If you have seen the more recent trailer for it since late April or early May (namely the trailer posted above), chances are you already know what the story is and if you have ever seen any movie ever you can guess how it is going to end. The more recent trailer basically gave away the whole story, but I will sum it up for you very quickly as it really doesn’t need a lot of detail given how shallow it is. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are called by a certain company to recover Pratt’s velociraptor Blue as well as recover other species before the Jurassic World Island explodes. But to absolutely no one’s surprise the company is just gathering the species to sell to buyers on the black market and now Pratt and Howard must stop the company from selling the dinosaurs as well as try to get rid or another genetically engineered super dinosaur that will kill anything that moves…yes, they are doing that again.
If the story sounds familiar to you that’s because they essentially did The Lost World all over again. Granted, there is no stupid sequence with the T-rex rampaging in a major city, but it essentially follows the same beats. I got bored with this movie about 20 minutes in and began to flat out dislike it after the island exploded. The movie was so uninvolving and the very antithesis of entertaining that I found myself once again slouching in my seat and checking the clock on my phone wondering when the movie will end.
As it is a sequel to Jurassic World, I was not expecting a quality narrative at all but at the very least it could give me a fun time but even that is withheld from me. The Jurassic Park films work best when it is dinosaurs eating people and while there is some dinosaurs chowing down humans in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, it had to go in the animal rights direction that just doesn’t sit well with me regarding dinosaurs. What do I mean? You have Chris Pratt and his raptor named Blue. In the first Jurassic World, I never really liked that the raptors were being trained to take orders and such from humans but there were two reasons that made me kind of forgiving of it. First, it seemed to give the idea that the connection between the humans and the raptors was very tenuous and could fall apart at any moment allowing the raptors to go back to natural ways set up by the previous films. And second, the film was a B movie and didn’t really need to think too much about it. In Fallen Kingdom, they basically put forth the idea that the raptors could be trained like puppies to obey a human master. There’s even a portion of the film that shows video where Pratt is training Blue and it begins to show affection for him. Wow! They just snipped the balls off arguably the greatest predator in the franchise. If that could be done with Blue, then it seems it can be done with other raptors. That’s just stupid. The film also just gets preachy about the rights about the dinosaurs and why it is wrong to sell them, use them as weapons and how humanity is not ready for them and…blah blah blah. I don’t care.
Yes, I know that plenty of dinosaurs were herbivores and very likely wouldn’t eat humans (unless you go to Skull Island in the 1933 King Kong. In that case, you’d be screwed) but even those still had menace to them as they could crush or impale you if they feel threatened. I don’t know about the rest of you guys out there, but I don’t exactly go for dinosaur movies where the humans try to save them. That’s not really what makes them fun…at least not for me. You wouldn’t watch the old stop motions dinosaur films if the ancient cave men or modern folk in those movies tried to save them from evil masterminds. You wouldn’t play Turok: Dinosaur Hunter if you spent part of the game removing buckshot from the raptors you just shot to try and save them. You wouldn’t watch King Kong (either the 1933 or the 2005 version) if Ann Darrow chided Kong for ripping out the tongue and crushing the head of the T-Rex that tried to eat her. The point is dinosaurs are more fun when the menace humans. Stop making them the underdog. It’s lame.
I’m not kidding when I say that if you have seen the most recent trailer, you already know the story and it is just as predictable as you already know it is. But the movie laughably tries to throw in some kind of twist (if you can even call it that) where apparently James Cromwell’s character Lockwood knew Hammond and wanted to do human cloning. Hammond was against that and broke off contact with him (Um…OK). Then Lockwood made a clone of his daughter (which is the little girl that Pratt rescues in the trailer) and that somehow makes the girl important...I don’t know, and I didn’t care at all about it since it was so poorly underdeveloped that when it showed up I was like “Oh. That’s a thing…OK.” It was just a sad attempt to give the little girl a vague purpose in the story when she didn’t need to be in there in the first place. The whole thing with Hammond and Lockwood’s feud didn’t fit into the story at all. You could take that out and no one would miss it.
The movie is well made from a directing and visual effects standpoint but again without an element of fun or even a somewhat interesting narrative, your movie can have best visuals of the year and still be crap. The chemistry between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard does help make a few scenes more enjoyable but Pratt for the most part feels like he’s on autopilot and apart from a few moments at the beginning and the aforementioned moments of chemistry between him and Bryce Dallas Howard, none of the charm he exuded from the first Jurassic World was present here. I didn’t like the veterinarian chick or the computer hacker guy who came along for the trip and wanted them to get eaten, especially the computer hacker as he was so annoying. Did we really need him around to show how whiny and whipped he is compared to Chris Pratt? Nope. And it has the usual visual call backs to the older films (the first one in particular) to remind the audience that Jurassic Park has seen better days.
I mentioned earlier that Jurassic Park 3 was pretty meh, but I would rather watch that again than this new movie. Fallen Kingdom is just slightly better than The Lost World but that is very faint praise as we essentially got a remake of it. I have heard from others around the internet that this film actually breaks continuity with the other films, but I always felt that the franchise was rather lose with its continuity and as a result I don’t care about that. I just wanted an entertaining film and Fallen Kingdom failed spectacularly at delivering that. Overlong, surprisingly dull, overly preachy and bereft of a reason to exist (outside of milking the franchise’s udders till they run dry), Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is one of the worst movies of the year.
