I guess there was no other place for this movie to go. When Hollywood chose to prop up the Jurassic Park franchise in 2015 with Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, they chose to make self-referential fun and became cynical to contrast Spielberg’s sentimentality. That film had Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus wearing Jurassic Park t-shirts and making comments from the control room as half Statler and Waldorf, and half exposition fodder. If the Jurassic movies really wanted to do something radical, they would have opted out of a sequel, and admit that World was a winky way of saying that making this movie was a mistake to begin with. Of course, that scenario doesn’t actually exist, and instead we are given Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a movie that tries to recover the franchise’s original heart from a place of complete absurdity. With the pieces they have, how could they possibly make anything good?

Between the events of Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom, the island on which the fated park had been sitting is soon to be toppled by a close-to-disastrously-erupting volcano. This would leave all the abandoned dinosaurs dead in a river of lava and noxious air. Former venture capitalist turned bleeding heart dinolover, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), is doing everything she can to help these dinosaurs from a second extinction. She gets the help (and the money) she needs from Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), a former friend and partner of Park creator John Hammond looking to make right and move the dinosaurs to a separate isolated island, presumably with no volcanoes in sight. Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) runs Lockwood’s affairs, since Lockwood is in failing health. Unable to walk, he spends his days in bed, his only real family being a precocious granddaughter named Maisie (Isabella Sermon). Mills wants to help Claire save the dinosaurs, but they need her to manage navigating Isla Nublar.

Claire brings along Zia (Daniella Pineda), a paleoveterinarian, and Franklin (Justice Smith), a tech-savvy dweeb type to help hack into the park’s system and reopen its gates. She’s also convinced to reconnect with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), notorious raptor trainer and Claire’s former romantic entanglement. They need Owen to get Blue, the last of Owen’s trained raptor flock. Blue is simply too smart to get captured and transported without Owen’s encouragement. So, this is the scenario used to bring the principal characters back to the island, always a tough sell considering in a real-life scenario, humans would have abandoned these creatures immediately after the events of the first Jurassic Park. Fallen Kingdom brings up a litany of ethics questions early on, chastising human hubris in the eyes of life creation. Jeff Goldblum is even rolled out, sported with a Dean of the English Department beard, and made to regurgitate Ian Malcolm’s monologues from 1993. The basic ethos: humans made this mess, now they’re the ones that are gonna have to clean it up.

I could understand being turned off by World‘s staunch sarcasm, especially at the hands of Trevorrow, a filmmaker given way too much, way too soon, who never seems to understand the balance of snark and emotion that these movies need to succeed. But I think I probably preferred that version of events, even in its ugliness, its occasional ignorance of how people actually behave. There was some deconstruction going on in World, where Fallen Kingdom seems obsessed with fidelity to 90’s movies. The homage falls flat when you consider its shallowness, and its inability to smooth out various obvious details. For instance: how can Zia be such an expert paleoveterinarian when she’s never even seen a dinosaur? She performs a blood transfusion! Or the reappearance Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), the formerly malevolent geneticist most responsible for the creation of dinosaurs, who now, like Claire, changes course and begs for their spiritual right to freedom?

Fallen Kingdom has a lot of cheeky stabs at America’s tumultuous political situation. This mostly comes in the form of Ken Wheatley (a surprisingly fresh Ted Levine), a militaristic mercenary who is part of Lockwood’s dinosaur re-placement strategy, and provides many callous Trump-isms meant to stir solidarity against an enemy otherwise never mentioned in the film. **SPOILER ALERT** You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to predict that Wheatley’s motivations aren’t totally pure, and a sequence of events then unfolds that again makes claims against capitalistic ventures where dinosaurs are concerned. Theoretically, I’m all for this supposed message, but Fallen Kingdom plays the same notes we’ve heard before, and there were times when I was there for it, and many other times where I wasn’t. At least Jurassic World had the integrity to not have integrity, and in that regard, it was a lot more fun.

 

Directed by J.A. Bayona