Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Director: J.A. Bayona
Quick Impressions:
This movie has amazing cinematography and a lackluster script. At least, the dialogue is pretty weak. The story itself is not bad and does really pick up towards the end. Still, I think the script could have used a little polishing. The whole adventure looks gorgeous, though. Every shot is breathtaking in its own way. And Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire is back (this time pointedly wearing more sensible shoes), so at least there’s someone for everybody to blame when things go wrong. (Why Claire? I swear she’s everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I’d really love to cobble together a short video of all the times people have blamed this poor woman and upload it to YouTube. In the last movie, Claire was somehow responsible for not parenting her sister’s children, and this time around she’s repeatedly shamed for bringing back the dinosaurs for financial gain. The way people single her out for exploiting dinosaurs for entertainment, you’d think she was Michael Crichton! What’s going to be all her fault in Jurassic World 3? Probably Jurassic World 2. That sounds about right.)
We had planned to celebrate my son’s third birthday on Saturday, then take the two older kids to Jurassic World on Sunday afternoon. But the just-turned three-year-old did not care for this plan.
“I wish you could go, too,” I said soothingly to my hysterical child, “but we’re going to a scary movie, and they said little kids can’t watch it because it’s too scary.”
“No you’re not,” he pouted tearfully. “You’re going to the dinosaur movie.” He had me there.
But, honestly, it would have been too scary for him. I was actually more concerned about talky exposition scenes boring him than scary scenes frightening him. Fallen Kingdom surprised me, though. There was less talky exposition and more frightening material than I expected.
Fairly early in the film, Claire begins to exclaim, “Holy sh–!” and is interrupted (and completely drowned out) by an erupting volcano.
“Hmm,” I thought to myself. “I haven’t noticed any profanity so far, and this movie is rated PG-13. If they’re not going to let her say that, then something really bad must be coming later.”
Yep. Much later on, a character known for his dastardly dental hi-jinks suddenly needs a hand in a scene that’s intense, frightening, gruesome, and sure to give a tiny child nightmares.
“No blood though,” my husband noted.
True, but that would probably just terrify children more. (“Daddy, why doesn’t the bad man have blood?”)
Because of scenes of intense dinosaur peril (that’s both peril caused by dinosaurs and peril endured by them), this movie is probably too scary for young children. (My nine-year-old daughter was fine, though. And I’ll probably let the three-year-old watch it on home video. They key is to cover his eyes at critical moments.)
The Good:
The idea of a movie that masks profanity, eschews nudity, and offers abundant carnage seems so American, but, actually, the director of this film is from Spain.
I didn’t know J.A. Bayona was directing this installment until I saw his name in the credits. I’ve always enjoyed his work. The Orphanage is on a very short list of horror films that I actually like. (Other than Scream, it’s probably my favorite horror movie unless The Birds counts.) I also found The Impossible pretty compelling, bolstered by superb performances from Naomi Watts and Spider-Man, not to mention a lovely supporting turn by Geraldine Chaplin. (Is she in all his movies?)
Bayona apparently works with cinematographer Óscar Faura a lot, and what the two have created here is simply incredible. Every shot of Fallen Kingdom is exquisitely framed. If this movie were a coffee table book, I’d actually read it.
When working on home photos, I sometimes pull a frame or two out of a video if I can’t find a still shot capturing a natural expression on my daughter’s face. You could take frames from this movie and use them for a photography exhibition in an art gallery. Every single image the camera shows us is something worth looking at, something not only exciting, but beautiful, deliberate.
Quite honestly, the visuals are a thousand times better than the rest of the movie. (That’s not to say that the other aspects are bad. The plot and characters are fairly engaging. The dialogue is weak, yes, but there’s plenty of fun action once it gets started.) The cinematography is good in a several ways. It helps to tell the story. It adds a sense of motion to static scenes. It introduces a great deal of visual symbolism. It shows us things from novel angles and perspectives. In times of massive chaos, it directs our gaze. Essentially, every scene is such a wonder and a pleasure to behold.
The final act of the film (I mean the climactic action sequence once all the players have gathered in the same place) is fantastic. The scenes leading up to this point are a bit uneven. (The dialogue is questionable, but everything sure does look good!)
The supporting players really shine in this movie. Toby Jones is a particular joy to watch. (The accent he’s doing reminded me of Steve Buscemi, but the rest of my family didn’t hear that.) Whoever designed his hair piece is a genius. Somehow Jones, the hair, the breeze, the elevator—they’re all caught up together as one ecosystem facing down the dinosaur.
Geraldine Chaplin is good, too. (But where does she go? She leaves in a blink. Has she hurried off to prepare for her small role in the director’s next film?) Isabella Sermon is delightful, and her character has so much potential. James Cromwell is great, but I wish his character were more of a presence. He’s gone too soon, as is Jeff Goldblum. (Why give him a cameo? Bring Malcolm back as a full-fledged supporting character.)
Ted Levine is really creepy, and Rafe Spall plays his part well, though I found his character one of the least interesting.
I’ll talk more about Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda in a minute. Both actors are great, but I have mixed feelings about their characters. There’s another performance I’d love to discuss but probably shouldn’t since even mentioning it feels like a spoiler.
Best of course, are Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard back as Owen and Claire. I wish Claire’s nephews were back for this adventure as well, but I suppose they’re probably in intensive therapy now. (Thanks a lot, Claire!)
Well, you know what? As I think about it, actually, Claire and Owen aren’t the best characters in Fallen Kingdom. This time around, the best characters are the dinosaurs, two in particular that really steal the show.
As for the score, Michael Giacchino has become the new John Williams, which I guess is a good thing. I had mixed feelings about this particular score. Sometimes I loved it (mainly because it told us what was about to happen next) and sometimes I found it irritating (mainly because it told us what was about to happen next).
Best Scene Visually:
Even though Fallen Kingdom is about dinosaurs, the cinematographer is the heavy weight of this production.
The winking, shoes-up introduction of Claire convinced me that I loved the way the movie worked visually.
At first, I kept a list in my head of visual moments I loved as I watched, but eventually, it became less a list than a summary of the entire movie. So I’ll just mention a few moments here. Obviously, there’s the attentive, playful focus on Claire’s shoes. Then I noticed a brachiosaurus standing near a broken clock with no hands. Early on, there are some really nice shots of first Claire and then Owen peering through plane windows. I loved the use of rear view mirrors, “objects are closer than they appear.”
My husband thought the final shot of one particular dinosaur standing next to its much larger shadow was extremely powerful, symbolic.
My daughter was moved to tears by the sight of the lonely, doomed brachiosaurus. It’s a haunting image for sure.
The Toby Jones elevator encounter is magical. At a moments, the film seemed to evoke King Kong.
And there’s more, much, much more. See it yourself. Trust me, you will never regret seeing this film, (although there’s a good chance you may find yourself cringing periodically at what you hear).
Best Scene:
I don’t understand exactly why this scene started, so I should deduct points for the character’s bizarre choice to enter at this moment. But I just can’t. What happens here is too deliciously pleasurable to watch. Who cares if the circumstances make very little sense (to me)!
(“Why would he suddenly choose to enter then and do that?” I wondered after the movie. “Hubris,” my husband answered simply, showing that he’s the one with all the wisdom in the family.)
I mentioned earlier that a certain character has a slight tooth fetish (and apparently an enormous hubris problem). For children, this would probably be the scariest moment in the movie. But it’s definitely also the most delightful, entirely because of the dinosaur’s face.
Actually, everything that happens at the Lockwood estate is pretty cool. What could be more entertaining to children than an old, labyrinthine house full of dinosaurs? During an early scene when Iris is looking for Maisie, my nine-year-old whispered to me, “If I lived in that house, you would never find me!”
I like the use of the dumbwaiter, too.
The Negatives:
A few days before we saw Fallen Kingdom, my husband remarked to me, “Apparently there’s a lesbian character in the new Jurassic Park, but they cut a scene and erased her sexuality from the final film.”
“It’s the T-Rex,” I joked immediately.
“Yeah, it’s that frog DNA,” we joked practically in unison, and then we started realizing that all the dinosaurs had been female originally, but that some had transitioned, leading to a really interesting discussion.
But, anyway, Daniella Pineda plays Dr. Zia Rodriguez, a character who is intended to be lesbian, though the lines confirming this for the audience are now gone.
Presumably, they were cut for time, though as I watched, I had the idea that they might also have been excised to preserve vagueness.
In one scene, a particularly creepy older guy says of Zia, “What a nasty woman!”
He probably says this in case the movie’s attempt to present Zia as an extremely liberal woman is too subtle for the audience to notice. I don’t see how since it’s so clumsily obvious that even the people at home notice. (That was meant as a hyperbolic joke, but I just realized that people who haven’t seen the movie actually are talking about Zia.)
I thought to myself, “Maybe they took out the part about her being a lesbian to make her character more vague, so that more women than just lesbians could identify with her.”
That’s a pretty stupid thing to do, but this movie’s approach to characterization is…rather lacking.
Instead of those great young brothers we got in the 2015 film, this time we have these two sidekicks who seem like they came out of a screenwriters’ handbook from another decade. There’s Zia, the tough-talking, strong, smart, assertive, well-educated woman who’s passionate and fearless and unafraid to be unpleasant.
And then there’s what’s-his-name, the guy with the glasses who knows computers and is scared of everything. He’s like the imaginary liberal/millennial guy today I keep seeing described in memes shared by people who make fun of guys like that.
To me, this looks like a clumsy attempt to show that the movie is being progressive by including characters who don’t fit into ridiculously narrow gender stereotypes. There are two problems, though. One is that (though I truly believe the film does desire to be inclusive and of the moment) this attempt sort of backfires because the characters are too easy to ridicule. And two, (the larger problem) these characters look more like caricatures (or even political statements) than fully realized individuals. They’re not interesting enough as people.
To their credit, Daniella Pineda and Justice Smith do a lot with what they’re given. But the material is not great. They feel like the result of focus group research rather than actual individuals who happen to be along on the adventure.
If you ask me, they should have kept in the part saying that Zia was a lesbian. Because even if she is a “nasty woman,” she’s not everywoman. This is not a morality play. She’s one person. Let her be one person. Give her a personal identity. But rewrite the dialogue. According to Pineda, the lines cut were, “Yeah, square jaw, good bone structure, tall, muscles. I don’t date men, but if I did, it would be you. It would gross me out, but I’d do it.’
What?! If you’re pressed for time, there are much quicker ways to say someone is a lesbian. How about a quick reference to “my girlfriend” or “my wife”? Also, only Hollywood would have a woman announce her lesbianism in terms of which man she would sleep with if pressed. I guess they really don’t want us to forget that Chris Pratt is the A-list male.
The cut dialogue is bad, but I wouldn’t call it offensive because all the dialogue in the movie is bad. It’s weak at best and awkward at worst. Even Claire and Owen have some very dumb things to say to each other. (That bit about who broke up with whom is sometimes funny but often baffling. I never could decide if I was amused or puzzled. I mean, it’s funny, but it is really what you would say in that situation?)
Some of the supporting actors who look best are the ones with the fewest lines. Geraldine Chaplin hardly says anything, but her acting is top notch (runs in the family, I guess). And Toby Jones’s best scene is the one in which he’s not talking. I mean, the dialogue in this movie is not horrible, but I’m sure Fallen Kingdom had a huge budget. They clearly spent money on special effects and great locations. So why does the dialogue sound like an eighth grader wrote it for a school project? There’s a real disparity there. The words the characters say to each other are just not sharp or interesting, which is a shame because the scenes look so beautiful.
The story ends up being pretty good (if you’re willing to accept its sometimes highly contrived and unlikely premises). I did find elements of the plot a little frustrating, not because they aren’t watchable as is, but because they have the potential to give us so much more. The story about Maisie, Iris, Lockwood, and what made him break with Hammond is probably not handled as artfully as it could be. (It’s extremely easy to figure out the reason. I literally whispered it to my daughter to prove it was so easy to call. That’s okay, though.) The thing is, Maisie has so much potential which isn’t optimally explored here. But maybe we’ll see some of that mined in a future film. (Also, where did Iris go? I realize she was told to leave, but under the circumstances, shouldn’t she come back at some point? And how is what happens at the end with Maisie possible, unless maybe some stuff is totally off the books? I don’t know.) I do like the way they seem to be building a villain (if you want to call him that) for the franchise. And the story does have some good points. (It made me think a lot about why letting private industry take charge of certain resources feels so wrong.)
Overall:
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is certainly not the worst installment in the franchise. It has stunning visuals and likable stars we’re glad to see again. It also gives the dinosaurs themselves a prominent role. (My daughter said her favorite character in the movie was Blue.) The script is not as sharp as it could be, but if the audience is game, the story works, and we get abundant action, suspense, and thrills as well as a post-credits scene that teases a most intriguing sequel. I cannot stress enough how beautiful the whole thing looks. For that reason, it’s probably worth seeing on the big screen.