This post contains spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
When Jurassic World premiered three years ago, I entered the movie theater with high hopes. I'd grown up loving Jurassic Park, which made me want to be a paleontologist even though I hated science and kick-started my obsession with Jeff Goldblum before I hit puberty. I knew that franchise reboots were a risky business, but since my other childhood favorite — Mission: Impossible — had recently come back in a big way, I thought maybe Jurassic World could do the same for Jurassic Park. It did not.
And yet three years later, walking into a screening of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I had not learned my lesson. I still carried a tiny flame of optimism that the movie might not let me down. Jeff Goldblum was back! Chris Pratt was handsome-ish! The dinosaurs were…there! Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't be that terrible. Not as good as the original, obviously, but slightly better than the hot pteranodon mess of Jurassic Park III.
And so it is with a heavy heart that I report that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not only just not good, but it is bad. Very bad. Extremely bad. So bad that I worry it has ruined my love for the entire Jurassic Park franchise for eternity. Will I ever ride the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios and not have my joy ruined by the thought of Toby Jones selling dinosaurs as WMDs? Will I ever hear John Williams's score and not weep for the despoiled memory of Dr. John Hammond? Will I ever truly love again?
Let's start with the plot, which is — and I say this without any of the love that I bestow on this word when I use it to describe something like the events of Fast Five — insane. Isla Nublar is on the verge of destruction thanks to a previously dormant volcano that is now erupting and threatening the lives of the dinosaurs that got left behind at the end of Jurassic World. Already, I am angry. I have never read Michael Crichton's book so if this is in there don't @ me, but where in movie canon does anyone ever say that Isla Nublar is home to a volcano? And if Isla Nublar were home to a volcano that was anything other than super fucking extinct, why in the world would you put a theme park full of living dinosaurs on it? JOHN HAMMOND WOULD NEVER.
But I digress. The park is a volcano. Bryce Dallas Howard is worried about the dinosaurs and agrees to take a meeting with a rich man who is John Hammond's hitherto unmentioned business partner, The Guy from Babe, and his young assistant, Not Patrick Wilson But Kind of Looks Like Patrick Wilson. (My disrespect for this movie runs so deep that I refuse to look up any character or actor names on IMDb.) Not Patrick Wilson is like, "Yes, we're saving the dinos, just go get Chris Pratt and you guys can tag along on our Dino Saving Journey." It is immediately clear that Not Patrick Wilson is going to double-cross them, but Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't notice because she's the kind of person who thinks high heels are sensible footwear for a dino theme park.
Long story short, Not Patrick Wilson is actually spearheading a Dino Kidnapping Mission because he wants to sell genetically modified dinosaurs on the black market for combat purposes. The movie never explains what kind of dystopian hell future these people are living in that they can just roll up to a battlefield with a huge reptile like it's NBD, but again, I digress. Some more stuff happens, Guy from Babe turns out to be cloning humans, too (I don't even want to get into it), Chris Pratt saves everybody, and the dinosaurs escape.
I know it's counterintuitive to quibble about things like "real-world implications of deep-state operatives buying dinosaurs" when you’re watching a movie about, well, dinosaurs, but my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. If you want me to accept that B.D. Wong can create a whole new species of dinosaur using nothing but a vial of blood and a wink, then you're going to have to curb your impulses somewhere between "human clone who travels by dumbwaiter" and "Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt successfully pretending they want to have sex with each other." You get one, Fallen Kingdom writers. You get one.
The presence of Jeff Goldblum cannot even save the movie, because (1) he's in it for about five minutes total and (2) his first appearance comes so early that you spend the rest of the run time thinking a second Jurassic Park O.G. is going to make a cameo. I kept waiting for Sam Neill to show up and tell everybody they were idiots, or Laura Dern to remind Bryce that combat boots are the best form of dinosaur-hunting footwear, but no. All you get is B.D. Wong popping up to betray all his moral impulses, which doesn't even count because he was in the first Jurassic World, too.
There are moments when you can tell the filmmakers are trying to channel the magic of the original — a dinosaur diving at a girl hiding behind a metal door is an obvious homage to the kitchen scene, for example — but the movie is such a mess that any pleasant sensation of nostalgia is tainted with the feeling that you're being pandered to by the filmmakers. I mean, this movie destroys Isla Nublar! Who gave them permission?!
What's most disheartening about all this is the knowledge that there's going to be at least one more installment in the series — the dinosaurs are out in the open now, so I guess Chris Pratt will have to deal with it. But to paraphrase the great chaos theorist Ian Malcolm: Your studio executives were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
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