I’ve already lurched and lumbered my way through the first four Jurassic Parks, so there’s no reason to keep quiet about No. 5, aka Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom—which I would rate as actually the third best in the franchise.
My rankings are quite idiosyncratic, because I give first place to the generally unloved Jurassic Park III, which can be described with some accuracy as “The Awful Truth Meets Dinosaurs”, but since I love The Awful Truth and I love dinosaurs, where’s the problem?1Jurassic Park III was a slimmed down version of the first two films, less weighted down with stars and “meta” speculation about God and man and dinosaurs and that’s why it worked for me.
I’d rank the original Jurassic Park second to JP III. The CGI and the life-size dinosaur animatronic models of JP I came as a revelation, and, despite too much talk, and too many ideas, Spielberg’s original dino versus human setpieces were undeniably brilliant. JP II I found to be a real clunker, simply rehashing everything that had been done better the first time around. JPIV was marginally better, but only marginally.2
JP V shines for having the guts to realize that it’s time to take the dinos off Isla Nublar. That island bit has been done to death, amirite? The film spends about 45 minutes getting the leads—Chris Pratt as dino-“handler” Owen Grady and Brice Dallas Howard as reformed corporate tight-ass turned nature lover Claire Dearing—back on the island to save the dinos because the whole place is going to blow, thanks to a monster volcano that sort of materialized out of nowhere. Despite a kick-ass fight between a horned dinosaur (not a Triceratops, which is the only one I can recognize) and a carnivore (maybe an Allosaur), a lot of the action here, particularly the almost ever-present lava flows, comes uncomfortably close to B-movie production levels. Lava is treated like some sort of obnoxious goo that’s really gross if it gets on you. Real lava is at least 1000° F, and if it’s flowing near you you’re not toast, you’re ashes.3
As you might expect from these films—JP III excepted, which is one reason why I like it so much—we discover that there are evil, corporate interests at work behind the scenes, who want the dinos for evil, corporate things, and our heroes, who’ve been joined by a couple of other virtuous dino-lovers, have been outhustled, outwitted, and outgunned, and the dinos are not being shipped off to another dino Eden but rather to an enormous chateau that appears to be located somewhere in the Rockies—the gatekeeper’s cottage at the entrance of Steven Spielberg’s Colorado getaway, perhaps. As the camera follows the train of trailer trucks bearing the dinos away to this (no doubt evil) mountain lair, a hilarious example of overwrought product placement occurs: as the last truck enters the parking lot, the camera veers to the left to give a quick glimpse of the polished fanny of a Rolls-Royce! A Rolls! Wow, these people are rich!
Yeah, I forgot to tell you the exact setup of this evil mountain lair. It’s got this old dying rich guy who I guess owns the place, and this evil other guy, and a dried-up, mysterious governess type, and this poor little rich girl chick, sort of like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with dinosaurs! Sounds strange, I know, but it pretty much works. Naturally, a bunch of rich evil capitalist types show up for a dino auction, and a satisfying number of them get eaten, though I personally would have liked to see a few more end up as dino chow, and there’s also a big battle between a “good” velociraptor—she shows “compassion”, Owen tells us4—and a bad, souped up dinosaur, sort of a velociraptor on evil steroids. Yeah, it is “unusual” to see all this taking place amidst black walnut wainscoting and carved ceilings, but, as I’ve said before, Americans like to look at wood and, as I’ve also said before, it works. As a final kicker, we learn that the little girl isn’t literally anyone’s daughter—she’s the clone of her dead mother, which would make her her mom’s twin. Being a clone herself, she decides that other clones have the right to live as well, and she releases the dinosaurs, though how they’re going to live in Colorado—well, I guess they’ll have to work that out for themselves.
I get the feeling that there was more backstory for the clone girl (Isabella Sermon as “Maisie Lockwood”5) that got cut out, reasonably enough, to make room for the dinos. There’s also a (highly dispensable) prologue and postlogue of sorts in the form of “congressional testimony” delivered by entirely too full of himself for my tastes Jeff Goldblum, returning as chaotologist Ian Malcolm6 to ruminate aimlessly on “man” (or I guess “humans”) and “Nature”, invariably making us look like the bad guys! Thanks for nothing, Jeff!
Afterwords
Is there room for a Jurassic Park VI? Why not? It’s not like Hollywood is going to run out of evil capitalists any time soon!
- Because there’s nothing like wrasslin’ and hasslin’ a Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus to bring a divorced couple (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) back together. ↩︎
- If you’re interested, I go into all this in excruciating detail in the piece linked in my first paragraph. ↩︎
- At one point, Owen appears to get some lava on his shoe, as though it were hot tar. ↩︎
- Sorry, but the notion that a reptile can show compassion is almost as hazardous to your health as the notion that getting lava on your shoe is merely an inconvenience. ↩︎
- A rich girl named “Maisie”? Perhaps a clever screenwriter was thinking of Henry James’ classic exercise in POV, “What Maisie Knew”. ↩︎
- Absolutely nothing Dr. Malcolm ever says has the least bit to do with chaos “theory”. ↩︎
