Movie Breakdown: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
It’s a hard split for me on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom because I so want every Jurassic Park-related film to be as good as the first. I want them all to somehow connect to that moment when the T-Rex erupts from behind the fence and all I could think in my 3rd grade mind was, “This is what every movie should be like.” But even if they traded up from Colin Treverrow to J.A. Bayona, this franchise is a different beast, and my expectations are wildly low.
Post-Screening Ramble:
The number one rule for dinosaur movies should be: the dinosaurs never leave the wild. I see the allure in placing prehistoric super lizards in tight spaces with meaty victims to savage – it’s good for a scare. But as soon as you take a dinosaur out of the wild, it’s not a dinosaur movie anymore, it’s just any other monster movie. And that said, if Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s (which kingdom has fallen never really gets a good answer) biggest flaw was that it was “just any other monster movie” it’d be a far step in the right direction for this middling, rock-dumb film. Picking up some years after the equally dumb events of Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom finds Owen (Chris Pratt, still struggling to be a tough guy through all his inherent niceness) and Clare (Bryce Dallas Howard now in sensible shoes) returning to Isla Nublar to save some dinosaurs from an erupting volcano at the behest of an aging billionaire (James Cromwell, sorely wasted) with deep ties to the original Jurassic Park. Things are not how they seem though and soon enough, to no surprise, Owen, Clare and a couple of youthful add-ons are running (so much running) to escape the volcano and the dinosaurs and the bad men at the heart of it all. Eventually, everyone makes it to Northern California and a giant mansion and there’s more running and more dinosaurs and a whole lot of plot that adds up to next to nothing. This is a painfully dumb movie where characters exist only as means to push the plot forward, dinosaurs only exist to occasionally inject the film with some low dose of energy and everything else is just detritus strewn on edges of a clanking franchise machine.
One Last Thought:
I will say, if making me feel bad for dinosaurs was the point of this film, well, it worked. Humans are bad, dinosaurs get fucked, I could’ve done without this film.
