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If your lizard brain’s been telling you Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom might be a silly, dull and instantly disposable place-marker movie, you’re dead right. Screenwriters Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, in cooking up the fifth flick in the long-running dinosaurs-on-the-loose franchise, and the second in a projected trilogy, have patched together a scenario that is, on the downside, unnecessarily convoluted and villain-heavy, while on the plus side, pro-animal rights, Mother Nature and anti-greedy globalists.
But make no mistake: Even with heavy doses of science and humanism, this horror-suspense movie from director J.A. Bayona plays as lovably dumb as any man-in-a-suit, giant-monster movie from the 1950s. It all begins with a dinosaur attack on a dark, stormy night on wrecked and deserted Isla Nubar, that reanimated dino breeding grounds on that bad old theme-park resort.
When a long-dormant volcano starts acting up and threatens to blow to kingdom come the remaining genetically restored prehistoric beasts, in come the pro-dino Good Guys—swaggering animal whisperer and galoot Chris Pratt as Owen; earnest, moist-eyed ex-corporate head of the Dinosaur Protection Group Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire; and new additions, do-gooder veterinarian Zia (Daniella Pineda) and Franklin, a motor-mouthed, terminally annoying systems analyst (Justice Smith.) They’ve all been sent on a well-funded rescue-the-beasts mission by cloning zillionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), purportedly to get as many of the creatures as possible off the island and onto a peaceable kingdom island.
But there, lurking in the shadows of Lockwood’s vast haunted house, is his secretly slithery assistant, his very own Stephen Miller (Rafe Spall), who secretly terrorizes both Lockwood’s beloved granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), and her caretaker, played by Geraldine Chaplin. The latter two actors are so good, it’s as if they’re in another, more intriguing Bayona movie. Anyway, when the rescuers reach Isla Nubar, accompanied by a force of military mercenaries, expect the weaponizing of the poor dinosaurs and million-dollar auctions of the beasts by international profiteers, let alone some delightfully hammy barking and snarling by Ted Levine as a gung-ho commander.
The movie is packed with some nicely shadowy, off-kilter, even haunting imagery, thanks to highly skilled director J.A. (The Orphanage; A Monster Calls) Bayona and cinematographer Oscar Faura. Bowing to Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg on one knee, Bayona creates some memorably nail-biting and thrilling, if derivative, moments—including several hiding-from-the-monsters scenes, a harrowing sequence with humans and prehistoric creatures alike struggling to outrace molten rivers of lava, and an especially haunting and heart-rending moment featuring the cries of a stranded beast that gets left behind.
The movie is packed with some nicely shadowy, off-kilter, even haunting imagery, thanks to highly skilled director J.A. Bayona.
Bayona directs with such style and verve that he almost glosses over the script’s patchiness and paper-thin characterizations. But it’s the beautifully realized CGI beasts (like, say, Pratt’s sorta domesticated velociraptor, “Blue”) that convey so much more heart, charisma and likability than most of the actors—so much so that the real fun to be had comes from rooting for the critters as they chase, stalk, stomp and munch the hell out of nasty, chattering humanoids. Too bad they take too damn long getting down to it.
So, for diehard fans of the series, maybe the movie will seem like a fun, forgettable bridge to the third entry, when it ought to be a lot more than that. Let’s hope that the next installment of the Jurassic World trilogy, due in 2021, gets a great screenplay—and while they’re at at it, maybe some brilliant gene-splicing.