Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018) I didn't go see the latest installment of the "Jurassic Park" series when it was in theaters because its predecessor Jurassic World didn't do anything new, but merely switched out new characters for the old (with the exception of Jeff Goldblum), and continued with the idea that, despite the mayhem from three previous movies, someone—or some conglomerate—would still think it was a good idea to create a theme park around living, breathing, carnivorous, and entirely untrainable giant lizards. Then, they went with the crazy idea that someone—especially Chris Pratt's Owen Grady—could train veloci-raptors and—because science fiction reality isn't enough—that one could create NEW dinosaur types by tinkering with their DNA. There is just so much evidence that this is a Capital B-Capital I-Bad Idea on so many levels, but the movie had to track away from the original's "naivete of visionaries" theme to the naivete and craven greed of corporate interests. You can always count on corporations to do the wrong thing when a buck is concerned. So, the initial under-pinning of "just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should" gets lost in a message so obvious and ever-present, any novel new idea gets swamped by it.

Well, along comes Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and it recycles Spielberg's (rare) sequel film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, like so much re-captured DNA, with only a few changes to people, places, and things.

In that, the ne'er-do-well nephew of park creator John Hammond decided that, despite the disasters evident in the first film, he would ship a bunch of the dino's over to the U.S. (that wasn't in Crichton's follow-up novel, but Spielberg really wanted to have rampaging T-Rex's tromping through city-streets before some hack did it) for profit—because it worked so well having them on Isla Nublar.

Again, very bad idea. But, it's the exact same premise of Fallen Kingdom. This very bad idea is predicated on the issue that the volcano on Isla Nublar has decided to go super-nova, and so a mission is undertaken—by Hammond's business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to save as many different dino-types as possible and put them on a new island—don't most large  islands have volcano's?—where they'll be safe to wander around without trampling any tourists (and, evidently, there are dino-preservationists who, since we've already messed with the natural order of things, think we should protect dinosaurs because they're so warm and cuddly, fit right into our eco-system, and besides "what could go worng? This is how Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) gets roped into the thing and this movie.

And if she's onboard, she'll get Pratt's raptor-trainer to coax "Blue" the remaining raptor from the last movie to get into a cage, or even sit on his lap, for the long flight to the new paleological digs.

This would be all fine-and-dandy (if a Bad Idea), if the intent was to actually re-locate the dinosaurs. But, no, it's a ruse by those shadowy corporate interests to auction off species for their potential uses of weapons of mass-stomping (they probably didn't show King Kong as the in-flight movie). Again, Bad Thing to do, but, then, a sequel was a bad thing to do, as well—so, one can imagine that such a thing might be possible.

The movie does have one nice little wrinkle to it that might be considered an interesting idea, and that is how they employ the standard "spunky little kid" into the scenario, which does utilize the "just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you should" theme to its maximum and logical conclusion. It is the one interesting idea in this sorry mess.

It is a sad thing to see, especially considering the director. J. A. Bayona has made a couple of really good, if not especially profitable films—A Monster Calls and The Impossible. Both of them are miles apart in genre and subject matter—one based on a popular children's book and the other on a true incident that occurred during the catastrophic tsunami in Thailand in 2004. It must have been tempting to take this talented director and try and goose his box-office appeal with a franchise-piece. But, it might have better served the director (and movies in general) to have allowed him to merely go with his muse and develop a project of his own leanings to create something truly unique as has been seen in his work in the past.

That might have been a GOOD idea.