J.A. Bayona

(On Cable TV, March 2019) I dearly love the first Jurassic Park film, but the rest of the series I can drop in an instant, especially once you take away the action set pieces that the rest seem structured around. I do believe that there are no creative or artistic impulses to the series—well, other than filmmakers jumping up and down while screaming DINOSAUR ACTION!!! Each new film seems intent on undermining the series’ laughable mythology, marginalizing people in favour of their reptilian overlords. This reaches a climax in Fallen Kingdom as the series seems intent to replace humans with dinosaurs. Inelegantly structured in distinct halves, the first chunk of the film takes us to a thrilling end-of-the-world segment on a self-destructing island for poorly justified reasons, but at least there’s a thrilling gyrosphere one-shot that’s suitably claustrophobic. The second half, on the other hand, gets worse and worse despite some interesting gothic atmosphere early on. The ending snatches a sequel out of the jaws of victory, releasing dinosaurs into the wild for obvious sequel-baiting action, and passing the action off as a muddled kinship of cloned entities. Still, even with the stench of uninspired moneymaking intent, there are good spots here and there. Director J. A. Bayona does have a bit of Spielbergian flair in the way he moves his camera and choreographs the special-effects-heavy action. Bryce Dallas Howard (in more sensible footwear) and Chris Pratt remain likable, with noted contributions by Toby Jones and Daniella Pineda. This being said, it doesn’t take much to be vexed by the inevitable, unnecessary, slightly obnoxious result. Fallen Kingdom simply feels fundamentally broken in how it, motivated by greed, tries to pass survival of dinosaurs as noble cause. We all know it’s to sell even more tickets later on, and that the follow-up movies will get worse and worse.