Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

The original books were better.

First book was good, second book was for $.

I liked the second one, too.

Saw it, very belatedly.

Eh, feels like it's kinda played-out as a franchise.

They introduce James Cromwell, totally ret-conned in as some partner of Hammond's from back in the day. He's got a precocious young granddaughter with a knack for getting into places she shouldn't be going. I guessed the secret about her from the very first line of exposition about her character. You probably will, too. I'm annoyed that this aspect doesn't have a bigger part of the story; it's more interesting.

The first half of the movie is better, though it feels a bit repetitive from earlier films. The novelty this time is that there's a ticking time bomb: a volcano's going to destroy Jurassic World. Guess when they built the park the geologists came up a bit short on their due diligence. Anyway, they spend the first half of the movie trying to rescue dinos from the island before it goes ka-blooey.

You know who the bad guys are right off the bat; it would've been a nice surprise if either of them had been a misunderstood good guy, but, no. They also do senselessly evil things...and some things that are just senseless. I mean, really, Wheatley (Ted Levine) gets in a cage with a supposedly tranquilized super-raptor, just so he can collect a tooth as a trophy? Deserved to be torn limb from limb.

At one point, the bad guys are auctioning off the dinosaurs to some rich but clearly nefarious people. They stand to make...get this...$100 miliion! Why, it only cost billions I'm sure to engineer the dinos in the first place. They would've gotten more profit by investing in dinosaur action movies. Sadly. This one made $1.2 billion, so it will be back.

The last third is like a monster-in-a-haunted-house bit, with our heroes creeping around a mansion trying not to run into the (yet another) genetically-engineered even-more-agressive-and-intelligent-dino-super-monster.

This movie came THIS CLOSE to redeeming itself. In the final moments, a character is faced with a hard choice. The character makes the CORRECT choice, the responsible choice, the defensible choice, the sane choice. We the audience get choked up knowing this is how it has to be. I actually smiled because the producers had the balls to go this way. Of course, this is not the crowd-pleasing choice, so events INSTANTLY transpire to make that choice irrelevant. Sigh.

If there HAD been an end credits scene, it would have to have been army guys getting into helicopters to go waste a shitload of dinosaurs.

Not nearly enough Goldblum. Not nearly.

I suppose I was entertained, but I didn't feel like I saw anything new; quite the contrary, a lot of this feels re-cycled.

6/10.

I liked it better than the first Jurassic World.

Still pretty shit though.

Disagree.

Agree.

I agree with another critic who said that Pratt is totally wasted here. Why hire Chris Pratt but not have him be Chris Pratt?