New Release Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

(2018. Director: J.A Bayona Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Jeff Goldblum, Justice Smith)

SYNOPSIS:

Three years after the events of Jurassic World, a volcano has become active on Isla Nublar and is threatening to kill off the last surviving dinosaurs left on Earth. Owen Grady and Claire Dearing return to the park on a rescue mission but soon realise that the people they are working may not have such noble intentions.

Time for a personal story.

On this website, our reviews are generally written with a certain objective distance from the subject matter and remove personal experience from the equation. However, I feel, just this once, I have to share a story from my youth.

25 years ago, I went to Jurassic Park. Not literally, of course, but as a small child, transfixed by an immense cinema screen, I may as well have been. I stared upwards in wonder as massive gates of the park first cracked open. My jaw dropped as that first brachiosaurus strode magnificently across the frame. I gasped in horror as the T Rex took its first steps out of it's paddock and towards the helpless visitors trapped in their cars. More than anything, I became obsessed with the Velociraptors. While my friends were playing games pretending to be spies, or cowboys, or superheroes, I pretended that I was a raptor. Not a regular raptor, though, a hero raptor; the sort of raptor who communicates with humans and goes on missions to save them from the bad dinosaurs. There are lessons to take from this anecdote. Firstly, that a great idea put together with masterful craft can truly capture the imagination and can shape young minds in unprecedented ways. Secondly, children make for godawful screenwriters.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the latest film in the beloved Jurassic Park series, feels like exactly the kind of film my 10 year old self would have tried to write. It's a weird monster mash-up that veers wildly from fun, family adventure film, to disaster movie to gothic horror. It's full of sneering human villains and various perils for both the human characters and the dinosaurs. It's also a nonsensical mess of a story that makes no logical sense whatsoever and feels as if it was put together by an impatient child with no understanding of the deeper themes at play.

The film opens in the remains of the former theme park 'Jurassic World' where a team of people are trying to recover a sample from the skeleton of the 'Indominus Rex' (which was dragged to it's death in the mossosaur lagoon at the end of 2015's Jurassic World.) For them, this does not go well. The scene itself, however, does. These opening minutes contain more slow building dread than was achieved in the entirety of that previous instalment (Apparently this scene was inspired by unused plot beats, originally penned by Spielberg for previous films.) It's an encouraging start, albeit one which feels completely divorced from the film which follows it. The mission is a failure and, barring a seconds long tease in the films closing montage, we never see the mossasaur again, let alone the surviving humans. (And remember, by the rules of 'Chekov's Dinosaur', if a giant prehistoric monster escapes in the first act, you will disappoint your audience if it doesn't eat anyone by the third.)

From there we jump into the story proper. The disaster at Jurassic World has turned into an international scandal with executives of the Masrani corporation being investigated for their negligence while the public debates the fate of the dinosaurs trapped on the island. A massive volcano on Isla Nublar has unexpectedly become active and if it erupts it will destroy a large part of the island, killing all the creatures living on it. A protest group has been set up to try to convince the government to step in and rescue the animals but they are being argued against by none other than Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) from the first two Jurassic Park movies. (Goldblum's presence in this film has been heavily marketed as a draw for fans of the original movie, but his appearance is nothing more than a cameo and he never appears again outside of these courtroom scenes.) Whether the dinosaurs deserve to be treated like any other endangered species and protected from this second extinction, or alternatively whether their entire existence is a folly which should be allowed to be corrected, makes for an interesting debate and could create some effective conflicts between the film's characters. Unfortunately this dilemma appears to have been introduced simply as a means to get our characters back to the island and the moral quandary of it is quickly forgotten about once they get there.

That aforementioned protest group is headed by Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the former protagonist of Jurassic World. This is a strange turn of events, since a large part of her arc in that previous film was based around her beginning to acknowledge the dinosaurs as more than simply numbers on her profit reports. Now she is apparently the passionate leader of a dinosaur rights movement (and this is not to mention how the film ignores the fact that, as the person most responsible for the disaster in the previous film, she should be either in court or jail by now, for multiple counts of culpable homicide.) She is approached by the estate of a man called Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) who apparently was the business partner of the original park's creator John Hammond but somehow luckily avoided being involved in the plots of any of the previous films. Lockwood wants to stage his own secret rescue mission for the dinosaurs, organised by his smarmy protege Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), which needs Claire for her knowledge of the park and her connection to the skilled dinosaur wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt)

Trailers for the film hinted at a version of Owen who is a bit more quippy and bumbling than the insufferably perfect 'Mary Sue' type character he played in Jurassic World. This hope is quickly laid to rest. Owen is first seen in the film building a log cabin for himself in the rugged woods while swigging clearly branded bottles of Budweiser. He's always smarter, braver, wittier, more observant and better in a fight than any of the other characters. He feels less like a plausible person than like an action figure designed by a committee of toy manufacturers who are disappointed that they at some point have to involve an actual human actor in this merchandise marketing strategy. He's basically Poochie from that classic Simpsons episode only he never saves the film by simply quietly 'returning to his home planet.' It's especially frustrating when you consider how wasted Chris Pratt is in the role. Pratt has previously played various degrees of charmingly dumb and cluelessly arrogant to great strength in everything from Parks and Recreation, The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy. He could easily do the same here to make Owen an engaging lead. Instead he is simply a blank slate of heroism, a man literally capable of doing anything except for being at all interesting or likeable. Bryce Dallas Howard isn't served much better. Where in Jurassic World, Claire was cold, aloof and unable to take responsibility for her own negligence, here her past flaws are handwaved away and she instead begins the film smugly self-righteous about how best to fix the dinosaur problem she herself caused in the previous movie. Although it feels inaccurate to merely say 'begins' because neither character has any sort of arc or development as the film goes on, and Claire especially seems little more than a spectator in her own story.

As with Jurassic World (2015), our bland protagonists are given a necessary assist from more charismatic supporting characters. Sadly, we do not see a return of that film's Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus whose awkward control room flirtation was one of that film's more charming oddities. Instead we have Justice Smith playing a cowardly IT specialist brought along for his 'hacking' abilities and Daniella Pineda as a tough, no-nonsense young woman who has somehow become a fully qualified dinosaur veterinarian without ever having seen one of these beasts in the flesh. (Just go with it. This is far from the largest leap of faith required for this film's plot to even occasionally resemble plausibility!) Both actors give solid, engaging performances in these roles but unfortunately both are underserved by the script which leaves them with too little memorable lines or agency in the plot to make a strong impression. More successful is Ted Levine who is cast as a coldhearted mercenary who accompanies our heroes on their mission but who has plans of his own. He's a sneering, cruel and sexist pig with no qualms about animal cruelty. Sure, he's nothing more than a generic archetype, but at least he's fun and in these early scenes he manages to feel more of an effective threat to our characters safety than the prehistoric monsters surrounding them.

It's this lack of dinosaur based terror which separates the Jurassic World films from the previous Jurassic Park trilogy. No one is in doubt that Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, who wrote both films, clearly love dinosaurs however they seem to have missed one of the central messages of Spielberg's 1993 classic: we cannot let our desire to be awed by these magnificent creatures overtake our fear of the consequences of a such an action. The dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are almost all benign in comparison to their chaotic predecessors. Well, most of the dinosaurs, that is. The film introduces a new genetically modified monster in the form of the 'Indoraptor', a hybrid creature which seems to be inspired more by fairytale monsters than any actual extinct reptilian. In the later scenes it acts as the film's primary antagonist, stalking our heroes through dark corridors and snarling through the rain by moonlight. J.A. Bayona, directing his first film in the series, feels most at home in these scenes and his skill with haunting visuals is clearly on show in sequences which evoke the likes of Nosferatu and the Universal horrors as much as they do the previous action movies in the series. Bayona's flair for powerful imagery is the films greatest strength. Having shown skills at depicting gothic horror, epic disaster and giant beings respectively in his previous films The Orphanage, The Impossible and A Monster Calls, he seems the perfect person for the job of framing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's mixed bag of genre influences. And he is. His clever use of flashes of light from lightning and flames to introduce dinosaurs creeping out of the shadows are used to create some of the best set pieces in the series since Spielberg left the directors chair. However, his efforts are undermined by the poor quality of the script which mishandles the characters and themes enough to make it hard to care about what is happening on screen, regardless how visually arresting it is at times. (That Colin Trevorrow is taking back the role of director on the third film in the 'Jurassic World' trilogy is hardly inspiring.)

Despite the human characters being unsympathetic, the film does manage to create some emotional weight in the way it portrays the dinosaurs. They may fail to be anywhere near as awe-inspiring and wondrous, or as terrifying, as they do in the Speilberg movies, but they have never inspired quite as much empathy as they do here. While the humans in the movie range from the merely flat and boring to the downright dastardly (Toby Jones even turns up as a distinctly Trump-esque evil businessman) the dinosaurs are treated as characters themselves rather than simply forces of nature and get the opportunity to be heroic, villainous and even, in one moment, slapstick. The film's single most powerful image comes from a moment involving a trapped brachiosaur which somehow managed to genuinely tug on the heartstrings even though we have been given no prior reason to connect with the animal or any of the people involved in the sequence. This suggests an interesting switch in the film series' moral allegiance. Where previous films have been built on the spine chilling fear that mankind could destroy itself through acts of hubris, this one takes a much more "Come Friendly Bombs" approach with the dinosaurs seemingly acting as our species' well deserved reckoning. (Interestingly this comes at the same time as Michael Crichton's other "theme park goes wrong" story, Westworld, is going through a TV reboot which similarly suggests that the original film's 'monsters' may have more humanity than the heartless beings who created them.)

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has some really intriguing ideas going on in it but it simply doesn't know what to do with any of them. (One really major shift in the series possible mythology is introduced right at the end of the film but has so little to do with the rest of the story as to warrant little more than a perplexed shrug by the audience.) That said, the film is so odd that it feels destined to become some sort of cult movie. It may well be the stupidest film in the whole Jurassic Park series but it's also probably the most ambitious and thankfully, unlike it's direct predecessor, isn't simply a tired retread of what worked in the past. My 10 year old self probably would've squealed with joy at many of the scenes in this film but even he probably would've understood one of the central themes of the 1993 film that these filmmakers have forgotten; sometimes the past is best left where it is.

Review by The Mogul.