What is Jurassic Park? I ask because Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is so far removed from the original premise that was Jurassic Park that it feels closer to some terrible SyFy channel movie than anything related to Steven Spielberg’s classic.
The original Jurassic Park changed film forever in a lot of ways. Growing up as a fan of dinosaurs, like most kids my age, the idea of seeing them on the big screen running wild was incredible. It’s also a film that still holds up because the story, while silly, is well written and takes itself seriously.
But what really made the film special as a kid was that care was taken with those dinosaurs. They had teams of people building animatronics, using CGI, as well as dinosaur experts contributing to the film to make it accurate for the time. The idea on the whole was a silly one but the filmmakers worked hard to make everything look and feel real.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom does none of that. What we get is a 2-hour film with a few minutes of modified raptor T-Rex getting out and killing a few rich bad guys. Oh, and writers who have no idea how lava works. Everything we get in the trailer is over and done with in the first twenty-minutes of the film with the rest becoming a bore.
That’s hard to write. Think about it, you have a film about runaway dinosaurs escaping an exploding island and yet it manages to be pretty boring overall. There is no attempt to educate audiences, teach anything about dinosaurs, with the film ending up treating them nothing more than generic genetic experiments.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens with a team coming to rescue the dinosaurs from the exploding island we saw in the trailer. The idea of the island falling apart and people coming together to save them like some dino-PETA was enough to sell me on the film, so it’s unfortunate that it’s nothing more than some predictable psych-out.
Jeff Goldblum is on the screen for all of five-minutes and feels so tacked simply to throw a bone to fans of the original Jurassic Park and get butts in seats. The crux of the film sees the dinosaurs taken by generic baddies to be sold to the highest bidders. It’s such a tired plot that it feels very Roger Moore era James Bond.
It’s mind-bogglingly frustrating that most of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ends up taking place in a really big house pulled right out of the first Resident Evil video game. You have these massive beasts in cages for most of the film in some guys basement while rich evils dudes bidding on them.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom at least bucks tradition with the story it tells, but it’s one so far removed from the series that it’s hard to even see this as a Jurassic Park film. What we get is a very expensive B-movie that is littered with plot holes and needless action scenes. How is it that nobody notices the entirety of the worlds underground villains (Russians, Yakuza, rich oil barons, terrorists, Disney reps) arriving in some tiny mountain town for a massive auction
If you saw the trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom then you’ve pretty much seen all the best parts of the film. The film has gone so far off the rails that *Spoiler Alert* there is even a human genetic clone because that’s what Jurassic Park was missing. Oh, and it’s a throwaway line for a character that does nothing for the plot.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is all about the action and lots of CGI dinosaurs running amok for twenty-minutes at the beginning of the film and the last twenty-minutes of the film
The film relies on a new dinosaur created simply to be used by black-market military people to kill other people. This new raptor crossed with a T-Rex is silly, only being there to get out of its cage to kill a bunch of evil rich people because smart people act dumb for plot reasons. What hurts the film is everything outside of the dinosaur action, which is surprisingly light.
The new characters simply exist and all, including the returning cast, are so bland you are just counting down until a dinosaur does something, anything, which they don’t during the entirety of the second act. The rest is just smart people having terrible lapses in judgment.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom almost plays like a comedy. Heck, as mentioned before there is an entire dinosaur auction scene (complete with dinosaurs on conveyor belts) with every evil organization in the world bidding. Trust me when I say it wouldn’t be out-of-place to get a cameo from Blofeld and Dr. Evil.
What’s funny is that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feels like that silly Rampage movie, if Rampage took itself seriously. A badly written script, idiotic plot, and canned performances of characters yelling to “look out” a lot make Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom nothing more than an expensive B-movie that’s so far removed from Jurassic Park that it insults the original.
Rating:
2/5
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