Welcome, to Jurassic World … again.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom takes our much loved dinosaurs out of the park and into the middle of nowhere. Following Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), an animal behaviour scientist with an almost telepathic like connection to the dinosaurs, as he gets caught up in a plot with comedy villains hell bent on creating the ultimate weapon. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and a gang of reporters do some stuff as well.
To set the scene, it opens with a large underwater creature escaping from the old park island compound as a group of mercenaries extract a T-Rex bone sample. The payoff for this only rears its head during the most ludicrous ending to a film I’ve seen, but I’ll get onto that later. This scene also contains a pantomime moment where a dinosaur is creeping behind Bad Guy #3 as Bad Guy #1 and #2 literally scream “he’s behind you”.
The plot goes from ridiculous to bordering on parody. The Hammond estate has been taken over and in debt and Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) has taken over the business. He liaises with Mr. Eversol (Toby Jones), a character so one-dimensional he’s only given a surname, to sell the dinosaurs to generic bad guys so they can splice dino DNA into a creature of war. The Jurassic World island is on the verge of a volcanic eruption which provides Mills with the opportunity to vacate the most dangerous creatures for sale. The most important of which is Blue, the super-intelligent velociraptor from the first Jurassic World. Blue is required to create a super weapon dinosaur which does beg the question as to why they needed any of dinosaurs at all as apparently all they needed to do was gather the DNA and wait for a couple of days for a fully formed clone to be made. Nevertheless, the dinos are taken back to the secret inland mansion house in America awaiting auction. That’s a fully furnished underground auction house, with automatic catwalk, room furnishings and tiny gavel. As expected, the dinos escape within the compounds of the house, cause mayhem and have to be rangled back together.
As for villains, we’ve got them all, from ten-gallon hat man to generic Eastern European man. Toby Jones is perhaps my favourite part of this movie, he chews the scenery like no other. The other characters are inconsequential, Bryce Dallas Howard spends most of the movie running from danger and we’re introduced to a rag-tag gang of journalists that follow her around and somehow perform dino blood transfusions. They did make a point of linger on Bryce’s combat boots after spending the last movie in high heels.
Also introduced is Maisie Lockwood (the breakout acting role of child actress Isabella Sermon), the heir to the Lockwood Estate. Isabella brought a fantastic performance to the role, showing exceptional range for a child actor. She spends most of the time running around the mansion until she finds our protagonists. In a passing comment of exposition, we’re told she’s actually a clone the original Maisie who had died. This is where the movie starts to veer into a different movie universe, as if the writers had no limits to what technology is available.
The ending is bonkers, the good guys have the option of killing all the dinos using leaking noxious gas or allow them all to escape into the wilderness and cause havoc among the human populace. Of course they pick option B, causing untold number of deaths. Goldblum narrates over it as if “well, what can you do, life finds a way” as T-Rexes are roaring with lions and that underwater creature from the beginning is seen swimming with surfers. This is Geostorm levels of crazy.