Movie Review #28: Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Director: J.A. Bayona
Writer(s): Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall

Don't see it.

I apologize for the blunt introduction. After all, this is a Jurassic Park movie: one expects the review to chock-full of dinosaur puns and hyperbolistic language. I'm here to tell you: no. This review is not fun. This review is a serious deconstruction of one of the WORST movies I've seen in theaters in a long time. This movie makes The Greatest Showman - a movie that normalized and valorized a racist, prejudicial con artist - look good by comparison. One might anticipate the standard movie critic's D+/C- grade, establishing the expectation that this is a bad, clumsy movie that one shouldn't see but might be worth a laugh. Perhaps this is a perfectly decent "so bad it's good movie" - audio-visual Cheetos, if you will. It's my unfortunate task to inform you Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is none of these things. It is a soul-draining, brain-rotting mess of stupidity that actively harms the mind once one applies but a synapse of critical thought to it. Moreover, it's decidedly unenjoyable to watch: a two-and-a-half slog of non-interactive, video game-paced, special effects mumbo jumbo, a barrage of action set pieces and CGI-blurs at once incomprehensibly dull and tonally confused. All of these negative attributes lead to a conclusion so morally nihilistic and antithetical to the spirit and moral of the original Jurassic Park novel and film that any hope I had for the future of this franchise disintegrated into ash before my eyes. This is a singularly unpleasant film even within the Jurassic Park series: a franchise, mind you, that has only ever had one good movie in it. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom manages to achieve a new low, a feat I thought impossible given the misogynistic, patronizing, and spiritually vacant tone of Jurassic World. This is a truly bad film; don't see it.

Three years after the events of Jurassic World, InGen has been sued out of existence thanks to civil class action lawsuits on the behalf of the thousands of families who lost loved ones in a genetic abomination-driven rampage. On Isla Nublar, the location of the now abandoned Jurassic World, the once dormant volcano has now become active, with an imminent eruption threatening the extinction of all the remaining dinosaurs in the park. Congress, for once using its penchant for inactivity for the good of mankind, opts to let the God-forsaken products of human hubris die. However, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) from the last movie are determined to save the dinosaurs, especially Owen's Deinonychus best friend, Blue (yes, I'm using the accurate dinosaur name instead of the film's erroneous Velociraptor designation; I was a dinosaur kid back in the day). They, along with their quirky computer geek friend Franklin (Justice Smith) and their "paleoveteranarian" friend Zia (Danielle Pineda), go on an expedition financed by John Hammond's former partner, Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) and his assistant, Eli (Rafe Spall). However, there's a conspiracy afoot, as a cabal of evil arms dealers and geneticists from across the globe have acquired the DNA of the Indominus rex from the last movie and have created a new, military-grade successor: the Indoraptor. The only one witness to this group's machinations is Lockwood's granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon). Will our heroes be able to stop the evil arms dealers and save the dinosaurs? Waste your time and money and find out.

A warning in advance: I will be spoiling the entire movie in this review. The film's innumerable failings cannot be properly described or analyzed without thoroughly examining the details and implications of its conclusion. This involves spoiling many of the film's so-called "plot twists." If you find these spoilers offensive to the hard work of filmmakers who demand your money... don't fool yourself. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a studio product: the amount of money from your ticket that actually benefits the hard-working special effects artists and writers on these projects is next-to-nothing. Your ticket finances a defective corporate product and fosters a cinematic culture in which films as bad as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are deemed acceptable. Should you wish to stop reading this review and see the movie anyway as part of some pro-laissez faire, anti-"soft censorship" political movement, I can't stop you. I enjoy illuminating the merits and faults of film-making, and it's my task to extract whatever I gained - for good or for ill - from films and effectively convey insight to an audience. In the case of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I cannot do so without spoilers. I'd also emphasize that I'm "spoiling" nothing: the film itself is spoilt and rotten. It is nigh impossible for me to make make it worse. Even if we adopt the purely figurative meaning of "spoilers" here, there's very little to spoil. This is a Jurassic Park movie. You know the story beats: man thinks himself able to play God, God says no, raptors chase a kid, the T. rex eats a guy in a suit, and John Williams plays us out. This is Jurassic Park; it is not Citizen Kane.

Let's start by talking the real reason people are going to watch Jurassic Park: the visual effects. Normally, I'd begin with discussing characters and story, but Jurassic Park has rarely been about characters and story: they're the original film's greatest weakness. Rather, the franchise has always marketed itself on having top-of-the-line special effects. It is to my dismay, however, to report that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has the worst visuals in the entire Jurassic Park franchise outside of Jurassic Park III. It's not that the CGI in this film is any less complex than that of the last film: indeed, there are many more skin textures and animated features on the dinosaurs as compared to Jurassic World. The real problem here is lighting. As a result of crappy lighting and limited computer processing power, the look of these dinosaurs is incredibly spotty depending on the set piece. The film's opening T. rex sequence looks especially bad, as the computer didn't seem able to effectively process the effect rain would have on the T-rex CGI model. The original Jurassic Park used practical effects shortcuts to work around this, but the new film - almost entirely CGI-based - fails to properly show what a T. rex would look like running in the rain. The result is a jagged, choppy model that looks wholly unappealing. Other times, dinosaurs are improperly lit or revealed through reflective surfaces, as the computer once again tries to fit in objects that aren't present in those surfaces. A great number of scenes in this film take place in a mansion full of mirrors and shiny vases, so it's easy for hiccups to appear. Unfortunately, they do appear. The only animated part of any of these dinosaurs that's consistently well-animated is the inside of therapods' mouths: you'll see plenty of them if you see the movie.

The design of the new dino villain, the Indoraptor, also makes zero sense. The Indoraptor is designed with military effectiveness in mind: it should be, by all accounts, an improvement upon the Indominus rex. Unfortunately, its biological features are preposterous. The creature has a sinuous, practically serpentine body built for ambushes and stealth warfare, yet the creature somehow has giant arms, four fingers, toe claws, and a head the size of an Allosaurus. The creature is also HUGE: there's no way it could stalk anything without giving itself away through body heat alone. A creature like this only needs one killing method - pouncing and ambushes. All of the other teeth and claws are just cosmetics. Speaking of cosmetics, the Indoraptor also has a bright yellow stripe on its sides, because apparently ambush predators should have bright coloring so as to inform its prey that it looks "fabulous." All in all, the creature doesn't look as threatening as any of the real dinosaurs or even as threatening as the preposterous Indominus rex from the last movie, and its design does not cohere with its stated narrative function. Rather, the Indoraptor is designed as it is for an entirely different function: selling model figurines to elementary school students. Buy a six-piece chicken nuggets from McDonalds and get your free ludicrous dinosaur model, equipped with two moving parts and a goofy-ass smile. (Yes, the dinosaur does in fact smile in the movie. Consider my suspension of disbelief settled in the flask.)

The flaws in the Indoraptor design approach the issue of plot-hole nitpicking. More so than any other major film franchise, the Jurassic Park franchise opens itself up to severe criticism of its ludicrous plot details, contrivances, and errors. Even within the realm of science fiction, its logical jumps and gaps leave much to be desired insofar as suspension of disbelief is concerned. All four Jurassic Park sequels would have no plots were the characters to display the slightest amount of critical thinking. Mocking the plot errors in this film would be normally counterproductive to good film criticism, turning this blog post into an awful display of pseudo-comedy like CinemaSins. I could talk about characters somehow surviving being covered within a pyroclastic flow, but it would be a waste of time. However, I do believe a good number of these errors cannot be ignored, as they lend themselves into a discussion of the broader thematic and structural failings of the film. While I can bemoan a silly plot contrivance - such as the entire second half of the movie being sparked by one moronic henchman's desire to open the Indoraptor cage - for being silly, pointing out this fact teaches nothing. Other errors, on the other hand, must be addressed.

For example, our main characters, Claire and Owen. The Jurassic Park films have never been good at developing characters beyond simplistic, lesson-learning arcs, but they are at least competent at using general stereotypes to make us care about certain individuals. Jurassic World did not do a particularly good job of this, as Claire and Owen are basically stand-ins for classic yet noxious tropes: the careerist woman who discovers that her only way to be "truly good" is to adopt a maternal role and modes of physical violence, and the dashing action hero who knows better than everyone and always gets the girl regardless of the pair's lack of compatibility. However, in the beginning of this movie, the two characters have somehow completely flip-flopped. Claire, a woman whose marketing campaign was almost entirely responsible for creating the Indominus rex, a woman who willingly tampered with animal genetics in order to please the masses, has become a left-wing "save the dinosaurs" activist with Congressional connections. Putting aside the fact that Claire would be serving 20 to life for multiple counts of felony murder for her actions in the last movie and would be a social pariah within modern corporate shaming culture, this character switch is all too sudden. Certainly, Claire adopted some drastically different behaviors from her normal corporate-driven mindset in the last movie, but a switch like this is a complete about-face from what she was. It's almost as if Richard Nixon turned into Frank Zappa. Owen's change is subtler but no less bizarre. While one would think he'd take up the activist role instead of Claire, he's instead building a house for himself like Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, permitting the dinosaurs to die until he watches some old footage of his best friend, Blue. As was the case in the last film, our perfect action hero never learns anything, but he's neither dashing nor confident in this film. He's just... there.

More insulting still are the film's supposed character arcs. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom repeats the exact same romantic subplot from the last movie. Claire and Owen have dated and broken up off screen, with a few passing references being made to the break-up as cheap exposition. They bond over a child and end up kissing in the end of the movie. No growth, no change, just titillation. The villains are one-note suits who get a few speeches in about the heroes' hypocrisy before being quickly eaten by dinosaurs. The one corporate character who has a heart dies as soon as his arc is completed, removing any hope of real growth from occurring in the story. The child character never changes, because all children in Jurassic Park sequels are saints whose actions are beyond reproach. The geeky character who was afraid of everything in the beginning of the movie conquers his fears by unleashing a dinosaur into the villains' lair, effectively becoming a murderer. No one cares. No one learns. No one grows. Insofar as films are a medium of human empathy, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is an utter failure.

Even when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tries to emotionally resonate with its audience, it completely fails. The film's emotional center, so to speak, is the Brachiosaurus from the first movie. It's the first dinosaur, after all, audiences ever beheld with wonder. When the characters first arrive on Isla Nublar, it's the first dinosaur they encounter, so as to mirror the first film. Thus, as the island is destroyed by a giant volcano, it is the Brachiosaurus that bids goodbye to our heroes as they are ushered away with a cadre of kidnapped dinosaurs. We then watch as the Brachiosaurus walks up to the dock, following the ship, slowly being surrounded by flames and falling into ash. Solemn, somber music plays. The characters start crying. A light from the heavens shines down as if to cry, "Oh the cruelty of man! Woe be unto him who would destroy such beautiful creatures!" It was at this moment that every single person in my movie theatre burst into hysterics and started laughing his or her pants off. The film just tried to portray Brachiosaurus, a giant prehistoric reptile the size of a small skyscraper, as an analogue to Jesus Christ - a narrative conceit so innately preposterous that one cannot help but laugh upon seeing it. The imagery of this scene alone is enough to completely undercut the tone of the film.

The film is also tone-deaf and incomprehensibly paced. The film races from action set-piece to action set-piece so quickly that one practically can't make sense of the plot, thin as it is. The first scene has a legitimately effective scare involving the Tylosaurus and a submersible that never surfaces, but the film never establishes itself. It quickly leaps from pure horror, to disaster-movie camp with explosions and dying dinosaurs, to techno-thriller, to espionage film, to action blow-out, to Freddy Krueger-inspired fever dream. The mood is so disorienting that one gets muted to the film's mood  and atmosphere. The film's most legitimately effective jump-scare is a fake-out involving a ten-year-old girl. Were I to properly characterize the mood of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I'd probably be best of describing it as a high-resolution version of the Dino Crisis video game series that one isn't allowed to play. One would be better off spending one's time watching a Let's Play of the original Dino Crisis on YouTube, as one would at least be vicariously enjoying oneself through another's gaming pleasure. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doesn't know what it wants to be as a film: as a result, it ends up feeling like an incoherent blob of brainless CGI set-pieces.

All of this awful filmmaking - the clumsy special effects, the bad script, the incoherent plot structure, the rushed pacing, the terrible characters - is secondary, however. Let's talk about the true reason Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is awful: its theme and moral center. Believe it or not, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom wants to tell us something. Unfortunately, it offers just about the most hypocritical and offensive message it could possibly relate. Let's plunge right into this pile.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has a disturbing habit of raising very important moral questions and then abandoning them with action scenes. The most alarming of these is the issue of human cloning. It's long been an uncomfortable undercurrent of the Jurassic Park franchise that the same genetic sequencing techniques used to resurrect dinosaurs could be used to bring people back from the dead through cloning. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this suggestion finally comes to fruition, when we discover that the little ball of "preciousness" that is this film's child character is, in fact, a clone of her dead "mother." The film announces this development as a major plot twist, as it's undeniably a shocking, troubling point. What can be said of the free will of this girl if she is nothing more than a copy of someone already dead? Is she truly human? What legislation should be passed to deal with this new technology? These are deeply troubling questions that strike at the core of our human understanding. How does Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom address them? Simple: interrupt the twist with a giant dinosaur attack, and never mention the issue again.

That level of moral irresponsibility permeates all of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The film raises deeply troubling issues that deserve complex conversation and nuance, all before smashing through them with dinosaur action scenes. The movie has no understanding of its horrific implications. Instead, the child just runs off with Owen and Claire at the end of the movie, with all of her legal guardians being dead. This, for those individuals who still had operating brain cells after watching the movie, is an act of child abduction that the film just brushes off. We're given to believe these two romantically incompatible, emotionally volatile, violent, unstable adults who now have a plan to trot the globe trying to stop evil geneticists from using dinosaur super-weapons on the public are somehow going to be good substitute parents. The film makes us worry about tons of side issues and useless side characters when every parent in the audience should be making an Amber Alert call. And let's not forget that this isn't an ordinary child, but a clone child aware of her existence as a clone that the federal government will have no idea how to deal with. How is this child going to deal with the trauma of knowing, if not for scientific meddling, she would never have existed? This is a huge moral blindspot that the film willfully brings up and then abandons!

Then, there's the main message of the movie. The Jurassic Park story is a very basic allegory for man's willingness to meddle with the environment. The message: don't do it. Nature will come back to bite you. One can very easily analogize the dinosaurs of the book and film to oil consumption, carbon emissions, and deforestation: should one upset the balance of the world, its side effects upon humanity will be apocalyptic. Should one upset the balance, one should do whatever one can to correct that balance. Save your fellow humans from dangerous dinosaurs. Don't interact with the dinosaurs. Keep the dinosaurs isolated and contained. Limit the proliferation of dinosaurs. And, yes, kill the dinosaurs. They're not supposed to be here: let them die. This is the moral Dr. Malcolm presents at the beginning of the movie, and the audience is properly given to believe that he is correct. However, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom presents the exact opposite answer: once you've inserted the dinosaurs back into the gene pool, let them run free!

The characters have a big moral dilemma at the end of the movie where they have the chance to let all of the dinosaurs die a second time, this time without the interference of evil dinosaur smugglers. Of course, the film analogizes this to human beings being trapped in a gas chamber; no exaggeration here: the dinosaurs are locked in a small room being filled with poison gas. It's as if they're trying to analogize dinosaurs - long extinct animals that had their time in the sunlight - to Holocaust victims. That's a level of profound disrespect for the dead. Dinosaurs aren't human beings: they're an open threat the world's ecosystem. And yet, we are supposed to feel bad that the dinosaurs are dying, because, according to this film, every child should have the right to see a dinosaur. And just when the adults are about to let the dinosaurs die as they should, the little kid "saves the day." The film seems to falsely equate the extinction of the dinosaurs with the extinction of living endangered species. The problem is that dinosaurs aren't endangered species: they're invasive species. They're cane toads, house cats, and wild dogs. They're elite predators and herbivores whose mere presence in the modern ecology would trigger a mass extinction. But, all because some whiny children want to see dinosaurs, the audience is given to believe that letting the dinosaurs loose is a GOOD thing. The film's true message: when humans screw up the environment, don't try to fix it by limiting the scope of your ecologically inept actions - double down. I can hardly think of a theme more antithetical to the original Jurassic Park if I tried.

These theme problems engulf this film in the flames it deserves. Sure, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not as over-the-top dumb as the last Jurassic Park movie. Sure, it doesn't have a cringe-inducing murder sequence of an innocent female character. Sure, it has one good scene in the very beginning of the movie. But those elements cannot excuse mediocre to laughable visuals, poor acting, sloppy dialogue, askew pacing, horrendous plot contrivances, and an absolutely abhorrent message. This is one of those films that gets almost everything wrong. Moreover, it's not even so bad it's good: it's a high budget, Hollywood production full of cynical clichés that seeks to milk your money and time. This film is two and a half hours too long. I would rather this film had been dumber than it was, if only I could have laughed at it more. Instead, we have a morally empty collection of special effects and storytelling vacuity that might as well have been written by Michael Bay. This is filmmaking by soulless committee, with not an ounce of genuine humanity on the screen. To put it as Dr. Ian Malcolm would, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom "is one big pile of s***."

I give Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a 0.9/10.