Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

We don’t learn.  We don’t.  That’s what’s been made abundantly clear to me.

Twenty-five years ago, we got our first cinematic glimpse of the dinosaur theme park that turned into a house of horrors in Jurassic Park.  A few years later, we returned to our crazy bio-engineered dinos in The Lost World, accompanied by Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm.  Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant would face off against the creatures again a few years after that in Jurassic Park III, with Laura Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sadler showing up, just not on the dangerous island.  Some of the criticism of those sequels revolved around how these characters, ones who we’ve seen get terrorized by dinosaurs, ones with some pretty solid scientific minds, returned to the dinosaur fold, usually through some major contrivance.  They, like the audience, didn’t really learn, and we were treated to some mildly repetitive stories.

Then came Jurassic World a few years ago.  The studio basically remade Jurassic Park by way of soft-rebooting the franchise in its fourth sequel.  This time, we didn’t get any of the park guests showing up, but we did get park geneticist B.D. Wong, albeit in a manner that kinda messed with his character (big time, if you ask me, but hey).  For me, this entry wasn’t necessary (as if any film is “necessary”, but you get what I’m saying), and I found myself feeling pandered-to and annoyed by the butchered script – from four writers, and it definitely feels that multi-headed – that didn’t seem to have learned the basic and obvious lessons we all did after finishing the first film.

And now we have another sequel.

Make no mistake, Fallen Kingdom is just a continuation of Jurassic World‘s soft reboot/remaking of the JP films, and certainly falls into the traps any modern remake of The Lost World would, complete with derivative title (“Fallen Kingdom” ain’t too dissimilar from “Lost World” when you think about it for a second).  Much like the other JP sequels, we get our previous protagonists to return to the island under contrived circumstances: Isla Nublar’s resident volcano has vigorously come out of dormancy, and its impending eruption threatens the lives of the bio-engineered dinos on the island.  Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing, now working as something of an advocate for the dinosaurs, who are potentially being treated as any other endangered species on the planet, and she’s taken in by Rafe Spall, a seeming acolyte of John Hammond and InGen, to rescue the creatures before they’re destroyed.  She recruits Chris Pratt’s Owen, who she left in the intervening years, to help, as he’s the only one who could hunt and court his trained raptor, Blue.  Things go sideways, and in the most obvious fashion: who’d’ve thought that the science/business people, who’ve got paramilitary forces on the payroll, would be asshats looking to exploit the dinos?  We don’t learn, do we?

Working within this framework, we’re given a script just as empty and obnoxious as the previous entry, complete with horribly annoying comic relief — I’m sure Daniela Pineda and Justice Smith are cool, but here, they’re incredibly grating.  Smith even has a line I agree with: “Why am I here!?”  To fill a lousy comic relief quota by hack writers, bud.  We don’t learn.  Moreover, we’ve got plenty of fan-service-y “homages” to Jurassic Park, like leaving vehicles to indulge in sauropod awe, hiding behind a fallen tree during a dino stampede, a large predator side-eyeing our heroes through a window (well, this time it’s a carnatosaur, rather than a T-rex), and the dramatic T-rex scream in dramatic glory we all remember from the trailer (every time I saw that part of the trailer, I gave the screen an obscene gesture, I’m just so edgy!), among other shots/scenes.  Could’ve done without those, though, as new and interesting things would have been nice, but, hey, we don’t learn.  The script is also teeming with hack-y expository dialogue, the crutch of lazy filmmakers who know they don’t have to try because, say it with me, we don’t learn.  The acting’s mostly fine, though, so there’s that.  (On a side note, we have one of those script cliches that’s been around the block a few times, the one where an exasperated parent yells something like “Not now!” toward the child, who then looks really shocked, leading to an apology and explanation from the parent.  Is this actually still a thing?  I mean, are parents not allowed to yell at a child when they’re ignoring the parent’s orders?  Especially during a stressful situation?  Is this akin to abuse or something?  I just don’t get it.)

As far as the visuals go, the film looks fine.  There isn’t all that much interesting going on cinematographically, but the shots looks nice enough.  J.A. Bayona’s direction is clean and fluid, but not all that eye-catching or awe-inspiring.  The VFX actually look very good, though the bits with extensive computer-modeling tend to look more strained than the rest of it.

All through the film, we get pieces of the debate going on in-universe: should these dinosaurs be treated the same way as the other endangered species?  Ian Malcolm, coming in for a cameo, believes they oughtn’t, while others see things differently.  It feels like the film is siding with the latter crowd, especially with an emotional scene of a brachiosaur facing its fate, but I’m not sure I agree.  I mean, these creatures were made privately, constructed privately, to serve as theme park attractions.  Later on, their genes were basically trademarked and sponsored.  No matter what, these creatures were never brought back to life to recreate their pre-extinction numbers or anything, they were attractions, more animatronic in use than zoologic.  This, combined with the fact they went extinct when the planet couldn’t harbor them any longer (much like today, mind you), shows me that, should they become literally endangered, they don’t deserve the same protections as other animals, especially ones who’re on the list because of man’s lack of due diligence, so to speak.  The issues involved are deep, but the film doesn’t care too much about rounding them out, instead focusing on surface-level takes and knee-jerk responses.  Not much faith in the audience, eh, guys?  But, hey, we don’t learn, so this is fine.  Just fine.  It’s fine.  It’s fine, you guys.  It’s fine.

We.  Don’t.  Learn.

Maybe those three words are part of the film’s flimsy commentary on things, but I kinda doubt it.  Instead, it relies on those words being very, very true, so that the studio can make some money off of a derivative product they’ve basically already made twenty years ago.  If you’re a fan of the series, especially of the previous entry, by all means, give this one a go, you’ll probably enjoy it.  Me?  I didn’t, much for the reasons listed above, as well as my distaste for the rebooting that came from Jurassic World.  The contrivances in getting people to purposefully enter a house of dino horrors are getting old, tired, stale.  Honestly, though they’re not horrible films, I wish they’d stop being made, the dinosaurs allowed to return to the realms of extinction and imagination.  But I’ve wanted that before.  We don’t learn, kids, we just don’t learn.