Either the "Jurassic" film franchise is showing its age or the team members behind the latest offering are showing their lack of originality. No matter which is the major culprit, the final result with "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" is little more than a cut-and-paste version of past productions.
What writers Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow _ the team behind the script for "Jurassic World" _ have tried to pass off as an original concept starts three years after the theme park was destroyed when the dinosaurs escaped. The island home of the park, Isla Nublar, is on the verge of being destroyed by a volcano, and that would create the second extinction for the creatures.
Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is recruited to mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs. She gets some help from her former boyfriend and dinosaur whisperer, Owen (Chris Pratt), who goes against his better judgment to save Blue, his lead raptor who's still missing in the wild. It isn't until the pair get to the island that they discover the rescue mission is not what they think.
This is the biggest example of how the new film is little more than cobbled together parts of past films. In 1997's "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," a research team is sent to the site to study the dinosaurs there while another team on the island is intent on capturing the dinosaurs and taking them to San Diego to be part of a new theme park. That's when everything goes wrong.
"Lost Kingdom" is just another rehashing of that storyline. And it's filled with endless stereotypes, starting with the corporate slug (Rafe Spall) who has traded his idealistic worldviews for a chance to be filthy rich. He will stop at nothing to get his money, including working with a shifty stolen goods dealer (Toby Jones) and a big game hunter (Ted Levine). The lack of original thinking with all three is stunning.
The one area where the writers try to be creative _ with the character of the young Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) _ the plot points are so convoluted, it would be easier to clone a dinosaur than to figure out her connection to the events. Mostly, she's there to make sure there is a youngster to terrorize.
Sloppy writing doesn't end there. All logic is tossed out just to create scenes that look good on film. The most glaring moment comes when Owen finds himself in the jungle with lava nipping at his heels. The fact lava is at least 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit doesn't even cause a sweat on the hero. Then there's the scene where Claire hides from the bad guys by putting on a baseball cap. Some leeway has to be given to summer movies as they are mostly designed to be mindless entertainment, but these scenes are too ludicrous to ignore.
These kinds of sequences would have been less notable had director J.A. Bayona ("The Impossible") had not been trying to match so many shots that Steven Spielberg used in "Jurassic Park." From the dinosaur shadows on the wall to the slow terrorizing of the child (by a dinosaur with Nosferatu claws) to a T-Rex attack in the rain, the staging looks far too familiar.
Even some of the casting is an attempt to call back to the better days of "Jurassic Park." B.D. Wong is back to play the scientist behind the dinosaur experiments and Jeff Goldblum reprises his role as Dr. Ian Malcolm. Wong's return is a nice bridge even if his views on the dinosaurs seem to have been corrupted, but Goldblum is completely wasted. His only job is to provide opening and closing bookends that look to have been added after the movie was completed. Goldblum provided a quirkiness to the other films that has been drained out of this appearance.
The movie isn't a complete waste, especially for those looking for pure escapism. "Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom" has plenty of dinosaur action. That's not entirely bad, as the other films have all been filled with plenty of action, just what moviegoers seek during the days of summer. The problem is in this case, we've been there, seen that, bought the T-shirt. Save yourself a few bucks and just pick up a copy of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park."
