The Jurassic Park franchise clearly wanted to squeeze out the last drop of money from the theme park and genetic engineering gone wild concept Steven Spielberg created in 1993. Fallen Kingdom is the latest iteration of this concept, with a volcano and a new killer dinosaur to be scared of. Oh, and most importantly, a cute kid in peril is back…with a twist: a British accent! Even cuter!
The dilemma at the center of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is what to do with the dinosaurs on the last island remaining that they inhabit because the volcano on that island is about to erupt. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is pro-life in this case, hoping to find a way to save these animals. She gets a shot from billionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) and his assistant Eli (Rafe Spall), who have a refuge ready for the dinosaurs to be left alone. Claire enlists the help of former flame Owen (Chris Pratt) to help find Blue, the last remaining raptor on the planet that Owen helped train.
I still enjoy seeing dinosaurs onscreen, and Fallen Kingdom is banking on the audience getting that same visceral thrill I do. The volcanic eruption only really takes up about an hour of time, but I was sort of hoping it would be the entire movie, since the stakes are most clear and story streamlined enough to feature the dinosaurs more often. The eruption itself is terrifying; there is lots of disorientation and fast moving clouds of ash that cause dinosaur stampedes, and we get what I think the movie should have done more of, trap the heroes in tight situations. The use of shadow is excellent here, hiding the creatures and slowly building their entrance for either a scare, or a majestic entrance, or in one case, just a heartbreaking goodbye. Once we move off the island and into an extremely large estate that clearly has lighting issues, we get repetitive but effective setups of scary carnivores stalking their prey under the guise of darkness or murky images, which prove effective enough for some solid jump scares.
And yet, you never feel anything except for the dinosaurs, which is a problem, because the humans take up more screen time, and there’s nary a character to be found here, save one defining characteristic: pro-dinosaur trainer (Owen), army mercenary (Ken Wheatley?, juicily played by Ted Levine), hacker (Justice Smith), or dinosaur nurse (Daniella Pineda). This can be fine if the story were interesting, but Fallen Kingdom feels like a failed pitch for the 2015 film that got filed away by the studio, where they simply recycled the same plot of genetic tampering and hubris in relation to dinosaur behavior. In 1993, this concept was super interesting and fresh; today, with great uses for genetic engineering around us, the movie doesn’t bother to modernize its message, leaving the story stale as a leftover slice of bread. The ending, meant to be wrought with moral quandary, merits merely a shrug because Fallen Kingdom fails to make us care, and ruins the ending by selling wonder and power and only delivering fear by placing the last two shots incorrectly (they should be flipped). For all the effort to deliver well constructed scares and moments, Fallen Kingdom fails to surround these moments with compelling filler for our characters, and thus zaps any chance of this Jurassic World to come anywhere near the amazement of the first film.
The very end of the story does set up a new direction for the movies to go, which is exciting because something new needs to happen, ASAP. However, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has cemented my cynicism to the point where all I’m wondering is which accent the cute kid is gonna have in the next film? French is the current leader at -200: any takers?