The Jurassic franchise has never meant all that much to me (as evidenced by my claim of Jurassic World being my favorite movie in the series a few years ago). I don’t hold the original film sacred, and I never even watched the third one (but does watching that clip of the talking dinosaur a hundred times on YouTube count?).In other words, I’m easy to please with this dinosaur shit. I didn’t even hate Fallen Kingdom, though I found it pretty boring. But the end of that film promised a world overrun with dinosaurs, and I thought, “Well, at least that next one will be badass.” Holy fuck was I wrong.
To be fair, my expectations are largely to blame here. I wanted to see a Roland Emmerich-type disaster movie with dinosaurs instead of aliens and natural disasters. I wanted raptors in the streets of New York. Pterodactyls bringing air travel to a halt as they reclaimed the sky. A T. Rex fucking up a baseball stadium or something. You know, some real cinematic shit. Instead, it’s glossed over in the intro that dinosaurs are just part of the world now, and the main issue isn’t that DINOSAURS ARE ROAMING THE FUCKING PLANET, it’s that there’s a corporation tinkering with the dino technology to control crops (which is only slightly more interesting than the Quantum of Solace villain’s plan to control the water of Bolivia).
The James Bond movie reference is fitting because this movie really wants to be one for some reason. It’s a good thing that pterodactyls are cool with commercial flight because the characters in this movie are constantly flying around until they end up in a Bond villain-esque compound at the end. The movie is way too busy trying to explain why the characters from the new films will end up in the same place as the characters from the old films. This inevitable meet-up of two different generations is meant to be some awesome moment of nostalgia and current pop culture, but I just didn’t care.
At first, I thought I didn’t care because I’m just not that into this series. That may slightly be the case, but there’s also the issue with an utter lack of character development aside from all the good guys wanting to stop the bad guy. The new characters are after their adopted clone daughter and a baby raptor, so I guess there’s a chance at some emotional attachment there for some audience members. But the characters from the first films are just there to wear their costumes that audiences will recognize.
But who cares about the people because this is a dinosaur movie. But it isn’t, really. The dinosaurs are presented as a normal part of the world, so gone are the scenes reveling in the awesomeness of the creatures. There’s a chase sequence in the middle of the film with raptors, and you forget that dinosaurs are even a factor in it until the end when Chris Pratt holds his hand up like a dildo trying to use the Force. And even when the new giant killer dinosaur finally gets to fuck shit up, literally every scene is in the dark. In a series that is only popular because of spectacle, this film is oddly devoid of it. I get that six films in, it’s hard to get excited about dinosaurs. If these assholes have the nerve to keep cashing in on the nostalgia of dino lovers around the world, then they should at least try to justify the existence of their movie.
It’s as if even the characters in the film don’t know why it exists. So many times characters look at each quizzically and ask, “What?” I’m starting to wonder if those were outtakes that got left in. Even the villain seems confused about everything. A very aloof Campbell Scott plays a Big Lots version of Steve Job whose only villainous trait seems to be a complete disconnect with humanity to the point that he can’t hold a full conversation with anyone. There’s a scene in which BD Wong (hey, he’s been in the other movies!) explains why they need the cloned girl, and Scott (rightfully) points out that maybe they shouldn’t just let her hang out in the lab. She immediately then escapes and is able to even break out the baby raptor on the way. It’s like Scott is still learning how to be a villain, and his heart really isn’t in it.
And that’s the feeling I took away from the whole movie. No one seemed to care at any point. They know any movie with Jurassic in the title is going to make a fuckton of money, so why try? Just throw together some action sequences and make sure all the characters meet up at the end. And maybe that’s all some audience members want: let me see some familiar faces and some dinosaurs. But as an audience member I set the bar pretty low for myself, and I still came away very bored and disappointed. At least they claim this is it…for now. But like the character who always wears a black leather jacket for some reason said in one of these: “Life finds a way.” Well, when life finds its way back to this series in a decade or so, hopefully someone finds a way to make it interesting.
Random Thoughts
Every time Pratt held up his hand like a Jedi was so fucking stupid. I get that he did that in the other movies, but that was with dinosaurs he had been working with for years. It’s not every random-ass dino knows what the fuck he’s doing with his hand. And when he did it at the same time as Alan, the movie presents it like this amazing moment of two worlds coming together, but I found it so stupid-looking that I laughed.
Dinosaurs are so normalized in this movie that they bring home the baby raptor in a fucking dog crate that I would use for my tiny Bichon.
So at one point in the film, a random evil lady has some dinosaurs that will attack people at her command. This works by her pointing a laser pointer thing at a person. If you have to be close enough to the person to point something at them to make it work, then wouldn’t you just fucking shoot that person instead of siccing a goddamn dinosaur on them? But I guess this is in keeping with the James Bond theme, because only a Dr. Evil-type motherfucker would have any use for such a stupid dinosaur.
The globe-trotting aspect of this movie is distracting. Laura Dern goes from Iowa (or maybe Oklahoma) to Utah (or maybe Nevada) to meet up with Sam Niell. Then they are suddenly in Pennsylvania…to get on a plane. And when the plane lands, they have to get in a helicopter. What the fuck is going on here?
Everyone is still way too underwhelmed with the fact that human cloning is now possible. Seriously, a human clone exists, and their main takeaway is that they can bio-engineer locusts with her DNA?
About those locusts. They seem designed to destroy any crops not grown with Biosyn seeds. But BD Wong and Big Lots Steve Jobs act like the locusts aren’t doing what they planned. So the villain is accidentally doing villainous shit. If he didn’t want to control the food supply, then what was the plan with the locusts? And is all this the film’s lazy way of condemning GMOs or something? Like everything with this movie, it feels like half a thought that they forgot to finish but kept in anyway.
Back to the pterodactyls. So when they disable the magic defense system at the compound, the pterodactyls immediately attack anything in the sky. So why is this not happening throughout the rest of the world? The movie makes it painfully clear that air travel is still possible. So the pterodactyls elsewhere are just cool with planes, but the ones at the compound hate them?
Why the fuck did the writers just decide to skip over all this kind of shit? I just think there’s a fantastically interesting and entertaining movie about what the world is like when the dinosaurs first make their way back to the rest of the planet.
Ugh. Fuck this movie.
