Genre: Action/Adventure
Premise: (from IMDB) When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.
About: Three years ago, Jurassic World took the world by storm. The movie nobody thought they wanted became a mega-hit, grossing 1.6 billion worldwide. In a strange twist of fate, the first film’s director, Colin Trevorrow, was fired from his Star Wars Episode 9 job, allowing him to come back and spearhead the back end of the new film in a producing capacity. The sequel is directed by J.A. Bayona, who directed one of my favorite horror films ever, The Orphanage. The sequel grossed 150 million this weekend.
Writers: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow (based on characters by Michael Crichton)
Details: 128 minutes
Jurassic Park has always felt like a hard franchise to embrace. For the longest time, I wondered why that was. After watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom this weekend, it hit me. Unlike franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, Indy, Harry Potter, etc., Jurassic Park has always been about the dinosaurs. And as awesome as dinosaurs are, they’re not people. They’re not characters we can emotionally connect to. This is why no matter who we plop down into the park, we’re left feeling empty. The characters have always been interchangeable in this universe.
Fallen Kingdom tries to solve this issue with “Blue,” the velociraptor who Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, trained as a raptor pup. Maybe, the theory went, they could turn him into a Disney animal, like reindeer Sven from Frozen. But the problem with these darn dinosaurs is if you make them too cute and cuddly, they come off as dishonest. These are predators and you have to stay true to that. Which means we can only feel so close to them.
The plot for Fallen Kingdom isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. After the events of the previous movie, a volcano on the island has become active. Once it erupts, it’s likely that all the dinosaurs in the park will die. There’s a debate going on about whether we should save them from extinction, or “let nature take its course.” After an impassioned speech by Jeff Goldblum (who never liked us “playing God”), nature wins. It’s decided that they should be left to die.
The estate of the Jurassic Park’s creator, Hammond (the old guy who always said, “No spared expense”), doesn’t want this to happen. They’ve found an island to sneak the dinosaurs off to and let them live in peace. They can do most of the work themselves, but if they’re going to find the elusive “Blue,” they’ll need someone who can find him. Claire says, “I can’t catch him.” And they say, “But you know someone who can.”
So Claire recruits Owen to go to Jurassic World to help lure Blue, only to find out it’s all a sham. There’s no second island. They’re going to take these dinosaurs back to the mainland and sell them off to the highest bidders! After being jailed at the head mansion by the bad guys, Claire and Owen orchestrate an escape, and run to the room where the auction is taking place. Of course, a few dinosaurs get free, and then all hell breaks loose. Now it’s back to basics. Get the hell off this compound without getting eaten.
The plot is by no means perfect. But it’s hard to come up with sequels to “monster-in-a-box” scenarios. You can’t repeat the plot from the first film, even though that’s the only way to make these concepts work. So you’re stuck stitching together plots like these, which have sections that are fun, but don’t add up to a complete experience.
The best stuff in the film, by far, is the stuff on the island. There were four, arguably five, good set-pieces. My personal favorite was running down the hill of the island with all the dinosaurs while a volcano blows up behind them. But the set piece I was most invested in was the drowning scene. Claire and her assistant are stuck inside one of those glass bubble vehicles which has plunged into the ocean and it’s filling up with water. Owen is able to come down and jimmy open the door just in time to save them.
This was a reminder of something I preach all the time here. The simplest set pieces are often the best. There are no dinosaurs in this scene. Just characters. But the scene is so perfectly paced and the threat of death so prominent, that I was holding my breath along with them. Really good stuff.
Ironically, this placed the script in a huge predicament – how do you follow such a strong island sequence? Unfortunately, they failed with their choice, setting the second half of the movie in a mansion. You cannot, under any circumstances, make the second half of your blockbuster action movie smaller than your first half.
Yet that’s what happens. We regress into small rooms and small scenes (time to sell the dinosaurs!). The whole time I kept wondering how they were going to get all the characters and dinosaurs to a final location where the giant climax will be. But it never happened. The movie remains inside the mansion/compound the whole time. The choice was so baffling, I assumed it had to be a budget issue. But who puts budget constraints on sequels to movies that gross 1.6 billion dollars?
Another problem with this dinosaur world is that the writers try to have it both ways. When it suits them, the dinosaurs are nice loving animals that need to be saved. When it doesn’t, they’re cruel heartless predators that you have to run from. This happened all the time. Help the raptor, THEN RUN FROM IT! Help the T-Rex, THEN HIDE! In defense of Connolly and Trevorrow, I’m not sure this is any different from the original Jurassic Park, but I noticed it a lot more here. And it left me confused about what I was rooting for. Are these things good? Are they bad? What am I supposed to be feeling? And if you’re going to say to me, “That’s the point Carson. It’s complicated!” Give me a break. This is Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. Not Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless.
The one big talking point coming out of this film is the ending (MAJOR SPOILERS moving forward). Some people have praised the film for finally “moving the Jurassic franchise forward.” I’m calling B.S. What happens at the end of the film is they let all the dinosaurs free, which allows them to scurry into the mainland, into society. For the first time, Jeff Goldblum post-scripts, man and dinosaur will co-exist.
Mark my words. This will doom the sequel.
Monster-in-a-box movies only work when there’s a monster and a box. You take either one of those away and you don’t have a movie. They’re taking the box away. So what’s the plot going to be? Are we going to cut between Japan, China, the U.S., France, and the U.K., observing how different nations adapt to the dinosaur phenomenon? That may work as a National Geographic series. But it won’t work as a movie, which needs something more contained, both in location and urgency. If you disagree with me, pitch your “Dinosaurs are everywhere in the world now” idea for Jurassic World 3 in the comments. Watch as it gets shot down. And it’s not your fault! There’s no way to make this setup work.
You may say to me, “But Avengers Infinity War, Carson! That took place all over the universe.” But that’s not a monster-in-a-box story. We’re dealing with characters there who have their own goals, their own flaws and fears and conflicts to overcome. That’s the inherent problem with dinosaurs. They’re not smart. They can’t have dino-arcs.
If I were grading this on the first half alone, I would say it’s worth the price of admission. But once we get to the mansion, each sequence is less compelling than the previous sequence. Not only that, but the writers didn’t recognize that while even though the dinosaurs are the stars of the show, the audience needs to connect with the characters. And they don’t give us anyone to connect to.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never go smaller in your second half. Movies need to build. This was a problem I had with Looper as well. We went from this giant time-traveling world-traveling opus to hanging out on a farm.
