Jurassic World: Fallen Franchise

This is it, first review. Before diving into the mess that is Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I want to address the dinosaur in the room, better known as the CHILDREN IN THE THEATRE.

At what point did it become okay to bring children under the age of ten to a Jurassic Park movie? Since this is the fifth movie in the franchise, you should probably know what you’re getting into when you walk into the theatre. Big, scary monsters with lots of teeth that are going to tear the limbs off several humans. So when a scene like this occurred today and the whole theatre had to listen to a young child cry and scream, “NO, NO, NO,” it made me wonder about a couple things:

1 – Your child is scared and screaming. Please remove them from the theatre immediately, you terrible person. My first movie was Snow White. I sat in my seat for a while, but when I finally decided that it was more fun to run up and down the aisle, I was promptly removed from movie theaters for the next couple years. Be a good person, and respect everyone else’s right to watch this movie.

2 – Not only was this disruptive to everyone there, but this should also bring into question the parenting of these people. You’re going to bring your small child to a Jurassic Park movie? How thick can you get? There’s literally a scene in this movie, that was in the TRAILER, of a dinosaur about to attack a young girl in her bed. Yeah buddy, good luck getting your kid to sleep ever again. You actually cost yourself countless hours of sleep as they are now going to wake you up every night post-nightmare. I’ve never really cared about movie ratings, but maybe we should start taking PG-13 a little more seriously.

Anyways, on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. I’d like to note that I really liked 2015’s Jurassic World. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it was a lot of fun. Good action, comedy, and simply a great build, start to finish. It’s very different tonally to any of the previous installments, but in a good and fresh way. Fallen Kingdom simply didn’t have the same feel, and it faltered because of it.

The movie actually started out very strong. The first ten minutes are undoubtedly the best of the movie, blending together the awe from Jurassic World and the horror from the Jurassic Park movies. I truly believed we were in for a great couple of hours, but sadly it was all downhill from there.

One of the best parts of any Jurassic Park movie is always the scale. Whether it’s the sheer size of the dinosaurs, or watching a t-rex running through the streets of LA, we’ve always been able to depend on seeing something big happen during these movies. Fallen Kingdom wasn’t able to accomplish this because the whole second hour of this movie takes place in a mansion. While the erupting island was a great and exciting visual at the beginning of the movie, the mansion scenes failed to recreate the classic raptor kitchen scene from the original Jurassic Park.¹ Jurassic Park/World movies need room to breathe and the confines of a house took all the fun out of this blockbuster.

I couldn’t be more disappointed with the newly created “Indoraptor.” They essentially took a raptor, made it a little bigger, and added some yellow stripes. Sure, I get the whole weaponizing dinosaurs angle, but I’d rather see the “villain dinosaur” be the t-rex again before watching another gene-spliced creation. The Indoraptor wasn’t nearly as impressive as the Indominus Rex from Jurassic World, and the “big climactic moment” ended up faltering because of it. Nobody in the theatre seemed to care as a Suicide Squad level of slow motion was being utilized.

Also, have none of the characters in this movie watched ANY of the previous installments? If there’s one rule to follow in these movies, it’s pretty simple: DO NOT OPEN THE CAGE. Are you kidding me dude?? My hands went up in the air along with a dozen people sitting in front of me because it was too dumb to handle. This isn’t our first rodeo with dinosaurs, we want more.

I can see the direction that the producers are trying to take the franchise in, but the execution here was poor. There’s always been a theme of morality in these movies, the idea of “is this what God intended,” but in this movie its shoved down our throats to the point where we just don’t care anymore. There’s a need for these movie to evolve in order to avoid being repetitive, but come on guys. Do less.

Verdict: BAD

This just isn’t a good movie. In fact, it BLOWS! All I can do is compare it to the previous installment and realize how much better Jurassic World is. Poor writing, stupid decisions, a dumb new dinosaur, and a complete lack of humor has seemingly left this franchise in the dump. Of course, as I write this, the movie has exceeded $700 million at the worldwide box office, so everyone get ready for the next installment of weaponizing dinosaurs!

Good news: If you do go see this movie, you will be able to see the trailer for Mission Impossible: Fallout, where Ethan Hunt gets disavowed for the 73rd time.

1. Which I assume is what they were going for