No Jurassic spark in this snarling sequel
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Exactly why would anyone visit a dinosaur-infested island for a fifth time, when all four previous excursions had ended in limb-gobbling pandemonium? Well, when a franchise revival like Jurassic World becomes the fifth most lucrative film ever made, with global takings in the region of $1.6billion, you can be sure that Hollywood, like life, will find a way.
And so it has done in the case of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The barely coherent new entry in the franchise sends the two new series leads, raptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and former park manager Claire Deering (Bryce Dallas Howard), back to the treacherous shores of Isla Nublar, on the pretext that the island’s prehistoric fauna now need rescuing from an impending volcanic eruption.
The previous film, Jurassic World, suggested that genetic engineers might create hybrid dinos to appeal to a jaded customer base who think fun means getting a lot of everything they think they like. And in a possibly unwitting self-parodic masterstroke, Fallen Kingdom seems to have been made with much the same mindset. The film staples together two snazzy-sounding ideas – an ecologically inclined disaster movie with dinosaurs and, later, dinosaurs on the loose inside a stately home – without considering whether the end product’s sheer snarling hideousness might just prove an intelligence-insulting turn-off.
You can see the sense in hiring the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona. His tsunami survival thriller The Impossible proved he had a feel for breakneck spectacle. His recent film,
A Monster Calls, refracted childhood fears through fantasy with Spielbergian savoir-vivre. But Fallen Kingdom reduces Bayona to a Spielberg tribute act – full-blown copycat shots taken from the original Jurassic Park look like the work of a director with no ideas.
This time, two millennials, computer nerd Franklin (Justice Smith, from Netflix’s The Get Down) and dino-vet Zia (Daniella Pineda) join Claire and Owen on the mission. Their backup is a band of armed mercenaries. Ted Levine plays its leader with swaggering unpleasantness, but the character pales next to the late Pete Postlethwaite’s far more intriguing big game hunter in the first Spielberg sequel, The Lost World.
The script, by Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, has the lumpy consistency of a first draft, with monologues that splutter out without pay-offs, dismal comic repartee, and a flexible attitude to the laws of nature: dinosaurs chomp through iron bars like Curly Wurlys but skitter harmlessly against wooden doors. The fundamental premise of all of the films is intrinsically silly. But there was an internal seriousness – and, yes, sincerity – to Spielberg’s peerless 1993 original, that was every bit as important as its special effects.
This new film has spectacle enough to split a mountain in two, yet none of it prompts more than a shrug. Dinosaurs boring? Hollywood found a way.