‘Fallen Kingdom’ Falls Victim to Retread, By-The-Numbers Filmmaking
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom plays the hits but suffers because of it.
At the outset of the film, two contractor-types are seen, in dead of night, steering a submersible into the now-defunct Mososaur habitat on Isla Nublar. Even before one of them tells his visibly-shaken co-pilot that whatever was in there could not have survived, you know that a massive, marine-like beast is chuckling to itself somewhere off in the pitch — ready to deliver the first (of many) deaths over the next two-plus hours.
To be fair to director J.A. Bayona, the bag of tricks he inherited from Colin Trevorrow is tried, true and largely picked over. What he is able to do then, with spent resources, is admirable. There are a few sequences in Fallen Kingdom that manage to illicit some amount of awe and transport us back, however briefly, to 1993 when many of us saw dinosaurs live and breath for the first time.
The problem here, in now the fifth installment to the Jurassic Universe, is that those moments are simply too few and far between.
Four years after the catastrophe that permanently shuttered Jurassic World, our central characters are trying to grapple with a new moral imperative: Do we, the generation who circumvented nature and reintroduced dinosaurs to the world, save them from certain doom at the hands of an erupting volcano? It’s a question that Jeff Goldblum, in all his Jeff Goldblum glory, attempts to decode in nary three minutes of screen time. The actual doing of things, not surprisingly, is left to new series fixtures Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt). While their romance has soured since we’ve last seen them (Claire won’t live in a van with Grady, single women in theaters across the country collectively groan), letting a young raptor die a fiery, volcanic death proves too much for an unflappable Chris Pratt, in full-on Indiana Jones mode.
Once on the island, the usual suspects and plot devices reveal themselves. There’s the shady, hunter/mercenary types (hello, Ted Levine), the tech guy (Justice Smith) who screams and the paleo-vet (Daniella Pineda) who snarks. There are explosions, there are animal deaths, there are plugged-in moments of gawking at Brachiosaurs. After the mountain destroys the island and we get a lingering shot of a dying behemoth sing her death rattle, we’re back off the mainland because, SURPRISE- the rescue operation was a facade for far more nefarious goings-on.
Pulling the strings all the while is Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who like the suits before him, means to make obscene profits off the dinosaurs. This time, by selling them to the highest bidder via black market. As was telegraphed from the earliest run of marketing for the film, the profiteering goes pear-shaped when the dinosaurs eventually get loose. In World, we’re introduced to the Indoraptor — a custom job of a dinosaur featuring the best and angriest components pulled from the T-Rex and the Velociraptor. It’s a bad animal, to be sure and Bayona, who has previous experience with filling darkened mansions with creeps and shrieks, has some fun with making the newest genetic mash-up from legacy Ingen, seem more demon than dinosaur.
Off in the wings, an elderly James Cromwell is a one-time confidant and trusted partner to the late John Hammond who happens to share a special bond with this granddaughter (Isabella Sermon), the latter of which is a walking-talking spoiler that you’ll probably piece together early on.
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Pratt and Howard share a dependable chemistry on screen which helps carry the movie over and around potential pitfalls. To be sure, there’s something to be said for watching Fallen Kingdom if for no other reason than to see bad guys pay a furious, razor-clawed karmic debt in real time. In addition, Chris Pratt has a raptor guard dog. I’ll just leave that there.
But like the Terminator franchise, which once conjured up true magic under James Cameron’s watch, Jurassic feels as if it’s losing its ass to a by-the-numbers approach to movie-making. There are only so many imperiled set-pieces and only so many hot-rodded dinos that you can trot out before even the youngest and wide-eyed among us are looking at the clock.
It’s possible that it speaks to a larger problem in the world. Perhaps, as the world continues to shrink and we’re exposed to a larger scale of stimuli, there’s simply less out there to dazzle us. The hope, then, is that the upcoming third-and-final installment to this Jurassic trilogy is able to tread entirely new ground. At the end of the movie, we’re left to watch our characters head back out into world forever changed, dinosaur and man now entirely entrenched against one another in the battle for survival.
Maybe there is some beauty to be found in the coming conflict, maybe it’s time to shut the park doors indefinitely and let the creatures rest. All any of us can do is wait and see. What I do know is that it is a shame we’re not able to transport ourselves back to 1993, when all of this was wild and stunning and unbound. Jurassic World may have expanded but, strangely, all of this feels just a little too familiar.