Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Review (SPOILERS)

I think it's safe to say, without being controversial at all, that "Jurassic Park" is one of the best movies ever made. If you were to do the daunting task of ranking all of Steven Spielberg's movies, I'm certain that most would have "Jurassic Park" at least in the top five and possibly the top two. I think most people have a fascination with dinosaurs and Spielberg did a great job of bringing dinosaurs to life on the big screen in properly adapting Michael Crichton's book, which is a book that I actually HAVE read. Not something I say very often in these movie reviews based on books. I actually read both "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World" when I was younger and they're both really fascinating. Much different than the movies, so if all that you've ever seen are the movies, go check out Crichton's two books. Anyways, back "Jurassic Park," I would classify it as a properly set-up horror film involving dinosaurs. If you are allergic to the word horror, then perhaps we can dive more specifically into the genre and label it as a proper monster movie. And it's more than just a monster movie where monsters run around chasing people. There's a lot of deep themes in "Jurassic Park" that make it properly fascinating in addition to being extremely terrifying, especially with the velociraptors.

The sequels to "Jurassic Park"? Yeah, not so much. It's really sad to see how far off the deep end this franchise has fallen and I'm going to dive into spoilerific details as to why this fifth installment, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" is perhaps the worst of the bunch. The short version of this is that they've completely abandoned what made "Jurassic Park" so great. As I very purposely stated in my intro, "Jurassic Park" is so brilliant because it is a philosophical horror film involving dinosaurs. Now I've seen plenty of my friends walk out of "Fallen Kingdom" and say that they've enjoyed it. Well, to each his own, I suppose. But the common theme I've heard from those who've liked it is that they enjoy watching dinosaurs eat evil people. For me personally, there's an inherent problem with that. These sequels, especially our two "Jurassic World" movies, are neither philosophical nor horror. They're full of dumb people doing dumb things so that the audience can watch dinosaurs run around eating people. In other words, they're brainless action films. And when you start the franchise off as a high-class philosophical horror film, then digress to a Sharknado-level brainless action film, but with a huge budget, that spits in the face of one of the greatest movies of all time.

In terms of "Sharknado," we have the sixth one coming out this summer and I might take that opportunity to discuss the franchise on my blog, but the reason why that franchise works is that they start off by being a really stupid, absurd action movie, with the idea of purposely making a really bad film just so you can kick back and relax with a group of friends and just have a ball. And that's totally fine in that scenario. But when your franchise starts off with high class, then digresses into "Sharknado" territory, that's bad. That's really bad. Now for the record, I actually still enjoy "The Lost World." Yes, there are plenty of problems with it, but it still has plenty of likable characters who use logic and it does hang onto the horror element in several sequences. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that when Michael Crichton finished his novel in 1995 and handed it over to Steven Spielberg for the movie adaptation, Spielberg read it over and essentially tossed it to the side and went in a completely different direction while only using the ideas of a second island and a scene with two T-Rexes terrorizing people. Outside that, they're very different. Perhaps Spielberg could've made a truly great sequel had he committed more to Crichton's novel than he did.

"Jurassic Park III"? Yikes. I was always confused because there never was a third book, so why was there ever a third movie? I suppose I've gotten past that a bit since I was young, especially because the biggest similarity between "The Lost World" in terms of book and movie was the title. So the idea of a third movie could be acceptable, but whoever committed to the writing and directing of this thing, barely made a third movie themselves, so we don't talk about. I thought it was so stupid when I first watched it back in the day that I've never cared to go back and revisit it. I was going to do that just for the sake of ranking all five movies, but I haven't gotten around to that. Maybe I will soon and leave those rankings in the comment section of this blog sometime in the near future. But for now we'll forgo that. In pertaining to "Jurassic World," I was actually nice to it in my review back in 2015. I was immediately soured on the fact that it broke the opening weekend record and went onto being one of the highest grossing films of all-time, thus immediately causing me to throw out the overrated flag. But I considered it fun enough, despite being really dumb. In the time since, it's only soured on me to the point where I was never once excited for this sequel.

In fact, I was so unexcited, that when I did my yearly preview this January of the movies of 2018, I included "Fallen Kingdom" in my bad section. When the first trailer came out, I was unphased. I wish I was excited. And it wasn't me being blindly arrogant and hateful. I honestly felt zero excitement. Literally the only piece of hope that I clung onto was that it was directed by J.A. Bayona, who is a great director responsible for such movies as "The Impossible" or "A Monster Calls." But the footage didn't do anything for me. When further trailers came out, I ended up being confused more than anything because each new trailer seemed to be advertising a different movie. So what WAS this movie? Luckily I was so uninterested by the time the final trailer rolled around that I didn't pay much attention to it. I remember the line from Ian Malcolm about the dinosaurs outliving us and a raptor running around in the house, but that was it. It's good that I forgot because the whole movie is in that final trailer when I went back and re-watched it afterwards. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered if I remembered because the shock value of what this movie was actually about stunned me. It stunned me so badly that I had to write a spoiler review simply because these elements have to be discussed.

First off, the movie begins where we all knew it would begin based on the very first teaser. As it turns out, the original island is a volcano. That teaser showed Chris Pratt running down the island, shouting "RUN!!!" as all the dinosaurs chased after him as they were all running from the volcano that was exploding. That's what I expected the first part of the movie to be and that's what it was. But the meat of that lies in a debate that starts the movie. The world has figured out that the island is an active volcano and there's a debate in Congress or in court, or whatever, as to whether or not the dinosaurs should be saved. This is one of Ian Malcolm's two scenes in this movie. Yeah, remember the hype of him being back? He's not. It's an advertising ploy to get you into theaters. They didn't actually know how to work him into the movie, but they new the return of Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm would sell tickets. So they gave him 30 seconds in the beginning and 30 seconds in the end, giving a monologue to the court, both of which were included in trailers, and called it good. Pathetic. But anyways, Ian Malcolm's opinion is that we should let the dinosaurs go extinct. The volcano was nature's way of correcting humanity's mistake. I agree. Case closed. End of movie. Right?

Oh wait, we're going to continue? For some reason, the movie thought they were bringing up some sort of philosophical debate when they really weren't. Creating dinosaurs in the first movie was a totally plausible idea. If, in pure theory, there was technology available to clone dinosaurs and bring them back, I could see a scientist being so preoccupied with the possibility of making it happen that they weren't thinking of the consequences. But as Ian Malcolm says in the first movie, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Thus underlies the debate with technology as a whole. We often get so caught up in thinking about the possibilities of something that we forget about consequences, which was one of the great theological messages of the first film. But if you try something and it turns out to be a complete disaster, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times in the four previous movies, you would think at some point the characters would start to realize that having dinosaurs around is a bad idea. More people would be on Ian Malcolm's side of the debate. But the first insufferable element of this movie is that none of our main characters get it. They ALL think saving the dinosaurs is the right idea.

So right off the bat, I became extremely frustrated. Now if you had a few characters act as the bone-headed people who still think having dinosaurs around is a good idea, then fine. Whatever. But balance them out with an equal amount of people, or a greater amount, who think this is an awful idea. Let Bryce Dallas Howard be the dumb one. Which she is. But have Chris Pratt be the voice of reason. Maybe she tries to convince him to help her out, but fails. Yet he comes, not because he changed his mind, but to save her from herself or to stop her. But that's not what happens. That's initially what does. He's all for letting them going extinct. But he ends up going because he watched a video of his pet raptors and suddenly that's the end of that debate. They're all on the side of save the dinosaurs and are off on a stupid escapade with a group of people to the original island. My eyes were rolling to near the top of my head and my head was probably buried in my palms, but I thought, OK. Maybe we'll get passed this roadblock and J.A. Bayona will have something up his sleeve in the second and third act of the film. I had no idea what direction the movie was going because the trailers were so confusing, but I was still holding onto hope that it would go somewhere.

Well, it did go somewhere. But that somewhere is where the movie completely derailed and stunned me into near pure hatred of the film. Turns out the save the dinosaurs escapade they were on was not a save the dinosaurs escapade. Not in the way our main characters were thinking, anyways. It was a capture the dinosaurs escapade so that our team of villains could sell them as a part of their elaborate dino trafficking scheme. Now if I were to have one major complaint about the original "Jurassic Park" it was the fact that the whole operation was screwed over because of one guy who had no brain in his head that led to all the dinosaurs escaping. I think they could've come up with a more believable way for the dinosaurs to break out rather than just having a dumb guy do a dumb thing. But fine. Whatever. One guy does one dumb thing that screws over everything. OK. I can tolerate that. But to use that trope in every ensuing movie got really old. Be creative in how things mess. In our fifth movie, not only can I simply not tolerate one dumb guy doing one dumb thing anymore, but the problem is literally exponentially worse as we have hundreds of guys doing dumb things so that everything can go wrong. A team of people screwed things over to feed into a major scheme.

My jaw hit the floor so hard at this reveal that I officially quit. I threw in the towel on this franchise and officially cataloged it with Michael Bay's "Transformers" franchise. A lot of reviews that have commented on this called them cartoon characters. I don't want to simply copy everyone else, but this is a good description because they're all fake. Bad guys doing bad things just for the sake of being bad is not acceptable in my brain. I like my villains to make sense. I like them to have good motivations. I want to understand where they are coming from and why they do what they do. But not only is every single villain evil for the sake of being evil, every single one of them is extremely stupid, never once using logic or making a good decision. But here we are for the rest of the film. The dinos are all captured. Well, 11 different species of them, and in an evil Noah's ark sort of way are transported in cages to this giant residence in California where they are to be auctioned off to all of these evil cartoon characters who will use them for poaching, hunting or selling their parts for money. Meanwhile, our team of unlikable protagonists who also don't use logic have snuck into this mansion with them and are trying to find a way to stop them. That's our movie.

Once we get into all of this, you know what's going to happen. Someone is going to make a dumb mistake and the dinosaurs are going to escape and start eating all of these people. That's essentially what happens. And this is where a lot of my Facebook friends apparently delighted in this movie because they got to watch dinosaurs eating evil people. For me this was actually not satisfying. Had we had real villains in this movie, it may have been satisfying watching them all die. But as they were all really stupid, horrible villains that I didn't care about, I was just bored to tears watching them all get eaten. But no, it's not actually dinosaurs, as in plural, that escape. It's dinosaur. Singular. Thus leading to my next point that I didn't care about. We have ourselves another hybrid dinosaur running around. Something we call an Indoraptor. Because we didn't learn from the last movie that the Indominus Rex was a stupid idea. We had to create another one. I don't know, maybe I'm alone on this, but one thing that made the first movie, and perhaps moments in the second movie, was the real dinosaurs that I've grown up studying. The T-Rex. The Velociraptor. There's plenty other real dinosaurs to choose from. Pick one. I don't care about fake dinosaurs who have never lived.

Thus when we got to the finale of our movie, I was completely checked out. I think I was supposed to be scared of this Indoraptor as he snuck around the mansion. But I wasn't. Because I didn't care about the Indoraptor. Now the excuse for the Indominus Rex was that the Jurassic World park managers thought they needed to spice up the park and create something new that was bigger and better. I thought that was dumb. I know some people that liked that, though. So whatever. Even compared to that, this Indoraptor's creation was even dumber. He was around because our evil cartoon villains thought it would be a good idea to create a new hybrid dinosaur that the government could use as a military weapon, because he was designed to be trained to follow certain lasers on guns and attack whatever or whoever the laser was pointed at. Granted, I think the Indoraptor itself had a cool design to it and there were a couple of moments were him hunting our main characters got somewhat intense, but the majority of his sequences were him eating the evil villains and only a short time was spent hunting our main characters when it should've been the other way around, like in the first movie where the dumb guy got eaten early and the rest of the movie was our protagonists in danger.

Even in the brief moments at the end, I never feared for the lives of our main characters. The most nerve-wracking scene was when they were in the truck with the T-Rex in the first half of the movie trying to take its blood so they could save the life of Blue, their pet Velociraptor. When Indoraptor was hunting them down and had them cornered, I basically counted in my head. In 3... 2... 1... BOOM! On queue comes Blue to save the day and fight Indoraptor. Because, you know, that's what these Jurassic movies do. At the very last moment, another dinosaur comes in to save the day. It worked with the first movie. But now it's become so calculated that I think it's lazy writing that they use the same tropes in each movie. So Indoraptor dies. But then we have one final moment of stupidity. All the dinosaurs left in the cages are being poisoned and the option is to let them die or free them into the wild of California. Easy choice. But since our characters are stupid, this becomes a hard choice, which eventually leads to Bryce Dallas Howard NOT pressing the button to release them. But the little girl they found does. Because, oh yeah, she's a human clone. And if she gets to live, then so do the dinosaurs. Because there's a piece of logic that totally makes sense.

I'd say introducing human clones crossed a line, but this movie had already sprinted past the line a long time ago at this point. Just another sign that the writers just didn't care. And guess what? They basically admitted that they didn't. The writer here is Colin Trevorrow, who directed "Jurassic World." He admitted that he had always dreamed of a Jurassic movie where the dinosaurs were running free throughout the world. But he knew it would take two movies to get there. In other words, this whole movie was filler and he knew it. Now I don't think the idea of a filler movie is an inherently bad idea. But when the writer literally doesn't care about this film and thus he puts together something as lazy as this movie just so it could be a stepping stone to the next, that's when filler becomes an atrocious mess. If the writer didn't care, then why should I? Now I don't actually blame our director, J.A. Bayona. He did the best he could with the ugly script he was given. Who I do put all of the blame here is on Colin Trevorrow for officially ruining a great franchise. After both Jurassic World movies and "The Book of Henry," aren't we all glad he got fired from Star Wars: Episode IX? As for my grade for "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," I'm going 4/10. And even that feels nice at this point.