Jurassic’s Fallen to a new low
Most of you know this already, but for those who don’t, the phrase ‘‘jumped the shark’’ refers to the exact moment a TV series or movie stops being even remotely credible and loses forever the audience’s respect and investment.
It has its origins in a 1977 episode of the sitcom in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) did just what it says, on water-skis. Years later, a few commentators seized on that scene as a convenient shorthand for the moment any entertainment begins its irrevocable slide into irrelevance.
I mention this only because I never need to use the expression again. As of tonight, I shall instead be saying ‘‘and that’s when the raptor opened the window’’. And for that dear reader, we have
to blame.
But let’s back up a little. This is the fifth film and the second in a threatened trilogy. It picks up the action a while after the carnage that closed out
in 2015. The dinosaurs have taken over Isla Nublar – site of the theme parks – and only a force of private soldiers, led by the requisite gun-happy bully, remain. They are working for a corrupt business type who claims to be evacuating the dinos to another sanctuary to escape an imminent volcanic eruption.
It’s all hogwash of course. If there’s one idea this franchise is absolutely wedded to, it’s that you can never trust a capitalist. Which is a kind of ironic garnish for a series that has so far grossed somewhere north of $US3.5 billion on an investment of around $US600 million.
It all goes horribly wrong, as it must. The plan is cover for a diabolical scheme to auction the beasties off to various shady types on the mainland. Our returning heroes from – Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt – supplemented by a couple of plucky stereotypes in the shape of Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda, make the trip after escaping the spectacularly unhinged first act.
And then, in the basements and bedrooms of an old stone mansion newly outfitted as a genetics lab and dino holding cells,
finally gets under way. And yes, there truly is a scene in which a hybrid raptor apparently works out how to open a window latch. At which point I laughed out loud and was pretty gratified to hear most of the audience join in.
It’s not that the stupendously good and affecting on his CV. He knows how to craft a scare or a Hitchcock reference just fine. It’s just that the script is too silly, too obviously ticking the boxes to ever give Bayona the opportunity to really turn the screws and take our breath away.
All I really took from
is proof – again – that all the money, onscreen talent and CGI wizardry in Hollywood doesn’t add up to a hill of beans without a decent story to tell and a reason to exist.
The film is a pile up of cliched characters, screeds of expository dialogue and a general sense of striving too hard just to meet our expectations, when it should have been trying to confound them.
To its credit, tries to break away from being nothing but a retread of what has gone before. And the monsters-inthe-house conceit is amusing, if not actually thrilling.
But as the credits rolled, I felt like I had been watching the pilot episode of a TV show, and not a feature film at all.