Look, I saw Jurassic Park 3 in theaters twice. I genuinely enjoyed the first Jurassic World (Which I know isn’t a universal opinion). I’m basically in as long as there are Dinosaurs (or in this case just giant lizards since no feathers); but fuck man, what a trainwreck. This movie is a disaster.
This movie assumes you the audience are dumb as a rock. Its plot doesn’t make any sense if Jurassic Park 2 and 3 exist (or if the rules of reality exist). There’s a lot of hubub about the extinction of dinosaurs which doesn’t make any sense if there’s a site B.
The thing I will say about Fallen Kingdom is that the litany of mistakes the movie makes have weight. It is a series of bad decisions instead of just a morass of suck; which makes it better than A Wrinkle in Time at least. It also means I wasn’t not entertained. Once I recalibrated from “What the fuck is this movie?” to “Oh, ok this movie is bad” I settled in to laugh at the trainwreck and laughed my ass off. Also I genuinely like Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s onscreen chemistry; the physical acting they do around each other does a lot to make up for the bad script they’re working with, both here and in the previous film.
Every sin this movies commits could be forgiven except for the greatest sin of all: Not enough Dinosaurs doing stuff! Be aware, laughing at how trash this film is almost exclusively what I got out of this. There’s like one fun Dinosaur scene and that’s it.
Whenever Dinosaur stuff is finally happening it always feels like the movie can’t get it over with fast enough. There’s no time to linger and enjoy Dinosaurs being awesome and doing stuff. Instead we get so many scenes of bullshit setup and plot that feel like padding to this 2 hour movie because so much of everything here amounts to nothing. There’s no cohesive structure to this monstrosity, just a series of things that happen.
This movie straight up forgets about 2 of its side characters for like a 4th of the movie. The last time we see one of them he’s mistakenly conscripted into doing menial labor for the evil mercenaries because they just assume he works for them rather than not belonging there; and the next time we see him he’s working in the evil scientist lab somehow having failed his way into a higher position there was no reason for him to be in. The interesting thing is that this journey that takes place entirely offscreen means that this character has the closest thing to a character arc in this fucking movie.
So much of this movie is just terrible on paper. The setup makes so sense, takes too long and is immediately pointless. There’s an extended Dinosaur blood transfusion scene that really feels like someone’s bizarre fan fiction (Seriously why does the movie spend so much time on this unless someone involved is getting off on it. Literally nothing comes of it. It’s like they saw the blood transfusion scene at the end of Fury Road and went “Aha, blood transfusion, this is what makes movies good!”). There’s the new hybrid that’s just explicitly a worse version of the hybrid from the last movie. The climax is about our heroes letting all the dinosaurs suffocate in a basement. And of course there’s my favorite terrible moment: When the Velociraptor sheds a single tear.
There’s a part in the movie when shit is off the rails and the villains are ranting about the future of genetic manipulation where I could see how a truly bananas movie could have introduced human-dinosaur hybrids and really gone crazy. This movie is stupid but it’s not stupid enough. It’s incredibly unimaginative; unable to see in front of its own two ankles. What a waste. It could have done anything and all it can do is a lazy rehash. Booooooo.
This movie is fucking bad. It probably could have used anyone who knows the first fucking thing about writing a screenplay.
I just wanted Dinosaurs you fucking move! One scene where a truly cartoonish Stygimoloch runs around headbutting people, unraveling the villain’s entire plan is fun, but it’s not enough for a 2 hour movie.
Fuck.
Thank You For Your Time.
