‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ or Terrible Lizards Indeed!
“Hey Colin — fancy going to see ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ this afternoon?”
“Well, I do have an ear-infection but it I guess it can’t be as bad as sitting at home and nursing a sore head so, sure.”
Turns out that the ear-infection was more pleasant than sitting through this film as ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ is, easily, one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. It’s like watching a dog trying to eat peanut-butter except without the panache and grace. The film itself is spliced in two, much like one of its genetic monstrosities, with the first half taking place on an exploding volcano and the second in a “haunted house”. Go figure.
Against these two disparate and tonally misjudged environments all the Jurassic Park clichés are wheeled out before us like so much visual sushi on a little conveyor belt. Here they struggle and die before our eyes, starved of any narrative oxygen to feed from or left thrashing around in a logic-free ocean.
I’ve been trying to think how to summarise the story but I can’t. From what I can gather a replacement Hammond wants the dinosaurs taken from Isla Nublar because they had forgotten that they had built the park on an active volcano and so scientists and military people are sent in a bizarre mixture of all the other Jurassic Park movies smashed together, except the volcano has started exploding and dinosaurs start dying along with narrative rigour or logical integrity.
But the heroes manage to save themselves (what did they actually achieve in the first half of this film?) from the exploding island whilst leaving a Brachiosaur in a moment that aims for pathos but falls into bathos. It is one of the stupidest scenes ever conceived and I laughed my ass off.
Fortunately the second-half changes tone completely to that of… The Antiques Roadshow?
So the dinosaurs are not taken to an island paradise to roam free but to a country estate where they are to be auctioned off whilst, at the same time, a new dinosaur as been genetically modified (aren’t they always?) and rolled out like the latest iphone model. This is the Indoraptor, possibly the stupidest dinosaur yet as, to get it to attack someone, you do so by pointing a gun at them meaning you might as well have just shot them.
My ear and head were starting to ache again but I couldn’t figure out if it was the infection of the movie boiling away parts of my brain.
The dinosaurs are auctioned off (some fetching prices as high as 4 million dollars! Seriously, is that all?!) but then our “heroes” decide that the best way to save the dinosaurs (actually, I’m not sure that is what they are trying to do) is to set them all free but then maybe not and should kill them, but no wait, let’s set them free and back and forth this goes for no good reason.
However, the Indoraptor has escaped and is chasing a little girl who is only in this film to be chased by the Indoraptor and the director obviously going for a “nightmare in the nursery”, manipulative, horror ending that is truly horrific… if you define ‘truly horrific’ as horrifically terrible.
So the Indoraptor climbs stealthily across the tiled rooftops because large dinosaurs are notorious for their ability to movie silently across steeply inclined, slated rooftops with ease. Our heroes are cornered on a glass roof yet, like this movie collapsing under its own ridiculousness, the Indoraptor crashes to its death as the T-Rex does something last minute so it can stand and do its roar thing for the poster.
This film is fucking stupid. Narratively, tonally, plot-wise, whatever — nothing here makes sense. This is not a movie to switch your brain off to but a film that you actively have to lower your IQ to stop from screaming at the movie for it to cease insulting your intelligence. It doesn’t help either that this film as some of the most awful dialogue I’ve ever heard. I already had an infection in my left ear but it was nothing compared to the verbal ghastliness that was pouring off the screen.
A number of franchises have had trouble with quality control recently but ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ might be the worse culprit so far, especially as it is not clear — in any way — as to where this series is meant to be heading. These films start and end in, almost, exactly the same way every time. There is no room for growth here. Like a bunch of dinosaurs stuck on a tiny island, there’s no potential, or space, for evolution.
My friend and I sat trying to collect our thoughts after the film; unfortunately we hadn’t been able to process any, other than “That was bad” or “My head hurts and I don’t even have an infection.”
The Jurassic Park movies now, like the dinosaurs themselves, need to be consigned to history. They had their chance and should now be left to their own, inevitable, extinction.
