Where have all the dinosaurs gone? Thatâs a question that may occur to you during vast stretches of âJurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,â the fifth entry in the âJurassicâ series, and the first that plays less like a thunder-lizard spectacular than like a â70s disaster movie run amok. Oh, donât get me wrong: The film provides plenty of encounters with our stomping, gnashing primeval-beastly friends â yet for much of âFallen Kingdom,â they are caged, shackled, sedated, wounded, and otherwise subdued. Theyâre right up there on screen, but too often they donât feel like the main event.
On Isla Nubar, site of the now-decimated Jurassic World theme park, a billowing volcano is about to erupt and consume the island. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), that hearty bro of a raptor whisperer, and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the former park manager who now leads a dinosaur-rights activist group, have come to rescue the dinosaurs that still roam there by taking them to a new sanctuary. Theyâve been hired by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), the majordomo of the Lockwood estate. It turns out, though, that heâs using them for their tracking system and has other, more sinister plans for the dinosaursâ future.
On the island, we get token glimpses of the dinosaurs in and out of action. âI want to see this!â shouts one of Claireâs workers, climbing out of a jeep to stare up at a brachiosaurus, in a shot that takes us right back to that very first sighting in âJurassic Parkâ: the moment that launched the age of digital cinema into orbit. Thereâs a nifty Spielbergian prelude that features a ginormous set of underwater jaws, and Owen wakes up in a daze to find himself being licked by the dripping tongue of a triceratops. At one point, Owen and Claire draw blood from a caged and sleeping T. rex, scrunching up against its fearsome head; thereâs a poignant shot of a brachiosaurus being left on the island to be consumed by smoke and lava. And let us not forget Blue, Owenâs favorite velociraptor, whoâs the most anthropomorphic of them all â a keenly intelligent specimen who, with her slight smile, looks like a cross between a domesticated T. rex and E.T.
Yet it must be said that none of these moments produce a hint of the awe, the gargantuan fairy-tale wonder and surprise, that has sustained the âJurassicâ franchise for 25 years. Spielbergâs original âJurassic Parkâ had a storyline that was more functional than inspired, but it worked as a frame on which the director could hang his brilliantly imagined, breathlessly choreographed stomping-reptile magic.
The movies, after Spielbergâs 1997 sequel, have declined steadily in quality â âJurassic World,â in 2015, was an orgy of deadly overkill, all prose and no monster-fantasy poetry â so it makes sense, in a way, that âFallen Kingdomâ adopts a new strategy. It doesnât pretend to wow us as if the sight of digital dinosaurs were still eye-poppingly unprecedented and amazing. It tries, instead, to tuck the dinosaurs into a busy and âtopicalâ conspiracy adventure thriller. The movie was directed by J.A. Bayona, the Spanish filmmaker best known for the atmospheric 2007 horror movie âThe Orphanage,â and though he does a competent job in âFallen Kingdom,â keeping the action thrusting forward, thereâs not much he can do to transcend the script (by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly), which is a kind of furrowed-brow disaster-movie pastiche.
In the â70s, if you went to see a film like âThe Towering Inferno,â it was generally brimming with plot and character and even a social âthemeâ (that one had some malarkey about the recklessness of building too many skyscrapers), but really, everyone had come to see the people trapped in hellfire, the burning bodies crashing down in a trash spectacle of disaster porn. âJurassic World: Fallen Kingdomâ is a liberal pulp message movie, yet it treats itself with even more sobriety. The dinosaurs, it turns out, have been targeted by Mills to be sold off to the highest bidder â yes, itâs the first cautionary dinosaur-trafficking movie â and at certain points you may find yourself ticking off the themes. Greed gone rampant among the globalized gilded class? Check. The sinister potential of genetic engineering? Check. The need to protect endangered species? Check. The privatizing of military action? Check. The eerie implications of cloning? Check. The danger of weaponized dinosaurs? Check.
I didnât find any of this stuff especially âfun,â though the cast members certainly treat the political/genetic/social fodder as if it meant something. Chris Pratt tones down the dude factor and exudes a lean-and-mean sincerity, and Bryce Dallas Howard projects a luminous concern for Godâs ancient revived creatures. The four behavioral profiles. Justice Smith, as a tech geek in aviators who is scared, almost mythologically, of being in the same room as a T. rex, comes on like a nerd version of Will Smith (no relation), and heâs intensely appealing.
The movie culminates in a dinosaur auction scene that carries echoes of âKing Kong,â but it just makes you wish that the air of poignance surrounding these creatures were more sustained. At this point, a âJurassicâ movie needs its dinosaurs to be both victimized innocents and giant-teeth-gnashing predators, and thereâs something hackneyed and opportunistic about the facile (if not mindless) way that âFallen Kingdomâ switches back and forth between those two modes.
The film takes a long time to build up to its climactic battle with an Indoraptor, and itâs effectively done, but itâs nothing we havenât seen before â and when it arrives, you realize that this is what these films will always, at heart, be about: not âsocial responsibilityâ but monsters who want to eat us. The first âJurassic Worldâ was, quite simply, not a good ride. âFallen Kingdomâ is an improvement, but itâs the first âJurassicâ film to come close to pretending that it isnât a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a so-so ride. I hope the next one is an all-out ride â but that for the first time since Spielbergâs 1993 original, itâs actually a great one. The audience for this series has proved that it will turn out in mega-droves. But it deserves more than a passable rerun taking itself too seriously.
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