Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Dir: Juan Antonio Bayona

2018

***

At this point in the Jurassic Park franchise it feels like writers Derek Connolly and Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow are trying to get blood from a stone. The film will make money (not as much as they’d hoped for though it seems) but everything of quality has now left the series. There were only two things I liked about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and now The Lost World and Jurassic Park III are starting to look like masterpieces. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom suffers from a magnitude of problems – its first was that the film’s entire plot was shown in the trailer. I didn’t think the trailer was very strong, so I had hoped that it was meant to put the viewer off the scent of what the film was really about but alas, no, the trailer is the entire film edited into three minutes. It seems to be something of a trend nowadays. While I believe Connolly and Trevorrow did listen to some of the criticism from audiences regarding Jurassic World, I don’t think they quite took everything on board. Many fans, including myself, criticized their first film for being a copy of the original – which it was, albeit a very poor replica. Every big block-buster and franchise film will have a hard-core following with the enthusiastic kids shouting just that little louder than everyone else but kids are fickle, and I’ve heard many a kid who said they loved JW when it first came out say how much they hate it now in retrospect. However, money talks – just ask the Transformers people. Modern cinema in general needs a good kick in the Erectopus (google it) but Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is the perfect example of Hollywood and a big studio messing with something beautiful for financial gain at the expensive of quality film making. The specific problem this time round is that they clearly couldn’t decide what kind of film it should have been – so it is essentially two different films pieced together. The first half of the film is ‘all back to Isla Nublar’. For the forth time now we are led to believe that people who had barely escaped the very literal jaws of death, have absolutely no problem with going back to the Island of monsters for another round. Of course it would be a rubbish film without dinosaurs but there has to be an more inventive way of getting the people and the dinosaurs together without treading old ground. Once again Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard – the most unconvincing on screen couple of all time – are reunited and are easily persuaded to return to the Island to save the dinosaurs from the massive great big volcano that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there in the original film but was an unused idea from the original novel. Personally I think that the first film was too far removed from the novel that they really should have left it well alone. The task is all very illegal because Dr. Ian Malcolm (played once again by Jeff Goldblum – in his third Jurassic Park outing) convinces the courts to leave the dinos to die a relatively natural (but painful) death. I can see the argument - man creates life and man has responsibility for that life (women tells man ‘I told you so’ etc etc) – but when man is constantly eaten by said life, then maybe a line should be drawn, lessons learned and everyone should move on without the being eaten bit. This is poorly explored, and really, would people who were inches away from being chewed by a T-rex really be that sad to see it extinct once more? Shouldn’t Bryce Dallas Howard’s character be in prison for manslaughter anyway? So Pratt and Howard go to the island with the very pointless Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) - a former IT technician for Jurassic World who is now the Dinosaur Protection Group's systems analyst and hacker and Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) a former Marine who is now the Dinosaur Protection Group's paleoveterinarian. The first three films had great characters and great actors playing them but the Jurassic World films are a far cry away in this respect. The team of four are met by the evacuation team – who are revealed to be bad guys very early on. The action starts almost immediately, with no build up or suspense. The story goes from ‘lets go back to the island’ to ‘quick, we’ve got to get off the island before it explodes’ within a matter of minutes. The second half of the film sees the dinosaurs that were rescued from the island auctioned off in a stately home somewhere on the mainland. Turns out John Hammond had a business partner that had never been mentioned until now. He is still alive (just) and wants to save the dinos in John’s honor and asks his assistant (played by Rafe Spall) to see to it. Of course his assistant is a bad guy, his intention is to sell the dinos to the highest seller – other bad guys who will no doubt weaponize the beasts. Spall isn’t up for the bad guy persona in my opinion, although I will always see him as the fat kid who works with Shaun in Shaun of the Dead. The second chapter really is about playing up to director J. A. Bayonea’s strengths. He is a haunted house director, one of the best there is, and the second half is dinosaurs in a haunted house. It is as silly as it sounds and at best as good as a cheap 90s video game. The truth is that he two chapters are basically a lazy bastardization of a couple of drafts John Sayles (of all people) wrote back in 2004. They were discarded then and should have stayed that way. The two scenes I liked in the film were; the long underwater bubble scene that seems to be shot in one take and the rather sad scene where the boat leave the island just before it is engulfed by the smoke of the erupting volcano. A lonely Diplodocus reaches the end of the pear with no where else to go. He cries out with a big sad face just before he is covered in lava out of shot and it is something of a tear-jerking moment. Its sad because everyone loves a Diplodocus but it also felt sad because the Jurassic Park that we all loved is now gone. Well, actually that Park was gone in 1993, it was killed in The Lost World. Just how such a great film has received just so many poor sequels is beyond me. Whether Fallen Kingdom is the worst is up for debate – it probably is – but more so because at this stage in the game the dinosaurs are no longer frightening or impressive. Everything we loved about the original is gone, the franchise as it is and as it was has well and truly run its course. I have little interest in the franchise from here on, although it does look like the next film is going to be something rather exciting. They’ll reel me in again no doubt, it won’t be the same as the Jurassic Park I love from 93’ but I won’t be hard to better this effort surely – Trevorrow needs to redeem himself or let someone else have a go. You know something has gone wrong when the T-Rex is now seen as something of a good-guy, constantly saving the good humans and only eating the bad ones. Bring back the talking dinosaur from Jurassic Park III, or better still, lets have Dr Grant wake up and reveal that everything that has happened in the last three films has all been a dream. Why the three stars? Purely for Bayona's direction and the techniques he uses, some of which are never seen in big action movies and I think they work exceptionally well here, it's just a shame the acting and script are terrible.