Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Year: 2018
Rating: PG-13
Length: 128 minutes / 2.13 hours
While I have loved the original Jurassic Park (1993) for its ingenious special effects, taut and thrilling plot, and entertaining characters, none of the sequels have been able to live up to its high standard. Sure, all the same elements of the first film are usually present in each subsequent movie, but the magic seems to have been all used up in the first go. Each version is only a slight variation to a story that never ends well.
Now in the fifth installment of this franchise, I’m a little surprised that this storyline hadn’t appeared yet. Sure, we had dinosaurs making their way to the mainland in The Lost World (1997), which was probably why Jeff Goldblum had an extremely minor (and entirely unnecessary) cameo in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) to act as a framing bookend to the film. Sadly, many of the mostly hidden weaknesses in Jurassic World (2015) came to light in this sub-par sequel. Like I said in my review of Jurassic World, I don’t care about these characters, even if their relationships seem to be written to elicit a response from the audience.
Furthermore, while the plot of Fallen Kingdom seemed like low-hanging fruit (which is probably indicative that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for plotlines), none of the twists were surprising or unexpected. Heck, the biggest twist was already obvious almost at the beginning. While I will praise this film as having quite a few neat bits of CGI and special effects, most of them felt like they were part of a demo reel for a college final. It didn’t help that the dinosaur mayhem didn’t even take place until the last quarter of the movie. By that point, I had lost all suspension of disbelief as children were outrunning velociraptor-type dinosaurs with ease. Nobody felt in danger, even if I really wanted the annoying and obnoxious “tech support” character to be eaten as soon as possible (it didn’t help that he only appeared to conveniently move the plot along).
A franchise that once again needs to go extinct, I give Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 2.0 stars out of 5.
