Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Film: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeff Goldblum
Director: JA Bayona
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I hated the first Jurassic World with a blinding rage (seriously, see the review-it's brutal), so it was never a guarantee that I would catch the film.  However, I went on a date and wasn't going to quibble too hard about catching it, and the reviews (both RT and from friends) indicated that it was considerably better than the first installment, so I thought I'd take a shot.  After all, Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies, the picture managed to find one of the original stars (Jeff Goldblum) to add to its roster, and it couldn't possibly be worse than that travesty, right?  The latter half of that question proved correct-it is, in fact, better than the first film.  But that shouldn't be confused for the film being good or remotely close to it.  At this point, we're all just wondering if the Jurassic World movies are instead a copy of the Transformers pictures-mindless drones of summer blockbusters churning out increasingly unnecessary sequels that the public will lap up because that's what's expected.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place shortly after the events of the previous film, though with a shocking change in a lot of the characters' personalities, the island that contains all of the dinosaurs is now under attack not from man or a meteor, but instead by a volcano that is set to erupt. The film follows Eli Mills (Spall), a handsome assistant to a previously undisclosed partner of Richard Attenborough's John Hammond, Benjamin Lockwood (Cromwell, filling in for one of many suspensions-of-belief the film takes that suddenly we have an important character that was never mentioned or seen previously).  Mills recruits Claire (Howard) and Owen (Pratt) to return to the island to help save the dinosaurs once again from extinction, particularly the raptor Blue, whom Owen trained.  Once there, they realize that Mills tricked them to try and turn a profit on the dinosaurs to use them as weapons of war, and work with a small band of nerds to eventually get back to the mainland, track down the dinosaurs before they're auctioned off, and then after a side story where we find out that Lockwood is also trying to clone human beings, his cloned granddaughter frees the dinosaur with a push-of-a-button in a ridiculously hammy scene where she protests "they're just like me" and we see a world that is now filled with dinosaurs, staking a claim through the deserts and into cities.

The film itself is an improvement mostly because the plot, at least if you don't look too closely at it, makes sense.  Howard's Claire has been rewritten to be more compassionate, more of an environmentalist, and as a result her relationship to the dinosaurs is similar to Owen's, making their romantic relationship a bit more believable.  The idea of the dinosaurs eventually getting to the mainland is intriguing, and actually we get the best scene of the movie during the opening, when the Mosasaurus escapes into the ocean, free to roam and feast.  But the film cannot handle its characters, and would honestly function better as a silent picture.

For starters, there's the idiocy of introducing human cloning.  Yes, in a world where dinosaurs can be cloned it would make sense that we'd turn to bringing people back from the dead, but the storyline feels a bit too huge for the picture and tacked on to have yet another child in the film, and really to give us some more characters to anchor us on the mainland (the film is pretty bereft of "good guys" in the face of a lot of bad guys, so giving us a child feels like a Spielberg-esque requirement that will also allow for some balance to the back-half of the movie).  This entire storyline feels unnecessary, and poorly edited.  Geraldine Chaplin is either doing way more character work than anyone else in this film as the nanny, or had scenes that were cut out as she feels far more important than her character arch would suggest, and really I could have done without all of this side business about human cloning.

The bigger issue, though, is that there is no suspense in the film whatsoever.  Think back to the original Jurassic Park.  The film not only sees the demise of Wayne Knight's Dennis and the "blood-sucking lawyer," but of some of the "good guys" like Samuel L. Jackson's Ray Arnold and Bob Peck's Robert Muldoon also perished.  As a result, there's some suspense in the film over who might live or die, making the dinosaurs seem scary and risky.  Here, though, there's only bad guys (and, it's worth noting, all of the bad guys) that are killed by the dinosaurs.  In many ways we've gotten to the point where the dinosaurs are now the heroes of the film, with you rooting for the raptors and T-Rex's rather than seeing them as the enemy.  This is fine-and-good, but it makes the action sequences kind of pointless-you can't have your cake and eat it too, and we know that since there's a guaranteed sequel that most of these characters will live to fight another dinosaur.  Without that risk, there's no point to the movie-you know what's going to happen, and since the effects are only middling, there's nothing particularly compelling occurring onscreen.  Add in the fact that no one is giving a noteworthy performance here (Chaplin's arguably the best, Toby Jones is the worst, but no one's clearing even the most basic of hurdles here), and you have a movie that's yet another cash grab from Universal.  Fallen Kingdom is better than Jurassic World because it's not desecrating a film classic, but it perhaps commits a greater sin: it's super boring.