Jurassic larks!
It’s Downton abbey with Dinosaur in a roaring romp up brings the raptors close to hom
AQUARTER of a century has passed since Jurassic Park was first unleashed on the cinemagoing public. I remember it vividly because it was the week I became a father for the first time.
That was the start of 25 years of howling, slobbering, roaring and stamping, punctuated by brief, blissful moments of tranquillity. Life would never be the same again. Fatherhood has had quite an impact on me, too.
Five films and many billions of box-office dollars later, the dinosaurs are still rampant, thundering out of nowhere when we most expect it. Director J.A. Bayona would doubtless prefer it to happen when we least expect it, but Jurassic old-timers like me know the signs of an imminent attack as well as we know the insides of our sock drawers. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom begins with a man in an underwater exploration capsule reassuring his colleague that they are perfectly safe.
‘Relax, anything in here’ll be dead by now,’ he says buoyantly, which is akin to what viewers of televised football know as the curse of the commentator. Suggest that a player is flagging and he will immediately score a belter. Here, venture that there’s no risk whatsoever and next minute you’re a dinosaur’s dinner.
Unsurprisingly, Fallen Kingdom obeys that and just about every
other cliché enshrined in the lucra franchise since 1993.
A token goodie might be sacrificed here or there, but mostly it’s the baddies who get eaten in what, once again, is essentially a two-hour live on version of an old joke — the one about terrified human beings hiding from the very hostile prehistoric beast known as a doy outhinkhesaurus.
This film whisks us back to the island off Costa Rica where the theme park that was so compreheny wrecked in 2015’s Jurassic World is now derelict. The dinosaurs are all at large, but facing extinction because of a mighty volcanic eruption.
Incidentally, with the volcano blowing its top, enraged dinosaurs blowing theirs, people screaming, the ground rumbling and an unseen orchestra going more ballistic than everyone else put together, there was never less danger of being put off by the folk behind you eating popcorn. This is one loud movie. But it quietens down in a gloomy old mansion in California, where a wheelchair-bound tycoon called Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) is funding a scheme to save the beleaguered creatures from the molten lava.
Sir Benjamin was in the extinct species cloning business with the late John Hammond (dear old Dickie Attenborough, who gazes out benignly from an oil painting), and wants to honour his friend’s legacy by moving the dinosaurs to another, safer island, where they can, at long last, be left in peace.
The younger, more energetic fellow he engages to supervise all this is smooth-talking Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), whose abundant charm can mean only one thing: that he’s rotten to the core.
To help round up the dinosaurs, Eli hires Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who in the last film was the theme park’s chilly operations manager, but has now become a slightly less chilly paleo-conservationist. She in turn recruits Owen Grady, the rugged, wise-cracking velociraptor trainer she fell for last time, again inhabited perfectly by Chris Pratt.
Soon, however, Claire, Owen and their sidekicks (who in further timehonoured fashion are a plucky young woman and a young man who’s a bit of a scaredy-cat) realise that something stinks, and it’s not just the breath of a narked triceratops.
A dastardly plot is afoot, and while I mustn’t give too much away, it leads us and everyone else back to the Lockwood mansion, where Sir Benjamin’s eight-year-old granddaughter Maisie (engagingly played by a promising newcomer, Isabella Sermon) has good reason to believe that Eli does not, in fact, have the creatures’ best interests at heart.
THE arrival of an even sneakier fellow played by Toby Jones confirms it. There ensues a marvellous dinosaur rampage round the mansion, which makes use of just about every stately home feature you can think of, from dumb-waiters to flying buttresses to glasshouse roofs.
It looks like the one storyline that the makers of Downton Abbey never quite got round to, more’s the pity. I’d love to have seen Mr Carson the butler trying to dish up the kedgeree with a brachiosaurus on the loose.
The movie’s final shot neatly sets up the next instalment in this long-running franchise, scheduled for 2021, and as whole, Fallen Kingdom does more than enough to keep anticipation alive.
It’s not as wildly entertaining as the 2015 film, and it’s a shame that Jeff Goldblum’s participation as Dr Ian Malcolm, one of the original characters, amounts only to a brief cameo at the beginning and end.
But the special effects, while by now a little over-familiar, are as splendid as ever. And co-writers Colin Trevorrow (who directed last time) and Derek Connolly are evidently aware that for these films not to face extinction themselves, a lively undercurrent of wit is required.
You have to be on the ball, though, especially to spot Hollywood’s almost obligatory dig at the current occupant of the White House, which comes in the form of a running caption on a BBC news bulletin: ‘US President questions existence of dinosaurs in the first place.’