By
Pike on
Sunday June 10, 2018 08:47 am
Many fans of the classic 1993 film Jurassic Park are anxiously waiting for the latest instalment of the movie franchise. While the movie is opening on June 22nd in the US, the worldwide audience already had the chance to discover the film in many countries. We are therefore glad to provide you with our exclusive review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
There are many reasons why the Jurassic Park franchise is so successful. But out of many, one is simple. It is about magic. This is the reason why there are children protagonists in any of the films. This is extremely clear in the opening of the 2015 Jurassic World, when the kid is seen in his room, filled with posters of dinosaurs, while the soundtrack is exacerbating this feeling or innocence and magic.
Many of us are imagining that dinosaurs were walking in front of our windows, ages ago. This is deeply anchored with the reality of time. And in a way, thinking about it is experiencing imaginary time travel.
Dinosaurs are the ultimate and most magical depiction of time. What else would you care about on Earth, before mankind? Bacterias? Fishes? There is nothing more magical than dinosaurs. And this is the reason why many fell literally in love with the original Jurassic Park film and why the same many people would watch every single sequel, even though the latest film was clearly not great and was rated average by many.
But let's jump to it, shall we? And before we proceed, the review contains many spoilers. You've been warned.
First, the film quickly shows the main protagonists drawn back to the Isla Nublar island and helping an organization to save a dozen of dinosaurs. While the story is of course exaggerated, in a sense that no one would want to go back to the island after the dramatic events of the previous film, it is believable and more than this, extremely entertaining.
The idea of the volcano works damn well. The volcano is also having a magical dimension similar to the dinosaurs. This is a truly brilliant idea which makes for outstanding images, even though computer generated. Once again, we are in the same Kaaawa valley from all Jurassic Park movies and virtually every single LOST episode. But this time, all goes much faster, in just minutes, we go from seeing many dinosaurs, having Owen facing lava, countless situations of people being either eaten or almost eaten by dinosaurs, to a completely epic scene where the dinosaurs are running from the erupting volcano. What a scene! We then literally jump into the ocean, in a similar and very frightening scene. Dinosaurs are jumping as well. Well, our movie ticket was definitely worth every penny.
Visually, the movie is simply outstanding. There is a shot of a dinosaur at the end of a dark tunnel, slowly moving forward. The lava is also sublime.
It all ends on the protagonists leaving the island, on an extremely moving shot of a friendly dinosaur (a Diplodocus? a Brachiosaurus?) disappearing, which is more moving than anything happening to any real characters during the entire film's run (128 minutes).
After that, a totally new movie actually starts and is a drastic change! To summarize, we move from an adventure film to a horror film taking place in a secluded castle. Many would never ever have thought about writing such storyline. On its own, it is definitely original and interesting. We get to see dinosaurs running around in corridors, jumping on rooftops and more. It feels really as if Alfred Hitchcock was directing a sequel of Jurassic Park in the fifties. Many moviegoers will definitely appreciate some aspects of it all.
But, once again, yet again, as expected, there are no lessons learned from the previous film. In a way, why trying to learn any lessons? The lesson is that the previous film made 1.6 billion at the worldwide box-office. If there would be a lesson, it should be "do exactly the same" and generate the same revenue if lucky.
But nevertheless, the first goal of any film is to be good, simple as that. And only after to try to make even. And Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not what we can confidently say a good movie. We go through the same boring moments of the cliché bad guys. There is not a single ounce of gray. We have the heroes on one side, and the super villains on the other.
Once again, the protagonists love opening doors to the dinosaurs. So much that this is actually the ending of the film, when the heroes are actually deciding the fate of humanity on a single button, deciding to release a dozen dinosaurs into the wild. This is so bad that we cannot even come to understand how this could have happened. This is a clear moment when the screenwriters dictate the actions to his/her characters and not the opposite. We are not talking about letting some ponies and unicorns into the wild. We are talking about deadly and ferocious creatures. As an audience, we can believe many things, such as the protagonists going back onto the island. But we cannot believe that they would release all the dinosaurs in America. Even if that makes a perfect idea for a sequel. There should have been a better way to come up to the same end result.
Once again, we go through the same boring storyline of bad guys wanting to use dinosaurs in war. The producers should have learned their lessons. But as mentioned, there are no lessons learned.
And most important, the characters are legos. They are not made of flesh. We go to the same stupid clichés than we are used to. Chris Pratt's Owen and the little girl are the only interesting characters. All the rest is noise. Bryce Dallas Howard is of course a beautiful woman but that ends it here. She is more flat as a b flat note on a piano.
And we won't even comment the two young characters, who are coming straight from a stupid z-series like NCIS.
Not only this, but the movie is extremely similar to The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the first sequel to the original Jurassic Park movie. In this film, the characters are not as interesting as the original cast, the story is going over the top and there are actually two films into one. One movie on the island and then we take a boat to mainland, where the dinosaurs are killing around the port. It is very ironic that time passes but that the lessons stay the same.
And of course, the movie is asking for a sequel. And this makes perfect sense. While we have had some harsh words about the franchise, we literally cannot wait to see the next film. And you read it right. While the movie itself is not great, we really had much fun watching it.
To summarize, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is an intense film with some great moments but that ultimately fails, mostly because of using the same bad elements from the previous film. I give it 4 out of 10. Average.
