Tuesday 3 July 2018

Film Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
2 July 2018
128 mins
PG-13
J. A. Bayona (Director)
Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard
Sci-Fi/Adventure
 
When the island's dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.
(IMDB Synopsis)

Five films in, has the Jurassic Park franchise reached a point where it needs to bow out? I think so. Fallen Kingdom was enjoyable enough--an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours--but it also had a lot of problems. In fantasy and sci-fi, you always need to be willing to accept things as possible that wouldn't work in our world; however, if you come out of a movie commenting on how things within the film contradicted each other, there's a problem. E.g. How is turning off the lights going to help them escape a creature whose heightened sense of smell has already been mentioned several times? I also fear they've run out of interesting places to go with the storylines, which are all becoming rehashes of past material. This was definitely a weaker film than Jurassic World, and even that wasn't as engaging as the first and third movies in the Jurassic Park trilogy. (We won't talk about Lost World.) It seems every film now has to have a new bigger and meaning dinosaur, while the raptors, which were genuinely scary in the past, have been neutered. In conclusion, I am giving this three stars. It was entertaining enough, but it was also highly flawed, and I think perfectly demonstrates that franchises sometimes need to learn when the time has come to let go.

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