JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

There’s such a strong sense of sticking to what’s safest with ‘Fallen Kingdom’, recycling successful ideas in order not to rock the boat, to the point where you could have one hell of a drinking game with this film (majestic shot of a brachiosaurus? Check. Hero shot of a T-Rex saving the day? Check.) What’s even worse is that ideas, motifs and images from the previous films are repeated and replicated without any attempt to riff on them, and each successive nod to the original feels less like a nice nod and more like lazy fan servicing (a kid trying to close a cupboard while a velociraptor runs at them? Seriously, again??). It also betrays a refusal to accept that looking in wonder at dinosaurs isn’t enough anymore, and no amount of monologues about “do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?” are going to bring that wonder back. You’re bored with the dinosaurs in the film almost instantly because this film offers absolutely nothing new to say about them - in fact, ‘Fallen Kingdom’ firmly establishes that this is a franchise stuck in reverse. The manner in which the first film presented the dinosaurs as animals as opposed to heroes or villains is gone, so now we either have dinosaurs humanised or turned into bland monsters. It feels kitsch, silly and downright dumb, no matter how many doe-eyed looks Chris Pratt makes at that bloody velociraptor with the stupid name.

There’s also little positive to say its craft. Bayona has done such beautiful work in the past, but is stifled here under the layers of mediocrity in the material. He never finds his way with the narrative, making it often hard to follow. The film looks fine, but any moments of visual flair felt unearned and insincere. Even Michael Giacchino’s score feels like a mess of ideas that never mesh together, neither with the film nor the franchise as a whole. The performances never stand out, Howard and Pratt slapping aimlessly at their wafer-thin character arcs to give them some movement, and the only new cast members with any spark, Daniella Pineda and Justice Smith, entirely short-changed. The other supporting cast, including Ted Levine, James Cromwell and Rafe Spall, are basically playing characters from ‘The Lost World’ with different names and identical costumes, and for all the hoo-ha made about Jeff Goldblum being in the film, he ends up being a redundant cameo where his name isn’t even mentioned.

In the original ‘Jurassic Park’, Ian Malcolm describes Hammond as having “stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you wanna sell it.” This is a pretty apt description for everything wrong with ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’. The idea of this reboot was a manufactured commodity now becomes abundantly clear, and the result is a bloated Frankenstein’s monster, devoid of originality, sincerity or wonder, and fuelled by lazy fan servicing that demonstrates no understanding of why we were fans in the first place. Worst of all, it’s just another boring and often incredibly dumb blockbuster that leaves you wondering how you could get those hours back. The damn thing isn’t even fun, it’s just kinda stupid.

I mean, I saw a dinosaur smile in this film. Smile. If that isn’t reason enough to shut this ride down for good, I don’t know what is.