Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

It appears you only need one good movie in order to continue spewing bland sequels. Such is the case with Jurassic Parkand it’s successive trilogies. We now have been given the second Jurassic World film, which is part of the second Jurassic trilogy.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom recruits raptor trainer Owen (Chris Pratt) and ex-park directive Claire (Bryce Dallas-Howard) to try and save the dinosaurs from extinction… again. The volcano Island Nublar where the park resides and the dinosaurs have been living on has become active, threatening to wipe out Phillip Hammond’s great creation from the first film.

There are a lot of problems with this film, none of which can be alleviated with Chris Pratt’s wit or Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s passionate attempts at originality. The script from Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow (director of the first Jurassic World) is so clunky and clichéd, that you wonder how it got green-lit by the Universal executives at all. All of the dialogue is so cringe-worthy, you wonder whether Trevorrow or Connolly ever went to film school; there are such blatant exposition scenes and the characters make the most illogical choices that it makes bad horror movies look good. Then there’s the continued mistake of casting Bryce Dallas-Howard and Chris Pratt together; while the two actors may be good performers individually, they have absolutely no chemistry together (as made apparent in the first Jurassic World film), and given that they’re the main human characters we’re supposed to care about, this absence of spark makes half of the film senseless.

Chris Pratt tries his very best to charm this film into something better, but to no avail; even with the dino-action is repetitive. Bayona tries to veer the film into something more horror-like that suits his skills (his breakout film was The Orphanage), but it proves fruitless. It’s even more discouraging to think we still have another Jurassic World film coming up in 2021, helmed again by Trevorrow. It’s a shame that every nerd’s dream has been diluted to such a baseless and pale commercial vehicle. In the end, Fallen Kingdom is, the Spanish say, “un petardo.”

5.6/10