Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) - A review. Maybe I rant a bit.

SPOILERS ABOUND for the whole franchise, particularly Jurassic World and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom.

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies of all time. I could write a book on why that movie is brilliant on its own and as an adaptation that, in some respects, improves on its source book (the book is great too though, don't get me wrong. They're both great for different reasons).
I'm far from alone in thinking Jurassic Park is great, and the box office has borne this out as well, enough that we're now on what is technically the fifth movie. Of course, box office is not actually a great indication of quality.

On that note, the saddest thing about this being the fifth movie is that only the first one is really all that great. They made a brilliant movie that had something to say, interesting characters, great performances, and of course incredible effects, and have turned it into, to quote the movie, "one big pile of shit".

Sure, The Lost World has good parts (the raptors in the tall grass? That's good stuff), and considering the difficulties faced in trying to get JP3 made, it could have been a lot worse. There are some moments in those films that I would say I enjoy. But clearly the series was on a steep downward trend.

So, fourteen years after JP3 (thus twenty two after the original release of JP) we got Jurassic World. Though I would rate it higher than JP3 and maybe even TLW, it really isn't a very good movie either. I enjoyed it for what it is. The pandering to nostalgia was blatant but not ineffective. The action is often mindless, but its fun. As ridiculous as a T-Rex and Raptor teaming up to protect the humans from a giant super mutant dinosaur is, it made for a great fight. And I enjoyed that. Its a bad movie, in some ways a wasted opportunity, and it doesn't hold a candle to the original Jurassic Park. But I had fun with it despite all that.

I can't make excuses for Fallen Kingdom.
Its a bad movie and it goes out of its way to hurt the franchise. I will explain.

It begins with some bozos opening the water paddock that housed the Mosasaurus, the giant water Dino from JW, and a little submarine going in. Two dudes in the sub, one is nervous, the other says something along the lines of "Relax, anything that was in here would be dead by now".
Okay, let me stop you right there.

This is the same universe where Jurassic Parks one, two, and three happened, as well as Jurassic World. Maybe the events of three aren't well known, but from Jurassic World we know that the events of JP1 and JP2 are. The events of Jurassic World happened only three in-movie years prior.
PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW BY NOW THAT THINGS NEVER GO THE WAY YOU EXPECT, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO THESE "DE-EXTINCTED" DINOSAURS.

The dudes find what they were looking for, the bones of the Indominus Rex, the super mutant dino from JW that the T-Rex and Raptor and Mosasaurus fought and killed. They cut a piece of rib off and send it on a balloon up to the surface for their top-side friends to grab, but oooo spooky we see a giant shadow above them.

Like, duh. Of course the Mosasaurus is still alive. Its Jurassic Park/World. Even in the movie where they explicitly mention stuff like all the dinos being female (so they can't breed, but they find a way to anyway) or the "lysine contingency" (basically, the dinos need lysine and their bodies can't make it for themselves, so if the park operators don't feed them food with lysine added, they all just die), life, uh, finds a way. The dinos always, always survive. They just figure it out. Change sex so you can be a dude and make babies. Eat other food. Just, survive. They find a way.

And again, in this universe these are documented events. The Jurassic World movie happened three years ago. That isn't long enough for people to forget that they had a dinosaur theme park on a tropical island that completely, and very visibly, fell apart. These idiots have gone to the island to retrieve a dinosaur bone for the villain of the movie (I mean, they don't say that but its obvious) so they should know the situation.

Anyway long story short, the submarine gets eaten. There is a short but stupid chase with the idiots on the surface running from the T-Rex. They get the bone and barely escape, but at the last second the Mosasaurus leaps out of the water and eats their friend, then swims out to sea from the still-open sea-gate. The whole thing was dumb. The idiots on this operation were ostensibly some sort of professional mercenary crew. They had a submarine, they had a base set up on the island. They had the helicopter. They were obviously well funded. But they apparently did no research on what happened before? They apparently were too stupid to expect and plan for dinosaurs when they're going to retrieve a bone from dinosaur island? It was just stupid.
And so in one regard you could say this whole opening sequence set the movie up quite well.

If I could write a book about how great the original Jurassic Park was, I could write a book about how every scene in Fallen Kingdom was stupid. I'm going to try to save both of us the trouble and get a bit more general from here on out. And honestly, writing this review in this way has been hard. I keep defaulting to just breaking it down scene by scene and explaining why almost every choice and every moment is stupid.
But seriously, it'd be a whole book.
So let me try to hit just a few big points.

Now, in case you don't remember or didn't see Jurassic World, here's a primer.
Dinosaur theme park resort is open! Woman named Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is running the show, but she doesn't care about the animals as living things, she's just all about the numbers and the operations and blah blah whatever. She pushes for the creation of bigger and badder dinos to combat growing apathy towards dinosaurs, and so approves the creation of the giant evil super mutant dinosaur, the Indominus Rex. Owen (Chris Pratt) is a Raptor trainer, and besties with a raptor named Blue. Indominus gets loose because its super tricky and evil and smarter than the humans who do stupid things, particularly Claire for not checking the tracking info and therefore letting people open the door that lets the Indominus escape. The Indominus runs around letting out other dinos and causing havoc, killing hundreds of people and causing billions in property damage and all of it is Claire's fault.
 
So of course she doesn't start this movie in jail or tied up in legal battles. She's running what appears to be a non-profit about saving the dinos (because she learned her lesson from JW, right? Now she cares). See, the setup to this movie is that the previously dormant volcano on Isla Nublar (Dino island) has re-awoken and is going to kill all the dinos. Some people say save them, some people say let nature run its course, again, and wipe out the dinos. But, um, hey guys, did you forget that there are two islands?

See, the whole point of The Lost World, the sequel to the original Jurassic Park, was that there was a second island, Sorna. That island is where most of the dinos were bred and born and raised before being shipped to Nublar.
Its possible I'm not remembering a line in Jurassic World about how they moved all the dinos off Sorna, but there certainly wasn't in this movie, and the endings of TLW and JP3 imply that Sorna was being closed off as basically a nature preserve for the dinos to do their own thing on.
So when everyone is talking about saving these dinos from re-extinction, and how they're the last of their kind (this comes up constantly), they're completely leaving out the setting of two of your now five movies.

So did Fallen Kingdom just forget about TLW? Well, no, of course it didn't, because it borrows heavily from TLW. More on that in a bit.

They introduce this new character, Sir Benjamin Lockwood, who is supposedly John Hammond's former partner (John Hammond being the old guy who started and oversaw the whole dino-park thing in JP1). According to this movie, Lockwood and Hammond worked together in a lab under Lockwood's estate to develop the dino-cloning technology.
But this doesn't make any sense based on the previous movies. Hammond was not some tech dude, he was not a scientist working on cloning in the basement lab of his fellow rich guy friend. He was just the rich guy who bankrolled the project in order to start the most expensive theme park resort in the world. Sure, he's also kind of this kindly old grandpa, but the movie makes it clear that his motives aren't originally entirely pure.
We're also introduced to Eli Mills, the guy running Lockwood's estate, played by Rafe Spall, and we immediately know he's the villain. They don't tell us that. He doesn't act like a villain. He doesn't say anything particularly villainous. The movie is just so paper-thin that we can all see through this facade they're trying to build and know that the rich guy who is running the estate is going to be eeeeevil.
Side note, I haven't seen Spall in too much, but he's great in Hot Fuzz (because that movie is perfect), and the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". His performance there is particularly incredible. But in JWFK he's speaking in an American accent and I could not get over that. That may just be me.

Anyway, he sends Claire on a mission to rescue the dinos from Dino Island. They need her to be able to access the computers and the old dinosaur tracking system that Jurassic World used when it was an operating park.

Claire has to convince Owen to go with her and help her on their island adventure, because he was besties with Blue the raptor, and they want to save her. Of course, Claire and Owen broke up in between movies because we needed to have a reason they weren't together so that there could be an entirely pointless romantic subplot between the two of them. Advice to Connolly and Trevorrow (the writers): trim the fat of your bloated film by just having them work together from the beginning. You'd save time upfront and not have them ending up back together, riding off into the sunset in the exact same way as the last movie, which totally makes every scene about their relationship entirely pointless by the end.

We also meet our two sidekicks somewhere in here, caustic millennial girl with attitude, Dr Zia Rodriguez, a paleo-veterinarian. So, she's a dino-doctor, but one of the first things we learn about her is that she's never seen a dinosaur in person. That makes perfect sense.
The other is super scared nerd Franklin, supposedly a former Jurassic World tech/IT guy and now the save-the-dinos campaign's resident hacker. His fear and desire to not get involved or not interact with dinosaurs is probably the only part of this movie that was at all relatable, as any normal human would not want to go into post-apocalyptic Dino island with exploding volcano. He also disappears for most of the last half of the movie and you absolutely do not miss him.

Once they arrive on the island, the crew is greeted by Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine, who is leading the dino rescue operation. We know immediately that he is a bad guy. The movie doesn't tell us. Its not in the script. Its not even that they cast freakin' Buffalo Bill to play him. He's just the guy in charge of operations here, and you just know he's the bad guy. There is nothing subtle about it. But the movie continues, at least for a little while, as if we don't all know that he's going to obviously betray the main characters.

Long story short, he does, Blue gets shot, bad guy shoots Owen with a tranquilizer and leaves him to die in the volcano explosion, traps Claire and Franklin in a computer room, and takes Blue and Zia (so she can work her dino-doctor skills on Blue, who was shot) and leaves the island.

This whole island sequence borrows heavily from The Lost World, but does so poorly. The big game hunter dude, leading the safari to capture dinos. The cages they put the dinos in look similar to the ones in TLW. But its all done very quick and sloppy. That sequence may be one of the best in The Lost World. You see these guys come out in force, with their jeeps and nets and tools, driving around the stampeding dinos, trying to capture as many as they can. Its kinetic, exciting, has some great effects. The scene in Fallen Kingdom is slap-dash and over before it begins. It's like they felt like they had to borrow, but just wanted to get this out of the way.

This is also where we get the sequence of people and dinos running from the exploding volcano, and this is awful too. The whole sequence just becomes silly slapstick. Owen has to roll himself away from the approaching lava, because he was tranquilized and can't move! But after a minute he stands up and can just run away normally.
Claire and Franklin are trapped in this room, but oh no lava is leaking in, and oh boy again, there's also a dinosaur here too now! How are they ever going to escape? But of course they're fine. Close proximity to dripping lava doesn't really affect them, or anyone or anything, in this movie.

Its just ridiculous.

The setup of the second half of the movie is that all the dinosaurs have been brought to the Lockwood estate on the US mainland, and Rafe Spall is trying to auction them off. Also, he re-started the secret lab under Lockwood's estate and has been continuing the genetic modification work they were doing on the island in JW. BD Wong makes an appearance as Henry Wu, which was fun in JW as a callback to the original movie, but it feels kinda wasted here. Like, they treat it as a reveal, but it was so patently obvious he would be here running the science part of the show that it just felt obligatory.

Anyway, they made another evil super mutant dino, this time it's the Indominus but with more Velociraptor in it, so now they call it the Indoraptor. After a bunch of other pointless stuff, it gets out and starts killing people, mainly hunting our main characters. When introduced to the Indoraptor we're told it's been designed for military application. It is a super predator. Hyper-intelligent, fast, strong, blah blah etc.

But a little girl out-runs and out-smarts it. It tracks the main characters very poorly and is confused/foiled by turning the lights off.

I just, I've left out so much of why this movie is dumb. But I'm running out of steam.

They pay lip-service to the whole "it's all Claire's fault" thing, but Owen literally absolves her by saying "its my fault too because I trained raptors, which just made them wanna make more soldier-dinos". Never mentioned again.

There is a good thing about this movie. There is a child character, the grand-daughter of Lockwood. When she first showed up I was so worried. The Jurassic movies have a rough history with child characters (as does film in general, I suppose). The kids in the first one are great because the movie knows kids are annoying and so they are just minorly annoying enough to get the point across, but never actually bother you. They are both well acted. The kid in TLW is a step down in performance, but compared to the rest of the film she fits in. She ruins the movie, though, with the whole gymnastics beating raptors scene, which I could write pages on and I'm just going to have to not right now. The kid in the third one is awful. The kids in JW are boring and kinda pointless.

BUT the kid in JWFK might be the best part of it. Not because her character has all that much great stuff to do, but the actress Isabella Sermon actually gives a fantastic performance. She may have given the best performance in the film. Her story-line actually has some emotion to it, which the rest of the movie fails to deliver even when trying its hardest. She has literally no other credits on IMDb, so I have no idea where she came from, but Isabella Sermon is one to watch out for.
They did a weird thing though, and made her character actually not the granddaughter of Lockwood, but a clone of his dead daughter. This was apparently what led to the falling out with Hammond, which is supposed to explain why we've never heard of him before this, I guess. Its weird and dumb.
At the end of the movie it seems like Claire and Owen take de-facto custody of this girl though? And that's also weird. Her story wraps up strangely.

There's also a moment where it looks like Claire might actually be a secret bad guy too, but its a fake-out. I thought for a second that the movie was actually going to do something interesting, but that ended up not being the case and it went back to being boring

In the end the trapped dinos escape into the real world (not the Indoraptor, a couple dumb humans and Blue defeat it) and we see a shot of a T-Rex roaring at a lion and its ridiculous. Again, the whole "dinos in the rest of the world" thing was taken from the ending of TLW. It was dumb there and its worse here because now the whole next movie is going to be "dinos in the rest of the world". Jeff Goldblum makes a cameo here and says "Now we really are in the Planet of the Apes" or whatever. It was a waste of a good Goldblum.

Here's the take-away. The movie learns all the wrong lessons from Jurassic World, basically pretends that the original three Jurassic movies don't exist, except when trying to steal some nostalgia from them, and doesn't use any of its situations or setups properly. I get that these JW movies are supposed to be, in many ways, a soft-reboot of the series, but they try so hard to have it both ways, and you can't. You can't have Henry Wu be so important, and call back to John Hammond, and in the original JW actually have them visit old sections of the failed first park, but then make up new characters that contradict those movies. You can't borrow so heavily from those films and expect us not to see how sloppily you've done so. You can't use slapstick comedy in your supposedly tense action scenes and expect them to still land. You can't establish a dinosaur as the ultimate predator+soldier and have it utterly fail to be a credible threat to our protagonists at all.

In short, bad movie.