movie was they basically tried to have a real plot and build characters... but only in the first half and with way too many characters to care about anyways and the obviously nefarious stuff was obvious. Hell the movie even has someone ask how the heck they didn't know this was happening lol. And then they basically abandon that to unintentionally hilarious Charlie Day show (seriously dude goes full well him but as a main bad guy) with some Kaiju fights which were well shorter and not nearly as good as the ones in the previous film. Namely the colors from the first that gave it that unique feel are all now well you've seen the trailers and none of the mechs have the same sense of weight and momentum they had in the first... or buildings that just easily get pulled down one after another on top of a Kaiju.
All the pilots were pretty meh to terrible so wouldn't really try to care about them anyways. They still shoehorned a speech in before the big fight but it was terrible. It was great that they actually reference how great the speech from the first one was even quoting part of it... though that was way earlier by Charlie. New hotter Asian replacement for Mako Mori was actually pretty decent after she stopped being a bitch and got in the damn robot... well just when she started being actually helpful
Edit: almost forgot this but I almost feels like they knew they were fucking with us. Between making a show that was clearly more designed to sell product than be well good. To completely rewriting concepts like oh yeah gotta be kids they form connections better and not better for marketing. Or trauma causing drift problems? Well apparently Mako Mori's brother watching her die in front of him doesn't count I guess since he only cared for about 30 seconds and no one else at all did. Other rectons etc. To referencing things the audience is probably thinking to flat out playing the trolololo guy video when going into battle <.<.