Movie Review: Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom · 10:48pm Aug 8th, 2018
The day before I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp, I went and saw the sequel to 2015's dinosaur movie extravaganza.
Now, let me say this right out the gate:
I love the original Jurassic Park. It's perhaps one of my all-time favorite movies. I simply cannot overstate the impact that the film and its media had on my life. As a kid, it was the movie that made me get into dinosaurs. It was the film that probably helped shape my interest in science, and science fiction. And I can probably credit the original novel by Michael Crichton as being one of the many influences that got me interested in writing.
I adore the original film. It's one of my all-time favorites.
And I also love the sequel, The Lost World. I think it's a much better film than people give it credit for. (And that Doug Walker is an asshole for reviewing it in the way he did, and that people who criticize it by quoting his review are also assholes. XD)
And as for the third movie... eh, fuck that one. That's the one that deserves to be trashed, and also, deserves the bulk of criticism about sexism in my opinion. >_<
So, when it was announced that Universal was making a new film about a new park being built on Isla Nublar from the original movie, I was excited as all hell. I eagerly looked into the movie, with its announcement of a new hybrid dinosaur being engineered by the park, and found it an interesting concept.
When Jurassic World came out in 2015, I went and saw it with my dad. Even wore my Jurassic Park t-shirt to the theater and all. 
And I had a great time. Loved the movie, love the Indominus Rex (which is NOT "just a bigger, louder T-rex," thank you very much >_<), and the final battle in the movie is glorious. I got some journals lined up for the future, talking about stuff from that movie, just so you all know...
So when they announced the sequel, once again I was very interested in what I saw for the premise.
The island's volcano erupting? Made sense to me. Isla Nublar in the book was a volcanically-formed island. Who's to say that it couldn't have become active again?
The dinosaurs being removed from the island? Sure, sounded like part of The Lost World all over again, but the idea still worked for me.
Jeff Goldblum returning to the role of Ian Malcolm? Hell to the yes, please!
And the stuff in the other teasers... of the mansion estate, of the T-rex roaring at a lion in the zoo, of a dinosaur auction, and several horror-movie-worthy sequences of a monstrous new hybrid terrorizing a little girl?
All filled me with interest to see how the movie would handle these plot developments.
So, on July 11th, I went with one of my best friends to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
And what did I think?
I had a pretty damn good time. Expect a lengthy review to follow! XD
Opening sometime after the closure of the Jurassic World theme park, the movie begins with a team of mercenaries arriving at the abandoned park to collect DNA from the remains of the Indominus Rex. After attacks by the Mosasaurus and the T. rex, the survivors just manage to get away, with a sample of bone from the I. rex... This sequence is fun in a theme-park ride kind of way, full of some fantastic visual images (in particular is a couple of haunting underwater images of the gigantic Mosasaurus)...
The movie then picks up three years later, with the volcano on Nublar close to blowing, and the Senate debating whether or not to save the dinosaurs. (A blink-and-you-miss-it joke during the news crawl in this scene contains a delightful take-that at Trump, by the way XD) Ian Malcolm, making his appearance in the film, advocates letting the volcano "correct" the mistake made in cloning the dinosaurs.
Malcolm's role in the film is very brief. All in all, he probably has a bit less than five minutes of screentime. And yet, his part in the movie is actually very important, as he delivers what I think is the movie's most important message: straight from Crichton, the sheer danger and power of the reckless usage of genetic power, and the self-destructive capacity of the human race. "Genetic power has been unleashed," Ian warns, "You can't put it back in the box."
If they remove the dinosaurs from the island, and bring them into the larger world, there's no going back. Nothing will be the same ever again.
It's a heck of an argument to make - and honestly, one that does make sense. As critics of the series have said plenty of times, when HAS messing with the dinosaurs done anything good? So really, it is quite the surprise that the movie seems to come down on the side of Malcolm and the idea of letting the dinosaurs go extinct, this time for good.
Of course, it never works out that way. XD
Returning from the first Jurassic World, former park manager Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) has traded in managing the park for running a civic activist group advocating to save the dinosaurs from the volcanic eruption. When the Senate votes in favor of leaving the island to erupt, all seems lost for Claire's cause - until she gets a phone call, from Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), an employee of wealthy nobleman Sir Benjamin Lockwood (played by James Cromwell), who's an old associate of John Hammond and the very early days of the Jurassic Park project.
Lockwood had a falling-out with Hammond in the past, but he wants to save the dinosaurs, in memory of his old friend's dream, and has entrusted Mills with planning a massive operation to remove dinosaur species from the island and relocate them to a new island sanctuary. Claire is needed to reactivate the park's tracking system so they can catch the animals...
And Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt) is needed because of his special skill with dinosaurs, in particular with the island's last remaining Velociraptor - Blue.
Now admittedly, the stuff with Claire going to meet Owen and convince him to join the operation is, definitely, in my opinion, the weakest part of the movie. Their relationship has NEVER been a strong part of the movies (although again, the people who complain about the sexism and misogyny of them dating should really find something more important to go off on), but to the film's credit, there is no distracting bit of relationship drama like in Jurassic Park III; Owen and Claire are exes, and while they bicker about who broke up with whom, it's not a part of the film that truly, seriously bogs it down.
Owen, after initial reluctance, agrees to sign on, and the film heads out to Isla Nublar for the final time. We are introduced to newcomers Zia (played by Daniella Pineda) a medic for the dinosaurs, and Franklin (played by Justice Smith), a nervous techie whose anxiety provides some of the movie's funniest moments; a particular gem being his fear of encountering the T-rex.
Heading up the dino recovery operation on Nublar is big-game-hunter-type Ken Wheatley (played by Ted Levine). More on him in a bit.
Now, then... the Isla Nublar sequence...
I compared the opening of the movie, with the Mosasaurus and the T. rex to something of a theme-park ride.
In hindsight, I'd actually use that analogy for the entire sequence on Nublar, once the dinosaurs show up. You've got it all - a tense standoff between Owen, Blue and Wheatley's mercenaries; treachery, as (of course) the dino-saving operation is a cover for a greedy profiteering mission; some striking visuals (a particular highlight being a Baryonyx in a dark tunnel, framed by lava); and LOTS of close calls, from a tranquilized Owen trying to avoid a lava flow, to a mad dash for safety from a dinosaur stampede and erupting volcano (leading to the film's poster image, of the T-rex roaring mightily over a downed Carnotaurus as the volcano thunders in the background - an image right out of old pulp fiction, but delightful in its own way)...
I want to give the film credit for adding some genuine tension to the conclusion of this wild sequence, in the form of Owen trying to rescue Claire and Franklin from a sinking Gyrosphere. I knew that they'd get out okay, but I was still on the edge of my seat watching Owen's struggle to save the two of them from drowning.
The real tear-jerker though, in all of this, involves the final getaway from the island, as Owen and Claire and Franklin hide on the mercenaries' transport boat... and witness the final moments of a Brachiosaurus left behind on the island, to die in the pyroclastic flow of the eruption. As I said before, I loved the original Jurassic Park movie as a kid, and this scene showing the first full-bodied dinosaur from that film, rearing up on its hind legs as it is enshrouded by the volcanic gases, was powerfully gut-wrenching and a heartbreakingbookend to the island from the original Jurassic Park. 
After the Isla Nublar sequence, the rest of the movie takes a hard shift in tone and scope. In many ways, while the "stealing dinosaurs from the island" concept is right from The Lost World, the rest of Fallen Kingdom is almost an antithesis to that film. Whereas Spielberg's movie goes into more action-related territory, with the T. rex attacks, the raptor village, and the iconic San Diego rampage, Fallen Kingdom shifts into a more close-up, suspenseful direction.
A particular standout here is a sequence where Owen and Claire try to take some blood from the tranquilized Tyrannosaurus rex (as Blue, shot by one of Wheatley's men, is in danger of dying on the operating table). It's a genuinely tense sequence, thanks to the very realistic practical effect of the rex animatronic (I both snickered and cringed to see the dinosaur's gross, snot-dripping nostrils XD), and yet also darkly funny, thanks to Owen trying to calm Claire ("It's just like riding a bull--" "I didn't grow up in a rodeo!!").
Soon moving from the confines of the smugglers' ship to the confines of Lockwood's mansion, the film swiftly establishes the true goals of the film's villains - Eli Mills wants to sell the Nublar dinosaurs in auction to the highest bidder.
Now, as villains go, a lot of the characters in the movie are, to put it bluntly, bland as all hell. Eli Mills is a greedy corporate bastard, and his auctioneer Gunnar Eversoll (played by Toby Jones, sporting an outrageously Trump-esque hairdo) are pretty much as unsubtle in their avarice and desire for money as your average villain-of-the-week on Supergirl. Normally, I'd be pretty offended by such caricaturish figures in a movie, but actually I was pretty chill with the two of them. Maybe because, I'll be honest here, the Jurassic movies have always had greedy assholes for villains. Look at Nedry in the first movie! And while he was much more polite, Peter Ludlow in The Lost World was also motivated by money. To be honest, the ONLY Jurassic-series antagonist to have genuine depth of character and personality is Roland Tembo the big game hunter... so while I know people have complained about the cartoonishness of Mills and Eversoll, I can't find myself too offended by it. Again, corporate greed is a huge part of the series' themes, so it worked well enough for me.
(And plus, cheap shot here, the Trump hairdo of Eversoll - along with other Trump references from other villains - made their deaths at dino fangs and claws to be a wonderfully cathartic experience. 
)
The movie really shifts into high gear when Mills' auction begins, and he unveils the newest hybrid creation of Dr. Henry Wu (played by B.D. Wong)... a monstrous hybrid of Indominus Rex and Velociraptor, given the imaginative (XD) name of Indoraptor.
I, personally, absolutely loved this new dinosaur. While the I. rex was basically a vicious brute of a beast that killed everything in its path, there is a wickedly delightful character to this monstrous hybrid dinosaur. As seen from its first appearance, scaring Lockwood's granddaughter Maisie (played by Isabella Sermon - more on her part in a minute), the Indoraptor likes to play with its food before eating it.
A particular highlight for me, is when the Indoraptor plays dead, in order to take Ken Wheatley by surprise. As it lies in wait, the creature genuinely seems to smile in a gleeful "I'm gonna fuck this guy up so bad" way, that I just found wonderfully sadistic. Yeah, it makes no biological sense, but this creature IS in every sense of the word an abomination. It's practically a lab-grown gargoyle, so I felt that the "wicked smile" moment fit perfectly on a thematic level with the Indoraptor's nature. (Interestingly, my friend whom I saw the movie with said she felt the Indoraptor was "Raimiesque" in its behavior and in the camera angles used to shoot it. Anybody familiar with Sam Raimi's films see that possible similarity?)
In many ways, I'd compared the latter half of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom to a classic Resident Evil game. You've got a massive estate with dark secrets, a hidden laboratory developing unnatural creatures as bioweapons, and a near-invulnerable enemy that the main characters can only barely hold their own against. In many ways, this is probably the best RE movie we're ever going to get.
A BIG part of what makes this shift into horror territory work so well is the skill of Isabella Sermon in portraying poor Maisie's terror and tears in this awful situation. I was amazed at Sermon's performance, and really bought into Maisie's desperate terror at being stalked by the Indoraptor, among other awful things to happen to her life. (A particularly heartbreaking scene is when she runs to her grandfather, and finds him dead - smothered by Mills previously. Sermon's desperate pleading for him to wake up is just wrenching.)
Another standout horror sequence is when Maisie flees back to her bedroom, and the Indoraptor climbs in through the balcony. The entire sequence is an excellent study in primal, childhood terror - the fear of the monster in your room - and director J.A. Bayona gives it his all.
The climactic fight/chase involving Owen, Claire, Maisie and Blue against the Indoraptor has some great moments to it, especially in the flow of the camera and the movement of the action. The conclusion is also an inspired moment, that personally had me thinking back a bit to the skeleton hall sequence of the original movie. (Another delightful call-back occurs a bit later, with Mills getting his karmic comeuppance. )
The conclusion of Fallen Kingdom is an unexpected surprise, in regard to the fate of the dinosaurs, and one that ties back into Malcolm's argument near the very beginning of the movie. If you've seen the movie, what did you think of the choices made in that moment? Would you do the same, or no? I was intrigued, again, by the film's apparent support of what may be the best choice, and WHY the character who made that choice MADE that decision...
As the ending of the movie came, it leaves the Jurassic franchise headed in an unexpected and frankly, very ambitious new direction.
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, who makes one final appearance as a narrator of sorts around the end of the film, everything is going to change. Nothing will be the same now, ever again...
"Welcome... to Jurassic World."
So ultimately, yeah, I'd say that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a worthwhile movie. Obviously, it won't appeal to everybody, not as much as it did to a dinosaur fanatic and lover of the series like me. But I think if you approach it with a pretty open mind, that there's plenty of stuff to enjoy in the film.
For one thing above all others, the cinematography is gorgeous. J.A. Bayona really outdid himself on directing a visual feast of a movie - from the rainsoaked and dark Isla Nublar of the opening to the hellish volcanic landscape of the eruption, to the both grand and ominous Lockwood estate, there is plenty of fantastic scenery and stylish camerawork in this movie. Adding to it are some fantastic dinosaur effects, especially in the T. rex scene, and also in the effects for the Indoraptor.
Performance-wise, I have to give the big award to Isabella Sermon as Maisie. She was just fantastic, and I really hope her career takes off because of her work in this film. Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt are perfectly serviceable in their roles, although I do feel that they were a bit underutilized - though Bryce Dallas Howard does get a delightfully heartwarming little speech, reminiscing about the very first time you see a dinosaur; a moment that I felt really did capture some of the classic Spielberg whimsy. (And Pratt's best scene in the film, is definitely in an old video about training his baby raptors from the first Jurassic World: Owen's interaction with the baby Blue is just so heartwarming 
)
Of the newcomers, Zia and Franklin both get some good moments. But I probably prefer Franklin more, mainly because of the comedy in his segments - from screaming like a little girl at the Baryonyx (can't blame him though XD) or trying to be a badass by rescuing Zia, he got some great funny lines and reactions.
James Cromwell, in the time he has, also turns in quite the intriguing performance as Lockwood. In many ways he's a grandfatherly old visionary like Hammond was, and yet has some dark secrets of his own... a particular one, if you've seen the movie, I find very darkly interesting, and retroactively adds a lot of flavor to his apparent past with Hammond and WHY John cut ties with him... (And even with that reveal, I still find his death scene to be very sad. Poor guy... 
)
So, to finally put an end to this Brontosaurus-sized review 
... I quite enjoyed Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom.
I'll be interested to hear what you all have to say. ^_^
You're right. It's an even DUMBER idea. Seriously, who is the in universe moron who thought that making a smart dinosaur who can psuedo mind control and TURN FUCKING INVISIBLE was a good idea!? Second, WHO THOUGHT BRINGING DINOSAURS BACK TO LIFE IN THE FIRST PLACE WAS A GOOD IDEA?! Sorry, I, I cannot like the Jurassic franchise. I have tried several times, but for the life of me, I cannot suspend my disbelief for the movies. Ignoring that the weather conditions were drastically different back then, just thinking about the premise makes me think of every way it can go wrong. And in every movie, things DO go horribly wrong. Every time. And people in universe keep trying this shit. Why? Just, just why? I know I'm rambling, but, I can't suspend my disbelief with these movies.
So, the smart move. (I know, I'm being mean)
Because apparently dinosaurs coming back to life and making everything to go shit at least once in a contained environment wasn't enough, now they want to do it again. Without all the security measures.
So, when and how does his plan backfire spectacularly? Because if it doesn't in the movie, that sort of plan is just dumb. It's going to go HORRIBLY wrong.
So, you crossed a uber dangerous killing machine, with another killing machine, but with a brain. Did, he not think that this could go horrifically wrong? Because the idea alone sounds like it's a horrible idea.
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Well, I admit, I do have to appreciate your sheer blunt honesty about all of this...
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I don't believe in beating around the bullshit bush. My point is, I get why people like this series. I however cannot suspend my disbelief for the life of me because I can only think of all the ways it can (and frequently eventually DOES) go wrong.
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Well, you know what I said before, the other time we talked about the series...
But anyway, your attitude about the series doesn't really bother me, tbh. The only time I've really gotten mad at people over the Jurassic series is over two things:
1- This one friend of mine who said that the DCEU has better movies than the Jurassic series. I was like, "bro, I will FIGHT you on that. Jurassic World is miles above ANY of Hack Snyder's bullshit"
2 - And the people who say that Jurassic Park III isn't a bad movie. That's the only one of the series I objectively find bad, on a storytelling or character level.
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That's fair. I've only ever seen Suicide Squad and I don't know if that even counts as DCEU. I hear Justice League did pretty good though, so with some luck, this is a turning point and the DCEU will get better from now on?
4917267
Suicide Squad does count as DCEU (unfortunately - I still cringe to think of Jared Leto's Joker). Maybe Justice League did better, I don't know, but I gave up after I saw Wonder Woman. It took DC / WB four attempts to get one that was decent, so that was enough for me.
(Expect to see me go off on Man of Steel in a later post. I've got thoughts on that movie I want to share... XD)
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My dad tried to get us to watch it but the TV didn't cooperate, so I was thankfully spared that. I did see the Nostalgia Critic's review of it. Good fun.
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Ah. Well, you didn't miss anything important. I went and saw that movie in theaters, and my dad and I were NOT impressed with it.
And, while I've had a turnaround on Mr. Walker and some of his reviews, I think he was pretty on the ball with a lot of the things wrong in Man of Steel. And his review of BvS with Angry Joe was a delight too.