Movie Review: Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom

Anyone who is even an occasional reader of this blog knows that I love Dinosaurs, always have. I’ve also always loved monster movies, probably because many of them (Godzilla, Gorgo) were take offs on dinosaurs. I freely admit that when I was a kid I dragged my dad to more than a few lousy movies because they had dinosaurs or something that resembled a dinosaur in them.

So as you might imagine I had to go see the latest edition of the Jurassic Park franchise Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. I’ve seen all of the Jurassic Park movies and even if the plots are convoluted, the characters rather one-dimensional and the endings really just a setup for the next movie in the franchise, they’ve got dinosaurs!!

So let me start by discussing the parts of Fallen Kingdom that I liked. First of all I’ve always like the way the Jurassic Park series has included some animatronic dinosaurs rather then just relying on CGI. In the dinosaur movies I saw as a kid the actors could never actually interact with the dinosaurs because they were actually guys in rubber suits like Godzilla, or small claymation figures like in ‘King Kong’ or they were blown up film of real life small lizards as in ‘The Lost World’. Either way it looked hokey to even a dinosaur loving kid like me.

Another good part of fallen Kingdom is the two stars, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, both of whom are easy to like and who seem to like each other, which is good because half of the movie is them interacting. In fact my favourite scene in Fallen Kingdom is when Pratt and Howard are trapped inside a shipping container with a sedated T-rex who starts to wake up. Here we have the two principals acting together and with something that, even if it isn’t really alive, still looks like a dinosaur, one they can touch and which can touch them back! Pratt and Howard are acting to a real thing, not just acting to a green screen on to which the computer guys will add a dinosaur.

Now if you think that sounds like I’m not a fan of CGI, you’re mostly right. I think that too much CGI starts to look more like a cartoon than anything else. Now I know that sometimes the producers have no choice, the things that they want to show simply don’t exist. Still, the less CGI, the more special effects consist of real objects, the better as far as I’m concerned. And that’s the way Amblin Entertainment, the studio that produces the Jurassic Park franchise, does things!

Now just a few criticisms. The movie is really two stories combined, and not too well. In the first story a volcano on the island where the dinos are is about to erupt, killing them all. So a rescue is setup. The second story concerns that fact that the people who rescued the dinos are badies! Ho hum!

Also, in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom James Cromwell plays Benjamin Lockwood, a partner to Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond from the original Jurassic Park. Obviously they wanted Attenborough’s original character but Attenborough had died since Jurassic Park so they created a new, virtually identical character out of nowhere who doesn’t really do much anyway. They really should have gone with a completely different character.

Still, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is an entertaining thrill ride, which is what any summer blockbuster is supposed to be. But best of all, it’s got Dinosaurs!!!