Jurassic reboot mines familiar themes
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back sharing screen time with the creatures of Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom. This time around, instead of running from the angry lizards, they are doing their best to save them from eventual extinction
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM ★★★ out of 5
Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Rafe Spall
Director: J.A. Bayona
Duration: 2h8m
“Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?” asks wide-eyed dinophile Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), in this latest trip to the cretaceous. And for many viewers the answer will be: Yes! It was 1993, in Steven Spielberg ’s Jurassic Park!
In the decades since, the franchise was driven into the ground with two silly sequels, then brought back from extinction in 2015’s Jurassic World, which was — let’s be honest — basically a remake of the original, minus a preening Jeff Goldblum.
Well, he’s back in Fallen Kingdom to say “Told ya so!” It seems the island of lost dinosaurs has turned into a very active volcano, and Goldblum suggests letting the animals burn. But that wouldn’t be much fun, so Claire teams up with animal-trainer Owen (Chris Pratt), to try to rescue them.
They have only each other and two plucky, diverse interns (Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda), to rely on, while the rest of the movie is stacked with villains so clichéd they’re almost fossils themselves. Say hello to Prosperous Rex, auction-onyx, geneticist-oden and that old gun-toting standby, ichthy-trigger-finger-saurus. Fortunately, the more evil the character, the greater the chance he’ll be eaten whole, or at least, um, disarmed.
Perhaps stung by accusations of gender insensitivity last time out, writers Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow, under director J.A. Bayona, unveil Howard’s character feet-first in heels, then show her wearing sensible boots for the rest of the film. They also introduce a redoubtable 10-year-old named Maisie (newcomer Isabella Sermon), whose unexpected backstory could probably drive an entire movie.
But of course it’s the terrible lizards who rule the film, and Fallen Kingdom has plenty, including a new model called the Indoraptor, which gets even better mileage than the old Indominus Rex of the last movie. There’s also a head-butting pachycephalosaur, the nearest thing the film has to comic relief. (Though I chuckled at the blinkand-you’ll-miss-it news-crawl on a TV: U.S. president questions “existence of dinosaurs in the first place.”)
Also back is Blue, Pratt’s dinosaur bestie, their friendship equal parts rapture and velociraptor. In one of the many examples of fine editing, the film cuts between Maisie watching old videos of Pratt bonding with baby Blue, and the adult heroes working to save the same dinosaur from a gunshot wound with an impromptu blood transfusion. It’s a tense and characterbuilding moment all around.
Fallen Kingdom has many moving pieces, however, and not all of them work so well. After a somewhat jerky start, Bayona manages to keep things moving nicely through the island rescue, and then to a sprawling mansion where the relocated critters end up caged in the wine cellar. Though he is a little too fond of transportation montages linking one location with another.
There are also some hard-to-believe escapes — the Indoraptor, for instance, has razor-sharp senses to match its teeth and claws, except when it suddenly doesn’t. And dinosaurs that are one moment bending steel bars and bashing through brick walls are stopped the next by the wooden door of a dumb waiter. Also, I’m not certain why one character is collecting dinosaur teeth as though trying to complete a charm bracelet.
But life finds a way, and so does Hollywood. Jurassic World ends with the promise of yet another chapter, seemingly lifted from the playbook of another long-running, twice-rebooted franchise. (There’s a brief bonus scene if you wait through the eon-length credits.) This one doesn’t feel quite as fresh as the 2015 “original,” itself a clone of the ’93 blockbuster. But as long as the filmmakers are convinced they haven’t bitten off more than they can chew, the show will go on.