What a ‘World’
“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” continues the dino-series.
PG-13 2:08 H H ½H Like a wounded stegosaurus lumbering off to fight another day, the sequel “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” labors mightily to justify its existence, while mostly existing to set up another installment in the long-running film franchise.
Still, “Fallen Kingdom” is an evolutionary upgrade from its 2015 predecessor, the blockbuster reboot “Jurassic World,” with superior direction by J.A. Bayona, who proved with his 2012 fact-based natural-disaster film “The Impossible” that he can balance emotional and epic storytelling.
The screenplay by “Jurassic World” director Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly layers the circumstances and contrivances on thicker than an ankylosaurus’ armor to get where they’re clearly trying to go, but Bayona keeps the unwieldy story trudging along fairly efficiently with relatively few stumbles.
Set three years after the events of “Jurassic World,” the long-dormant volcano on Isla Nublar comes bubbling back to life, threatening the genetically engineered dinosaurs now running wild on the island and setting up an ethical dilemma. Now that man has brought back dinosaurs, do we owe the once-extinct and often-destructive creatures the same protection as other endangered species?
With all the shiny laboratories we’ve seen in these movies, it seems like some scientist would have the recipe and ingredients to cook up more dinosaurs tucked away somewhere, but they’re at least trying to give a passably logical motivation for embarking on a magma-dodging dino rescue mission.
On the testimony of mathematician Ian Malcolm (an underused but always welcome Jeff Goldblum), Congress opts not to intercede but let nature take its course. The news is devastating to former Jurassic World director Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, who at least has sensible boots this time but still gets less of an arc than a velociraptor), who has become a “save the dinosaurs” activist.
She finds an ally for her 11th-hour attempt to save the thunder lizards in Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), a representative of California billionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), a former partner of the late Jurassic Park founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Mills and Lockwood offer to dispatch Claire with a highly trained team so the dinosaurs can be moved to an animal preserve, but they also want her to recruit her old boyfriend, animal behaviorist Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), to track down Blue, the last of the velociraptors.
Claire, Owen, strongwilled paleo veterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and stereotypical computer nerd Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) join the mercenaries, led by Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine), that Mills has hired for the rescue mission on the increasingly unstable ground of the island. But it doesn’t take long to learn that Mills is less motivated by ethical concerns than by old-fashioned greed − which Lockwood’s clever granddaughter Maisie (newcomer Isabella Sermon) could have told them — and soon they’re running from their lives from flying lava, lethal carnivores and trigger-happy mercs.
The sequences of our heroes fleeing a stampede of panicked dinosaurs while molten fireballs and clouds of ash bear down on them are among the most exhilarating since 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” and Bayona adds several fun callbacks to the first film in honor of its 25th anniversary. The director, to his credit, works hard and mostly succeeds in making the audience care about the fate of the often-deadly dinos.
Naturally, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” features some of the now-standard prehistoric pleasures: The T-Rex shrieking in from out of nowhere, the fearsome hybrid terrorizing everyone in its path, Pratt charming his way through any obstacle. For the target audience, like my 11-year-old son, Gabe, the sequel is sure to delight, while the rest of us hold out hope that the next installment grows stronger legs under its story.
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, James Cromwell, Jeff Goldblum (intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril).