Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Lives Up To Its Predecessors
- Jun 21, 2018
- 2 min read
There's been a long standing tradition regarding sequels to Steven Spielberg films. They're almost always awful.
The volcano on Isla Nublar is active and is on the verge of detonation. In an effort to save the animals, Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) recruits Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) to bring the dinosaurs to an island that he, and apparently his good friend John Hammond, established in an awful piece of revisionist history. After speaking with Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), a cartoon level villain hiding in the guise of Lockwood's go-between, she recruits Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) with the intention of recovering the last remaining Velociraptor. Then things get very convoluted, very quickly.
Once again, we get a weak Jurassic sequel, albeit one that's almost identical to The Lost World. Dumb villains, attempts at militarized raptors (just stop), Franklin Webb (Justice Smith), an absolutely awful character who won't shut up, stop screaming or cease crying, a tone that flip-flops between moral dilemmas, melancholy setpieces, dumb comedy and Frankenstein-esque gothic horror all make up Fallen Kingdom. It's not the worst Jurassic sequel, that dubious honour still belongs to Jurassic Park 3, but it's not great.
The opening sequence is excellent, drawing on the horror roots of the franchise and setting a bar so high that the rest of the film struggles to keep up. Everything after that up until the volcano goes up is entirely forgettable, as is everything after that until those horror elements return in the form of the Indoraptor, yet another angry hybrid dinosaur. Taking place in a gothic mansion, the final act of Fallen Kingdom is actually pretty solid, bringing dinosaurs into what feels very much like Frankenstein or The Wolfman. Unfortunately, everything in between left me feeling bored and empty.
I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by the overall quality of Fallen Kingdom. It's in-line with the sequels that came before, painfully so. Yet again film-makers try to convince us that T-Rex isn't the meanest dinosaur around, which only adds insult to injury. In the words of Ian Malcolm, they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
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