Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, James Cromwell, Ted Levine, Justice Smith, Geraldine Chaplin, Daniella Pineda, Toby Jones, Rafe Spall and Isabella Sermon with B D Wong and Jeff Goldblum

Directed by J.A. Bayona

Universal, out now

NB The first of our reviews contains spoilers

Three years after the fall of Jurassic World, Claire is running a dinosaur advocacy group. The park has been allowed to go feral and the dinosaurs have carved out their own food chain. But Isla Nublar’s long dormant volcano is active again and without help, the dinosaurs will become extinct for a second time. Claire is given a chance to rescue 11 species but, as she and Owen soon find out, there’s more going on than either of them know…

The good news; this is much better than Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World. There’s no shrieking peril siren marketed as a female lead. Owen is about 25% less profoundly unlikable dickhead and the thing actually has a plot. It’s even an interesting one. I mean, you’ll know that if you’ve seen the trailers. You’ll know the final line of the movie if you’ve seen them too. But still, that’s the good news.

A lot of that is down to JA Bayona, who puts together shots, consistently in fun, nasty ways. He has a favourite trick of using intermittent lighting to show dinosaurs approaching that works far better than it should. The opening, featuring the world’s stupidest commandos, is a great example of this where we see the mososaur as much by the light it blocks as by its presence. It’s a lot like how the Star Wars Stories movies shoot Star Destroyers: almost blasphemous in their size and power.

There are some fun action sequences too. The volcano escape, which, again, you’ve seen all of if you’ve seen the trailers, is really fun when you see it glued together in sequence. Similarly the closing running battle with the indoraptor has a pleasing muscularity to it. It feels like there are stakes, which, at no point, was the case in the last movie.

Better still, Claire not only gets sensible shoes (there’s a close up of her motorbike boots where you can almost here Bayona going “HAPPY NOW?!’ And thank you very much I am) and an arc which isn’t about how important it is for women to breed! Yaaaaaaay!

Seriously, I don’t think there’s a single white actress who’s been worst served by every single blockbuster they’ve ever been in. I mean, I love The Village, but I’m alone in that and even if I wasn’t, when your last solid genre hit was a decade ago, that’s not a good thing. But here she has agency! And purpose! She gets three moments of legit badassery! And then the film sets her up with this amazing choice to be the one who frees the dinosaurs out into the larger ecosystem! It completes her narrative journey! It makes her the most interesting female lead (Maybe the ONLY female LEAD) this series has ever had!

And then someone else does it.

That near miss with greatness happens a couple of times. There’s a horrible moment where the last dinosaur left on the dock is killed by the pyroclastic flow and all Claire can do is watch and sob. It’s a brachiosaurus, the species Lex meets in the original movie and the death of this huge, brilliant, gentle creature is the death of innocence in the movies. Towards the end, there’s another one in the stampede. There’s massive symbolism in freeing this innocent, useless to big business, dinosaur and in doing so changing the tone of the movie. It’s an immense moment and they do nothing with it.

That’s not the only ball the movie fumbles. Toby Jones is staggeringly terrible as an arms dealer with Donald Trump’s hair and oversized teeth for no apparent reason. Rafe Spall does his best with the evil yuppie bad guy but doesn’t have much to work with. Ted Levine is even worse served as the chief game hunter who, hand on a stack of bibles, is killed in an extended Tom and Jerry skit with the indoraptor. Oh and gets to say ‘What a nasty woman’ because 2016 political humour is the perfect fit for a movie like this.

Then there’s the throwaway introduction of human cloning, the deployment of Jeff Goldblum at the top and bottom to class up the joint, and the single stupidest set of corporate commandos in human history. Seriously, I am Captain Suspension of Disbelief but I am better equipped, sitting here next to a phone, a water bottle and a copy of Speed with a Deadpool 2 cover, to go and retrieve items from Isla Nublar than these guys. Try and watch the opening sequence without yelling ‘SONAR?! GUNS?! ANY FORM OF UNDERSTANDING YOU’RE ON AN ISLAND WITH DINOSAURS?!” I dare you.

But at least Owen isn’t an actual scumbag this time. He’s still not very interesting, at all, but both he and Claire are brought face to face with the consequences of their actions last time and it actually hits home. Pratt’s had a rough couple of years, with the stalky toxic nonsense of Passengers, Peter Quill: Manchild Volume 3 in Infinity War and now this. But, here, just, he manages to bring something extra to the screen. A lot of the time it seems to be an audition reel for Indiana Jones but he does alright for the most part.

If it sounds like there’s a lot to dislike about Fallen Kingdom, that’s because there is. Any movie, made with a straight face, in 2018 that has an evil Russian arms dealer yelling ‘Twenty five millions!’ during an auction deserves to not so much be mocked as put in the stocks in the town square so we can throw fruit at it. It also utterly wastes Justice Smith as a nerd character who plays like he was written 20 years ago, and Daniela Pinda as a magnificently snarky vet who is so interesting she, too, is written out for an act or so. There is a LOT to dislike here. A LOT. You think I’m overestimating how stupid Ted Levine’s death is, I can tell.

I am underselling it.  Seriously.

But, for all that’s there is so much effort expended here that the film just, barely, lands. Howard works so hard, all the time and does wonders. Pratt isn’t great but he’s better than last time. The basic concept is solid and the thing is always beautiful. It should be so much better than it is though and while it promises much next time it delivers some now. Whether that’s enough is up to you. 5/10

Alasdair Stuart

An apparently altruistic mission to rescue the dinosaurs from a soon to be engulfed by volcano Jurassic World on Isla Nublar is revealed to be nothing of the sort, with far more sinister uses being planned for the genetically recreated beasts.

There’s an unfortunate scene in Justice League where Alfred relates to Bruce Wayne that things were a lot simpler when all they had to worry about was exploding wind-up penguins, which immediately took you back to an earlier, superior film in the series (Batman Returns). They make the same mistake here in Jurassic World sequel Fallen Kingdom, the fifth in the Jurassic Park series, where Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire asks Chris Pratt’s Owen if he remembers the awe of seeing his first ever dinosaur. And the problem is, we all do, 25 years ago in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No matter how good the dinosaurs are (and the new ones are great) nothing can replace that first ‘wow’ moment. It’s even addressed in Jurassic World that the public soon tires of the current dinosaur, demanding a new one.

That’s not to say that the dinosaurs don’t impress, as they are better than ever, with director J A Bayona opting to use animatronic versions where practical, giving them a real sense of presence. It also injects a spark of personality into the creatures, with both raptor Blue and new creation indoraptor having real mischievous glints in their eyes. The latter is a snarly, jumpy, bitey critter (get me a new dinosaur and make it snappy!) Of the menagerie of dinosaurs, the bone-headed pachycephalosaurus literally makes a great impact in one of the movie’s many action set pieces.

Jeff Goldblum is back as Ian Malcolm, but be warned that it’s little more than a cameo. Howard and Pratt are on fine form as the movie’s leads, the latter getting more opportunity to flex his action hero muscles in some beautifully choreographed sequences. Other human characters fare less well, with Ted Levine’s hunter and Rafe Spall and Toby Jones’ villainous businessmen being little more than boo-hiss archetypes just waiting to become dinosaur chow.

The Lockwood estate where the second half of the movie is set is a wonderful Gothic creation, an impossibly scary ancestral home with dark dark corridors and underground lairs for our heroes to run around. It makes an interesting change to the natural beauty of the island and presents plenty of opportunity for jump scares.

I wasn’t expecting the moral issues raised in the movie – do we have the right to let the dinosaurs die in flames now that we’ve created them? – and it’s interesting that both Owen and Claire feel guilty for contributing towards the current situation and having a responsibility to sort it out. I’ll steer clear of plot twists and contrivances – you can discover them for yourself.

The ending sets up the final part in this new trilogy, suggesting we’re moving into Battle for the Planet of the Dinosaurs, and that’s a movie I look forward to watching. Oh, and there’s also a short post-credits scene that’s little more than a gag and you might resent having to sit through five minutes of closing crawl to watch it.

Verdict: For me, the Jurassic Park movies have always been old-fashioned B-pictures with A-List credentials. They are ‘monster on the loose’ movies and this latest instalment sticks to a winning formula, throwing in multiple creatures in increasingly jeopardy-rich situations. It does what it says on the poster, with a rich visual style and plenty of derring do. 8/10

Nick Joy

 

Three years after the incident that closed Jurassic World for good, the formerly dormant volcano on Isla Nublar has become active again, threatening the dinosaur population of the island with extinction. Claire Dearing and Owen Grady are brought together once again to perform a rescue mission, but all is not quite as it seems.

If Fallen Kingdom has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t really feel all that connected to its predecessor in a lot of ways. After the obligatory pre-credit sequence, we find ourselves with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), former director of publicity at Jurassic World, now working at a charitable organisation seeking to get funding/congressional help in mounting a rescue effort for the dinos trapped on their volcanic lair. It’s unclear what has prompted this change of heart from the cold, analytical asset manager who survived multiple dino attacks in the last movie to this, and the movie doesn’t feel it’s important enough to bother with, just urging you to go with it.

It also adds a new element to the background mythos – a former business partner of John Hammond, with whom there was some falling out before the events of Jurassic Park. Reclusive and dying billionaire Sir Benjamin Lockwood, played with a slightly inconsistent accent (which seems to aiming for British) by James Cromwell, has a secret, the source of said falling out, and the movie drags this one out as a secondary subplot.

Owen Grady continues to be a set of macho, rogueish tropes in a Chris Pratt suit, and once again it’s the innate charm of Pratt himself that sells the character more than anything else. Here too, there’s oddness, as the film (for me) retcons Grady’s relationship with the raptors generally and Blue in particular.

Toby Jones gets a little wasted in a role that requires only that he put on an American accent and give us that trademark Jones snarl. Rafe Spall is not as subtle as his part requires as Eli Mills, and Isabella Sermon performs well in the scrappy adventurous genius kid role as Maisie Lockwood, Ben Lockwood’s granddaughter. Daniella Pineda does a nice turn as marine-turned-paleo-veterinarian Dr Zaia Rodriguez, although she’s given little to do beyond acting as a walking McGuffin for various parts of the movie. B D Wong returns as Dr Henry Wu and is even less consistent than before and completely different from the last movie, and everyone else is, well, there.

Ironically, given that this is a popcorn blockbuster with dinosaurs, the creatures themselves form the emotional heart of the story. There are genuinely heartstring-tugging moments involving only these CGI creations, as well as some real jump scares and moments of claustrophobic terror, which is in itself impressive five films in when you’d think we all know how this works. Action set pieces work extremely well, beautifully presented and often imaginative, and the second half of the movie wisely holds back in a way that I hadn’t expected it to.

And the new big dino baddie – well, disappointing would be the best word. Unimaginative, certainly, as if the screenwriters had done everything else and then suddenly realised at the last minute that a big bad dino was needed. It’s a scary enough creature, but it really isn’t anything that we haven’t seen before.

What makes the film stand out most of all from its predecessor though, is that it feels like it’s part of a wannabe franchise. Trevorrow pitched Jurassic World just so, so that it both seeded elements that could lead to future movies but also stood well enough as a standalone movie. Bayona’s movie plants itself firmly in ‘part 2 of a series’ territory in terms of look, feel and indeed ending. Oh, and if you were excited about Jeff Goldblum, I would advise that you moderate your expectations.

It’s not that Fallen Kingdom is a bad film, more that after the refreshing surprise of its predecessor, it feels a little obvious. Without the conceit of a park running in the place where the original park was, there’s not the same opportunity for self-referential fun that there was in the last entry, and with everything feeling so disconnected from how it was in that previous film, what we end up with is a fun but throwaway romp, full of big CGI, stunning action sequences but lacking the heart of its stablemate. Inevitably, there will be another one of these (a trilogy was always the plan) and maybe that will feel more satisfying and a little less empty than this one.

Verdict: Big, brash and full of action. This is a decent popcorn movie to take the kids to, with dinos aplenty. But it doesn’t have the same soul as its predecessor, and when it does have genuine opportunities to do deeper things with the narrative, it fluffs it in favour of more teeth. 6/10

Greg D. Smith

Check out Greg D. Smith’s Trail to the Fallen Kingdom reassessing the previous movies:

Jurassic Park

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park III

Jurassic World