The Worst of 2018: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
A review by Chris Lee
As one of the first pieces you’ll be reading from me, I don’t want to start out on the hyperbolic. Subtlety is important in review and reflection when trying to get your opinion across. No one can really take you seriously if your only two opinions on things are, this is the worst thing or this is the best thing.
So unfortunately, as fate would have it, I of course have to start out with a genuinely hyperbolic review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018, Directed by J. A. Bayona and starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard). Please, without knowing anything about me except this, give me this pass. We are entering a word-field of self-aware absolution.
When I was around 5 or 6 years old, my father decided it was time to watch all the cool action movies. Being an impressionable 6 year old, I of course decided that movies were the greatest thing in the world after being immersed in some of the best visual masterpieces of action/adventure filmmaking, still, ever made. Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Aliens, Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Matrix, etc.
It was the audio-visual palette equivalent of being fed the best food in the world, then subjected to gas station hot dogs, which can invariably range in quality between “I’m starving and this will add seconds to my life and is therefore adequate” and “Dear God, what have I done to deserve this crap?”.
Most often, I find modern action filmmaking to be fairly adequate. Rarely do we get insane, off-the-wall plots and concepts executed by a team of professionals that take their craft seriously. In the last 10 years, I can point to sadly few movies that knew exactly what they were doing and did it well.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not one of those movies.
Remember in the first Jurassic Park, when the characters are introduced to the park, and drive up in the Jeep to the surprise revelation of the Brontosaurus? The awe, beauty, and majesty that Spielberg was able to convey; Richard Attenborough’s, gleeful, hope-filled, spine-tingling delivery of “Welcome to Jurassic Park”?
This movie was the anti-thesis of that moment. Fallen Kingdom features a cast of characters so uniquely boring, uninvolved, and ineffectual, that I found myself hoping each one would be eviscerated by the cgi monstrosities they ran from, as though I were doing nothing more than lazily digesting a big-budget sci-fi channel original movie. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, two of Hollywood’s most charismatic and likable performers, turn in “awe-shucks” and “gimme my paycheck” acts as: a guy who doesn’t want to be where he is and a girl who thinks she wants to be where she is, but really doesn’t.
*slow clap*
Taking the in-narrative justified plot of The Lost World and going full-tilt dumb with it, Fallen Kingdom asks viewers to give a shit about saving a non-descript amount of cgi beasts, from eons past, dying on an island that has never successfully produced good fortune for any human characters we could possibly care about.
Shallow action sequences with little weight, tension, or adherence to logic defeat what in better hands could have been at least a little bit fun. The plot takes a turn midway through involving a twist that only someone with no handle on emotional narrative significance could think was a good idea.
Let me provide some examples of just how banal and insulting this movie gets:
*Spoilers ahead* (not that I think they’re worth saving in this instance, but spoilers are the worst and you have the right to see this movie fresh and with all its glorious misfires)
- A raptor “action movie jumps” away from an explosion. Like a fucking satirical cartoon.
- A character tries to save a small child from rampaging dinosaurs by grabbing them and staying directly in harms way so that the audience can…..see the danger from their perspective? Why isn’t ours good enough? Run away. You are in danger. What are you doing?
- A character gets mad when a 300 lb bag of muscle, teeth, and claws gets shot while mauling another innocent human being.
- A character makes a decision that will likely cause dozens of innocent people to be brutally devoured because “feels”.
- Needlessly breaking the laws of physics that even a 4th grader would understand. Suspension of disbelief is important and it is fickle. Most people can only take so much obvious bullshit.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is my worst movie of the year. It killed my interest in sequels to the franchise, it did not care about its audience at all, and it doesn’t even function as a good popcorn flick. It’s the worst kind of action filmmaking: the kind made purely to fill some corporate quota. Soulless, just like the poor creatures brought back out of their own time.
Save your money or go re-watch Deadpool 2.
1/5
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