Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

“If you do this, there’s no going back. We’re not on an island anymore.”

Owen

As spoiler-free as I can make this, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom I think has one of the strongest opening scenes in the entire franchise, the way it was shot and the pacing mixed with the soundtrack put me on the edge of my seat within minutes of the film starting. I liked that we take some time to get to the island as well, I didn’t feel it was too rushed, and it gives some time to explain the motivations to go back to Nublar on the brink of it’s eruption.

That being said, I think the entire time on Nublar (minus one moment that I really really loved) is one of the weakest sequences in the Jurassic series, I thought it felt very rushed, and new dinosaurs just keep popping up left and right. I’m not complaining that we finally got to see Carnotaurus or anything, but Baryonyx is really the only new dinosaur that made any sense being there, but that’s just me being nit picky. Things just kind of seem to keep happening the entire time the volcano is erupting, and then as quickly as they start up they’re gone. If you saw the trailers, I wasn’t fond of the dinosaurs deciding they wanted to attack the main characters in the middle of an eruption, those things would be running just like all the others (again that’s me just being super nit picky about dinosaurs).

The second half of the movie is where it really picks up, and I’m especially not going into specifics, I think that this sequence was very very well done for a Michael Crichton-style scifi/thriller, but I don’t think it really fits as a Jurassic Park movie. I really loved the Indoraptor but do wish a few things upon it that I won’t say due to spoilers, and this movie does what it’s sole purpose to do is, to set up the next (and I’m hoping the last) installment of the franchise. This is something I’ve been worried this movie would be since they announced it in 2015 and said they knew where they wanted the third film to be about, but weren’t exactly sure how to get there yet. Fallen Kingdom, to me at least, feels like a bridge movie (kind of like the second Hobbit movie).

I think Fallen Kingdom has some of the best individual moments in the franchise (I can think of 3 specially), and is definitely one of the most beautifully shot and visually stunning of the 5 films, but like I said earlier I’m not a fan of it as a Jurassic Park film. It takes us in a very different direction than the previous movies, and is certainly the darkest movie in the series. This movie is a monster movie that features dinosaurs, and I think it felt more like a spinoff rather than an additional installment. The beginning, some moments in between, and the ending are very Jurassic Park though and I’m very excited to see where they take us next.

I didn’t hate this movie, but I for sure didn’t love it. I did have to watch it a second time to really appreciate what it was doing so that way I knew what to expect out of it. I’m going to give it a 5/10 and I’m still deciding if I want to put it above Lost World or below it on my Jurassic ranking (the order being Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Lost World, Jurassic Park III before I add Fallen Kingdom. I sound like a broken record, but I really enjoy this movie as a Crichton-style scifi/thriller, just not fully as a Jurassic Park film.

This was a longer review than I was expecting, and I tried to keep it as spoiler free as I could.