Universal Pictures. 2018. Adventure. 128 minutes.
Before we dive into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, let’s check and see how Comcast stock is doing today:
Comcast is up 30 cents and that’s great news. Because Comcast, as you know, owns Universal Studios, the company that made Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. They also own four Universal Studios theme parks worldwide and all of them feature a Jurassic Park ride. These dino-themed attractions need the global reach of the Jurassic Park films to drive park attendance (and, to a lesser extent, vice versa), hence this latest cinematic sojourn to Isla Nublar or Isla Fisher or whatever the island containing dinosaurs is called. And so it will be until the franchise is wrung dry and the Jurassic Park ride is torn down or repurposed to promote whatever new franchise darling is sending Comcast shares skyrocketing. Until that day, Comcast shareholders are confident about the prospects of Fallen Kingdom and, as we all know, when the shareholders are happy, the audience wins.
So if horizontal integration demands that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has to happen, at least it’s in the hands of the fabulous Spanish director J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls, one of the best films of 2016) who, like his longtime friend and mentor, Oscar winning director Guillermo Del Toro, has a proven ability to elevate genre material to include genuine emotion and psychological insight. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom then, would not seem to be in Bayona’s wheelhouse, since the franchise is hardly character driven. The only interest anyone has shown in a Jurassic Park character was during the 2015 series reboot, Jurassic World, when park manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) was reduced to continuously running for her life wearing vertiginous heels.
Credit Bayona, then, for having a cheeky sense of humor: the first shot of Claire in Fallen Kingdom is a pan-up of her professionally-attired body, starting with her shoes. Her new footwear seems less fashionable but more appropriate for the upcoming activities, namely running, with the occasional jumping and falling. But before the fun begins, there’s some table setting. No longer park manager, Claire now runs a paleo-protection group and with the original park abandoned and Isla Nublar’s enormous lava-spewing volcano about to wipe out the dinosaurs again (that’s twice in 66 million years, damn their lousy luck!), these genetically miraculous monstrosities are in desperate need of protecting. Enter Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who runs the estate of ailing, philanthropic 1-percenter, Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Eli asks Claire to spearhead a Lockwood-endorsed effort to rescue as many dinosaurs as possible and relocate them to another island. Of course, when the last syllable of your first name is “lie”, you’ve probably got something to hide (just ask Waldo Lydecker from 1944’s Laura. The first syllable of his last name gave him away).
Five films in, one must now concede that the series plateaued about an hour into the first installment 25 years ago, when a slack-jawed Laura Dern slowly rose from the seat of her Jeep to marvel at, as it turns out, the dawning of the CGI age. Awe, one of Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg’s early specialties, is just not cool anymore. Today’s action-adventure films are more of the “what have you done for me lately” variety. And Bayona, who gave us the devastating tsunami sequence from 2012’s The Impossible, definitely knows how to bring it. He also slips in the occasional moment of grief, such as the long shot of the T-Rex who fails to make it off the island, his body slowly engulfed in smoke as his anguished wails fade into the distance.
With Claire onboard, she puts together her team. After enlisting her reluctant partner from the previous film, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, dialing down the snark without losing the charm) she’s further accompanied by a young paleo-veterinarian (Daniella Pineda) and an even younger computer geek (Justice Smith), mainly to insure that folks who were zero years old when the first film was released will have someone to follow on Instagram. Together they’re front and center during the best 15-minutes of the picture, as the volcano lays final claim to Isla Nublar and everyone is chased by panicked dinosaurs, pummeled by flying chunks of lava and nearly drowned after falling off a cliff.
The first Jurassic Park played an insidious game with its audience: we were lifted by the notion that such a monumental feat of genetic engineering seemed vaguely plausible, then we were made to feel arrogant, if not stupid, that we considered playing God a good idea. Fallen World is not that subtle or genuine. As Eli’s plan for the dinosaurs is revealed, notions of greed and private versus government-funded philanthropy are introduced less to be explored and more as a shortcut to know who the bad guys are. And a bizarre, late-inning bomb drop regarding Lockwood’s 10-year old granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) goes nowhere, although it does hint at some creepy places this franchise could go.
Otherwise, Fallen World is an expertly manufactured hunk of corporate moviemaking, whose success will mostly depend on one’s appetite for slow push-ins of astonished or terrified scientists. The story, co-written by Derek Connolly and Jurassic World helmer Colin Trevorrow, has that dispiriting whiff of machine-stamped franchise moviemaking. You can almost envision the 50 or so 3×5 scene description cards pinned to a corkboard and arranged to make a movie. As an inevitable result, the characters are either too thin or too broad, especially poor Ted Levine as the gruff mercenary, Wheatley, who’d surely chomp on a cigar if provided one as he walks the ominous, dinosaur-infested rooms of Lockwood’s mansion shouting, “I want my bonus!”
Fallen Kingdom is bookended by a cameo from Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) who appeared in the series’ first two installments. He testifies to Congress that we should stop using cutting edge technology for our own entertainment, let evolution take its course and allow the Isla Nublar volcano to wipe out the dinosaurs. There’s a message there, of course, about the evolution of a film series and whether it should be allowed the dignity of coming to its natural end. Trevorrow’s Jurassic World mischievously noted the difficulty in providing increasingly more thrilling experiences to the entertainment-craving masses. And in Spielberg’s 1993 original, Dr. Malcolm noted, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” So, really, the entire Jurassic Park series is a veiled plea to stop making Jurassic Park movies. If only someone could genetically engineer a studio executive who’ll listen…