I was planning on rewatching the first Jurassic World film to refresh my memory before going to see Fallen Kingdom. But then I remember it was basically the same plot as the first Jurassic Park film but devoid of all the things that made that movie good. There was no way I’d willingly watch Jurassic World again.
From the trailers it seemed like I shouldn’t be watching Jurassic World again but the original sequel The Lost World, as this seemed to have the exact same damn plot, even down to bringing back Jeff Goldblum. And yes, these two films do share a lot of similarities, but they do take it in a different direction. But seeing as this film is dumber than a bag of dirt, that direction wasn’t going to turn out well.
There really should have never been two Jurassic Park sequels in the first place, much less four which we have now. It just didn’t have the kind of story you could keep gathering from. It had a great premise sure, what if we could clone the dinosaur DNA found in crystalized mosquitoes?
And that made for a great movie. Watching it in the theater as a kid was the highlight of my childhood theater going experience. It’s right up there with seeing Super Mario Bros.!
The problem with Jurassic Park doing so well in theaters was they now wanted sequels, but how do you make a sequel out of that? Or what I should say, how do you do that without things getting fucking stupid? The answer? You don’t, you get stupid. Which is the direction these new films have taken. Let’s get more into DNA gene splicing! That’s what fans of these films want! Let’s make up our own dinosaurs!
I’m sorry, but that’s dumb. Especially if these new dinosaurs are just slightly different versions of what we’ve already seen. Let’s have a raptor but make it T-Rex size!
Yeah, that would be cool! What do we do for the sequel? I don’t know, want to just do raptors again? Sure, why not.
New raptor, but this time it’s bulletproof!
Fuck you, movie. This franchise is so goddamn stupid now. I think the aspect of the original concept was so appealing to people because they made it seem so believable. I think this was around the time they cloned that goat or whatever, so people had the idea that cloning is now possible. And it was in the realm of possibility that this could work. It made sense, mosquitos suck blood, maybe they sucked dino blood? If we find a preserved mosquito maybe we can clone a real dinosaur!
Our 1993 brains saw that as an actual possibility. There was even like a 60 Minutes episode on it.
So I guess you can pretty much guess that I did not enjoy Fallen Kingdom at all. No, correction, I enjoyed maybe the first hour of it, all the first act stuff on the island, but then the film slips and falls on its face looking like Andrew WK.
It reminded me of this time when I was about 10 years old or so. I was with my grandparents, running around, goofing off, frolicking like a dumb kid does. Then suddenly I trip and land hard on my knee, ripping it to shreds. Happy one minute, in tears bleeding the next. That’s Fallen Kingdom. You’re happy one minute then what’s left of your knee is stuck to the gravel on the sidewalk.
Maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic, since this film left me mostly bored to tears instead of angry or in pain.
Once they get off the island, we take a 30 minute boring boat ride. Then we spend another 30 minutes dicking around in this underground lab hidden beneath a mansion like this is a Resident Evil game.
It’s so painfully dull, I don’t care how many forced action sequences they force on you, boring is boring. Especially if you aren’t invested in what happens to these bland generic characters who you never feel are in any real danger. Ever.
They managed to make Chris Pratt dull. Chris fucking Pratt, people! How on earth did they manage to pull that off? Who is his character anyway? What defines him or makes him stand out as the hero? And, more importantly does the Jurassic Park franchise need an action hero stereotype?
Just look at the other three films, whenever a badass action hero type steps up to the plate his ass gets eaten. Can you really say Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum’s characters were badasses? No, they were paleontologists and in Goldblum’s case, I think just a philosopher.
They lived because they weren’t heroes, they ran from the danger. What happened to badass raptor hunter guy in the first film? He got eaten by fucking raptors.
Tossing in this action hero character doesn’t make sense for this franchise.
And at two movies now both clocking in over two hours, I still have no clue who Owen, Chris Pratt’s character is. He might be slightly southern, though his accent comes and goes at times. He acts kind of dumb, yet he is this behavioral scientist that can tame a bunch of raptors…
All he is is just action hero stand in guy.
Don’t get me started on Bryce Dallas Howard’s character Claire. She was this executive that couldn’t give two shits about the dinosaurs in the park. But now she’s this free the dinos activist? Really? You’d think starting off not liking these creatures, and then almost getting eaten by several of them, you might not see them as these majestic creatures anymore. I mean, just look at Grant, Sam Neill’s character from the first film. He loved dinosaurs. Loved them! But after what happened, it took a fat check to get his ass back on that island again.
Some time has passed since the events of Jurassic World, Bryce Dallas Howard like I said is now an activist trying to save the dinosaurs stuck on the island, which is currently about to be covered in lava from an erupting volcano.
The senate is debating if they should step in and rescue these animals, but with Jeff Goldblum’s character return, he persuades them into letting them die off.
Hope you enjoyed your Goldblum cameo, because that’s all we get, folks. What you saw in the trailer is about the extent of his role.
Not wanting to see these animals die either, Eli Mills who I’m guessing now runs the theme park, needs Claire’s help in activating all the locating chips in the dinos so they can be found and relocated to another island. Hopefully this time one without an active volcano.
They also need her help in getting Chris Pratt’s character Owen on board to help them capture Blue, the smarter than usual raptor.
Eventually she convinces Owen to tag along. Just like in Jurassic Park 3, where you think Sam Neill and Laura Dern have gotten married and had kids, then you’re hit with the disappointing realization that nope, they had broken up, Owen has PTSD and Dern is married and has a kid. So that’s depressing. That’s the one thing about that film that really pissed me off.
In Owen and Claire’s case, I couldn’t really give a shit about their romance. These two have zero chemistry together. But to be fair, Christ Pratt doesn’t have chemistry with anyone in this fucking movie.
And of course as soon as they are introduced to Ted Levine, the head of this hunting operation on the island, you know these are the bad guys. Which means the guy who sent them to the island is also a bad guy.
So quick question… why?
Why do any of this?
For the raptor, I kind of get. She’s special and they need her to complete their idiotic raptor experiment. But what about the rest of the dinos? Can’t they just reclone them? That’s what they are, they all came from a lab. The very same lab they clearly have access to since they are the ones who started all this.
As the evil theme park owner with access to cloning technology, why waste your time gathering the already hard to handle dinos and not just clone new ones for your clients? I’m sure you’d get way more, too.
To play devil’s advocate for a second, but aren’t the dinosaurs their property? Can’t they do whatever they want with them? The main reason congress doesn’t interfere with helping the dinos is because it is a private business.
This Eli Mills guy is doing all this behind this Benjamin Lockwood character’s back, who I don’t believe we have ever been introduced to before, but are treated like we should know who he is. I’m guessing he partnered with John Hammond who created Jurassic Park. Even though we’ve never heard of this guy before now. He is currently on his deathbed much like how John Hammond was in Lost World. They even gave him a cane with the crystalized mosquito.
Also tossed into this film is a little girl named Maisie Lockwood. We needed a little kid in this I guess since every single Jurassic Park film has had at least one. At least this one isn’t doing gymnastics to help fight off raptors.
So now that Claire and Owen are on this island, they are unfortunately accompanied by two annoying additional characters that I was just fingers crossed hoping would get eaten by or stepped on by some kind of dinosaur.
I hated these characters, especially the geeky guy who is meant to be the comic relief, yet his style of comedy is to just scream like a girl. This might be why I never really cared for Kevin Hart.
At one point… what was the character’s name again… I guess he’s played by Justice Smith and the character is named Franklin, but honestly, in my head I remember him being played by the Indian guy from Deadpool.
Owen goes off to track down Blue with the obvious bad guys while Claire stays behind in a bunker to activate the locator chips for the dinosaurs.
But oh no! The obvious bad guys betray Owen and accidently shoot Blue, now giving the other annoying character they brought along a reason for being in this film.
They shoot Owen with a tranquilizer, leaving him for dead.
Claire on the other hand is dealing with being trapped in the bunker as lava quickly starts spewing their way. It’s at this point we are introduced to the allosaurus, a T-Rex sized dino. Which if I remember right, I suggested the franchise do more with as I believe they were larger and more ferocious looking. Think the T-Rex but bigger and with spikes.
And you have no idea how much I was rooting for the allosaurus to eat the annoying tech geek.
Meanwhile, Owen wills his body to move even though he was tranqed with a tranquilizer strong enough for a dinosaur. Though they did make it shown that the tranq was removed before he got a full dose, so maybe I can look past this part.
The volcano is in full force now, spewing lava everywhere, with ash shooting out and dinosaurs from all over the island running for their lives, including Owen and Claire… and I guess geeky tech guy too.
Claire and tech geek find quick shelter in one of those dome mobiles from the first film. Owen has to run along aside it, dodging dino attacks and a special appearance from the what now has to be an old ass T-Rex.
It can’t be the only one, right? I mean, wasn’t the whole plot of Lost World is that they nabbed a baby T-Rex? What the fuck happened to that?
But this isn’t the last we see of our T-Rex, as it was also somehow captured by the bad guys and locked in a shipping create.
Claire, Owen and annoying tech guy sneak onboard the ship carrying the dinosaurs to their new location. It’s at this point the film takes a giant nose dive into boredom.
I believe at this time we also get a bunch more with the little girl back at the mansion with a secret lab underground.
We learn that the little girl is the clone of this old man’s wife. Which is pretty creepy if you stop to think about it. I’m not completely sure the reason this character is in this, aside from there needed to be a kid character. Also she is the one responsible for releasing all the dinosaurs onto the population. Us clones gotta stick together. So if you needed another reason to hate her, there you go.
Once we are done with our long and boring boat ride, we end up at the underground lab where our evil bad guys are throwing an auction to buy the recently captured dinosaurs.
So remember in the first film when Nedry stole all those DNA samples and hid it in a shaving cream can? But he died before getting off the island, leaving the canister behind? And everyone was left with question about it, like who could he have stolen this for? Who wants to buy it? And what for? I guess the answer was to make dinosaurs to sell on the black market?
Again, fucking stupid.
What else can you really do with the story other than weaponized them. Also idiotic, though seeing raptors with machineguns strapped to their backs would have been hilarious.
Claire and Owen get captured… I honestly don’t remember what happens to geeky tech guy. He gets taken somewhere on the ship and we don’t see him again. Or maybe I hated his character so much I blocked him out for the rest of the film. I wanted him to be gone from the film and I willed it to happen.
After breaking out, the bad guys release their new raptor on them and this is where things get slightly hazy for me as I fell asleep only for a few minutes. But when I woke up the little girl was hiding on top of her bed for some reason from the new raptor. Why not under the bed? Did she think that would be too obvious? That’s the first place he’ll look! I know, he’ll never think to look on top of the bed.
He looks on top of the bed.
Once Blue defeats the new raptor, geeky guy returns informing everyone that the lab is on fire and all the dinos are about to die. Claire wants to release them but comes to her senses about releasing dinosaurs, a lot of them carnivorous, out into the general public.
That’s when the little girl steps up and releases them. I mean, we need at least one more sequel. Maybe this time they can get the old crew back again. Then maybe we’d finally get some likable characters back in this franchise.
Fallen Kingdom gets a big SKIP IT rating. If you enjoyed the first Jurassic World film (god help you) then you might enjoy this one. I found the film boring, the characters unlikable, the plot stupid and the CGI shoddy at times. The original film was magical, these new sequels are just soulless quick cash ins. Not to mention they look ugly. The color palettes for these films look off. Really crushed tones, with a lot of blue. It feels like a DC Universe film or something. Did Zack Snyder secretly sneak in and color correct this when no one was looking? Damn you, Snyder!
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