Jurassic Worldwas by no means a “smart” movie, but it had some loose kind of internal logic that barely held together if you didn’t look at it too hard. Its sequel,Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, however, goes full-blown idiotic from the get-go. Working from a premise that makes absolutely no sense, the movie fluctuates between predictable, stupid, and predictably stupid. Despite some pretty direction fromJ.A. Bayona, there’s nothing he can do to rescueColin TrevorrowandDerek Connolly’s lazy, boneheaded script that never met a shortcut it wasn’t willing to take. Yes, the film will give you the destructive dino carnage you crave, but it’s difficult to enjoy when you’re constantly rolling your eyes at every decision the characters make.
Three years after the events ofJurassic World, Isla Nublar is about to explode* due to an active volcano that will destroy all the dinosaurs remaining on the island. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is now an activist for the protection of dinosaurs, and already the movie has fallen apart. Claire and her organization, which includes paleoveterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and systems analyst Franklin Webb (Justice Webb), want to prevent the re-extinction of dinosaurs. At no point in the movie does anyone ask, “Can’t you just make more?”
I do know I was constantly reminded of a quote from Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) not from this film, where he sits in at a senate hearing and gives dire warnings, but his dire warning fromJurassic Park:
“This isn’t some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.”
Fallen Kingdomoperates under the assumption that we want the dinosaurs to live. Even if you think they shouldn’t go re-extinct (and they totally should because they’re a freaking hazard and the best thing anyone could think to do with them is put them in a theme park), their extinction on Isla Nublar wouldn’t matter because the previous movies establish that the science exists tojust make more dinosaurs. Throughout the film, every time someone brought up trying to save the dinosaurs, I instantly responded, “Why don’t you just make more?”
When the U.S. government wisely decides not to save the dinosaurs, Claire gets a call from Johnny Exposition, Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), the assistant to the wealthy Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), who was John Hammond’s former partner who has never been mentioned until now. Eli says they want to save the dinosaurs by putting them on a nearby island that won’t explode (why this wasn’t the location for the theme park is never explained), but he needs Claire to recruit Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) because they’ll never be able to capture his beloved raptor, Blue. Claire replies, “DURRRR. OKAY. I’M SURE THIS ISN’T A DOUBLE-CROSS,” and happily goes off to believe something that’s too good to be true. Owen, with his past feelings for Claire and his affection for Blue, reluctantly agrees to be Blandsome McCoolguy once again and head off to the island.
But if you’ve seen the trailer, a previousJurassic Parkmovie, or any movie in the past fifty years, you know that the double-cross is coming, so their time on the island, brief as it is, loses all tension. We’re just waiting for lead mercenary Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine) and his band of equally untrustworthy mercenaries to betray the good guys, make off with Blue and the other dinosaurs, and then make their way back to the Lockwood Estate so that the sleazy Eli can auction off the dinosaurs (for the grand total of less than it cost to makeJurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) with the help of auctioneer Mr. Eversol (Toby Jones). It’s a movie devoid of stakes because you can tell where it’s going down to the smallest detail.
For example, in the first half of the movie, we meet Lockwood’s granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon). She’s been his ward since the death of her mother, but when she asks him if she looked like her mother and he furtively holds his notebook closer, we know something is up. And then it takes no time at all to figure out that Maisie must be a clone because cloning has been a factor in these movies from the start. What’s meant to be a major reveal loses all its impact because the film is so ridiculously dumb and yet it assumes the audience isn’t in on what happening.
That stupidity permeates the entire film and there’s nothing Bayona can really do to overcome the shoddy script. For example, there’s a scene where Wheatley wants to take a tooth from the dangerous Indoraptor. Rather than just kill the thing (because everything has gone to hell at this point anyway), he tranquilizes it (or at least he thinks he does), gets in the cage with it, and then tries to pull out one of its teeth. Bayona shoots the scene playfully, and he should because Wheatley is being the dumbest person imaginative. But he’s also dumb because the script needs him to be dumb, so apparently the only way he can get his jollies is if he’s pulling teeth out of live dinosaurs rather than dead ones.
So the dinosaurs get carried back to the Estate where they’re all put in pens that are secured by a padlock you could buy at Home Depot. One could argue that the film is hammering home a point about the carelessness of humans, but that carelessness always seems to serve the plot and give the writers easy ways to proceed. Take the survival of Claire and Owen. They manage to survive the island, make their way back to the Lockwood Estate, get discovered, thrown into one of the easily escapable cages, and then Eli tells Wheatley, “We’ll say [Claire and Owen] died on the island,” but then doesn’t proceed to kill Claire and Owen. He just leaves them in the cages for no reason. The film doesn’t even try to offer an explanation like, “We need Owen alive to retrain Blue and Owen won’t do it unless we protect Claire.” The film is too lazy to even bother with the modest housekeeping of explaining its characters’ motives.
Those motives are frustrating because you get a glimpse of a movie that could have been so much better. You see Claire and Owen wrestling with their culpability in Jurassic World, Claire with her creation of the Indominous Rex and Owen with raptors that could have been used for (gigantic sigh) military applications. But rather than wrestle with that guilt and a way to make amends, those ideas are quickly tossed aside so we can get back to the action and watch the new mutant dinosaur, the Indoraptor (does the buyer get to workshop the name and give it something better?) tear the place apart.
The Indoraptor is where you can see that Trevorrow and Connelly can’t get off their hobbyhorse that some nefarious villain wants to use these dinosaurs for the military. That was the plan of Vincent D’Onofrio’s character in the previous movie, and that’s what Eli believes the new one can be used for here. They even have it trained so it will respond to lasers and sounds so you can direct it to a target. There’s a scene where Eli explains that mankind has used animals in warfare for centuries. And none of that makes up for the fact that using dinosaurs as weapons isthe dumbest fucking idea.
Here’s a tank. You build it, you ride it, it does what you tell it to, and it won’t turn on its riders and murder them. Here’s an Indoraptor. It has to be raised, carefully trained, given specific instructions and targeting, and if it doesn’t obey, it could end up turning on the people hoping to use it. Also, it’s not bulletproof so if someone shoots it in the head, all the hard work of training it has been wasted. Using dinosaurs as weapons is a really bad idea, and Trevorrow and Connelly cannot get enough of it.
And you can see that’s where the third movie will go. The entire purpose ofFallen Kingdomis to build up to a third film that will literally be a “Jurassic World” as dinosaurs roam free. To get to this point, they first have to put all of the dinosaurs in a room. There’s about 26 different species, and they’re all in the same room together. Then there’s a big red button that leads to the outdoors, which is the only precaution in place. Maisie pushes the button and says, “They’re just like me,” so I guess Maisie eats people and destroys ecosystems.
The movie ends with the dinosaurs roaming free and the implication that we must now share the planet with dinosaurs or they’ll take it over. How exactly this will happen when you only have one of every species so there’s no way for them to breed (yeah, yeah, “life finds a way,” but even the Bible, which was written slightly earlier than this movie, knew to put two of every species out there) is never explained but it’s a damning conclusion—mankind was “careless” and we’ve wielded genetic power like nuclear power so proliferation, in the form of dinosaurs, is inevitable.
The question at the heart ofJurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: is it a careless movie about the carelessness of humanity? But let’s give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and say that it is. Then that’s a remarkably nihilistic and shallow view of humanity, and one that it can’t really earn. Yes, there are bad people in the world, but the person who let loose the dinosaurs was the dumb little girl who didn’t understand her relationship to these creatures. There’s no reason this film couldn’t reach its point, dark and twisted as it may be, through sharper means. Instead, it’s a film comprised of shortcuts, and I don’t buy that the shortcuts are the point when those shortcuts also serve the dino carnage that the movie gleefully presents.
Rating: D-
*Why would you build an expensive attraction on an active volcano? Yes, Yellowstone is also on a volcano, but no one decided to build billions of dollars’ worth of facilities and expensive research on that location. You go for the natural beauty and hope that today isn’t the day when the volcano goes off.
