Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

When Jurassic World graced the silver screens in 2015, the world fell mad in love with it. Within its first weekend it managed to break records across the board and held them for a few months until the juggernaut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens took everything away. It got decent reviews and fans were mostly pleased with this long-awaited sequel/reboot of a much beloved franchise. However, three years on, it seems like a lot of the general public seems to be, "meh," about Jurassic World nowadays, and although it does stand as the best overall sequel to the original Jurassic Park, it still holds no candle to the original.

So, even though the 2015 film may have alleviated some of the work, there was still a huge job placed on the shoulders of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Many people, including myself, were ready to see a film that took the franchise to new places and featured new ideas that hadn't been showcased before. The trailer did look quite promising, featuring the main characters returning to the island to rescue the dinosaurs from a volcano, so I believe that a lot of us were fairly excited to see this franchise finally really take off.

Unfortunately, Fallen Kingdom manages to present to us much of the same, really. Even worse, the blandness doesn't stop there.

Where Fallen Kingdom manages to fail completely is the fact that it feels to safe. Everything feels way too calculated and programmed. The story is a boring one we've seen a million times before, even in the movie that preceded it: a big bucks millionaire guy wants to get the dinosaurs, weaponize them, and make some money, while genetically altering some mega-saur in the process. There's no real pizazz here, there's really nothing that stands out. Even the dinosaur fighting scenes, which are always fun to watch, don't exactly manage to spark up the boring story at all.

To make matters worse, the characters put on display here feel robotic and far too plain. We have our two main players, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing, played by returning cast Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, taking most of the grunt of the fallout from the first film and the goings on here. But, while they were lovable characters in the first film, they both feel held back here, and Pratt's character feels even more like a re-written Star Lord than before. Unfortunately, they're not the only ones who suffer, as every other character feels like they were churned out from a computer who was given traits to make characters out of. The only character who has any real pizazz is Dr. Ian Malcom, who returns after 20 years and is played by the dashing Jeff Goldblum, but he's only on the screen for 20 minutes at best.

I'm really struggling to find redeeming pieces of this movie, and I can only really scrub up a few. While the non-dinosaur effects are not the greatest (the lava looks so computerized and some of the backdrops look uneven in comparison with the real-life aspects), director J.A. Bayona does manage to pump out some pretty beautiful shots here and there, especially during the segments on the Isla Nublar, showing the decrepit state of the old park. The dinosaurs are as lovable as ever, including returning creatures Rexy (the T-Rex from Jurassic Park and World) and Blue (the charming beta raptor from World), which manage to be frightening, cute, and badass somehow all at the same time. Finally, to much of my chagrin, I'd be lying if I said there weren't a few fun points in this film, and some pretty cool setpieces, but they all seem to be lost within the beige muck that makes up most of this film.

Unfortunately, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom just barely manages to keep itself off of the extinction list, and because of it, it earns a 5.1/10. If there would have been some changes to the story, something a little bit more interesting, or even focused on some of the more interesting ideas from what they had going on here, we would have seen a movie that was far more exciting. But as it stands, perhaps this franchise should become dormant once again.