Movie Review: "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" Is Basically a Haunted House Movie, With Dinosaurs

The dumbest Jurassic movie to date is also the funnest since the original Jurassic Park.

The Jurassic Park film franchise—originated by Steven Spielberg in 1993 and revived by director Colin Trevorrow in 2015 with Jurassic World—takes place in a parallel universe where humanity has figured out how to bring dinosuars back to life.

So, why are all its characters so dumb?

In the fifth entry, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, someone tries to cheekily extract fangs from a sleeping velociraptor; another person doesn’t even notice when a fleet of roaring dinos moves into their garage. A lot of these people die, violently, and you can’t help but think, "Yeah, fair enough."

At least Fallen Kingdom—co-written by Trevorrow and his collaborator Derek Connolly, and directed this time by J.A. Bayona—leans into the stupidity. On no fewer than five occasions, characters scramble away from dinosaurs and immediately sigh or cheer in relief when they’ve barely escaped, only to promptly get surprise-attacked/eaten. (One time, it’s a dinosaur doing the premature celebrating.) By surrendering to dumbness and dropping the pretence of thoughtfulness, Bayona gets to use the incredible CGI dinosaurs and some Hammer Horror-inspired shadow-play to make a silly, suspenseful rollercoaster ride.

And though it stretches credulity further than the franchise has dared to stretch it before, the latest Jurassic World movie is just too much fun and too viciously entertaining to make me complain.

When the picture begins, we learn that former Jurassic World operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) isn’t serving a lifetime prison sentence for recklessly endangering the lives of her park patrons, but is instead campaigning to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from the abandoned theme park on their volcanic island home, Isla Nublar. Following the ah, recommendations of, uh, Jeff Goldblum’s, ha, Jurassic Park wiseacre Dr. Ian Malcom (this time wearing a shirt, unfortunately), the American government decides to leave the last dinos on Isla Nublar to perish. However, a billionaire (James Cromwell) and his right-hand man (Rafe Spall) convince Claire to help them secretly escort the endangered beasts to a new sanctuary. She, in turn, compels her ex, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), to join them and locate his super-intelligent pet raptor, Blue. So, they willingly agree to visit a disintegrating island to corral a bunch of dinosaurs onto, umm, a boat. I guess they’ll just have to delay the Genius Parade until they’re back home.

Pratt is still miscast in the role of smooth raptor wrangler Grady (when will Hollywood realise he’s not the new Harrison Ford, but the new John C. Reilly?). Howard, on the other hand, is superhumanly sympathetic, which is remarkable given how she’s playing a woman directly—and unrepentantly—responsible for so much death. It probably helps that Spall plays such a devious villain in contrast. (How? Rafe finds a way.) And I guess her cavalier attitude is consistent with the series' general attitude towards humankind (it makes Westworld seem positively optimistic). The only characters we’re ever really meant to feel sorry for are the dinosaurs, and maybe the mysterious little girl Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who lives at the billionaire’s estate, and whose unexpected parentage takes the series in a strange new direction during the bonkers third act. Everyone else is just meat for the maw.

Bayona and cinematographer Óscar Faura definitely mark an upgrade from Trevorrow and his lenser John Schwartzman. The previous duo struggled to capture the awe of their unquestionably awesome subject matter. Yet Fallen Kingdom feels like a culmination for Bayona and Faura: they give us an underwater tracking shot reminiscent of the visceral flood from The Impossible, and the sequences of Claire and Maisie hiding from dinos in the dark recalls the gloomy terror of The Orphanage’s haunted game of Hide and Seek. They also gift us with a mournful final shot of a Brachiosaurus left behind on a burning island.

None of this artful craftsmanship should distract from the fact that Fallen Kingdom is weird AF. The trailers have certainly been covering the tracks of this feature’s unusual trajectory. Sure, it may start on Jurassic World, but it eventually moves to Jurassic Mansion before coming to a climax at Jurassic Child’s Bedroom, becoming a haunted house flick with warring velociraptors. Turns out decreasing the surface area for the dinosaurs to roam is inversely proportional to this saga’s quality.

4/5

In Australian cinemas 21 June. Rated M for action violence.

Photo: Universal