Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Review and more!

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

3 ½ stars

The original Jurassic Park is one of my all time favorite movies of all time, and the ultimate summer movie. The OG park was a frightening, heartfelt, intellectual, thrill ride that took movie going experience to a whole new level. That movie remained popular in theatres for months, and was a global sensation. All that said, that type of Jurassic Park movie experience can never be replicated and I thought the first Jurassic World took a pretty good stab getting close to what made the OG JP great. It lacked the intellect and layered characters of the original, but captured the wonder and awe of a world with dinosaurs and added something new with a real working theme park. Even though I highly enjoyed Jurassic World, my expectations were pretty low for Fallen Kingdom. The trailers didn’t grab me and the whole plot point of militarizing dinosaurs, first introduced in Jurassic World, is pretty dumb. However, I was pleasantly surprised that Fallen Kingdom did have some fantastic action set pieces along with a few twists that weren’t spoiled in the trailers. A lot of the plot borrows from the previous movies, especially The Lost World and Jurassic World, but they change up the setting in the second half (to a spooky mansion) and even though it doesn’t all work it’s at least different. And surprisingly, I really enjoyed the first half (Escape from Dino-Island) even if most the best parts were spoiled in the trailers. There are definitely some jumps in logic, characters constantly make dumb decisions and the villain’s plan is ridiculous. Chris Pratt and Dallas Howard’s characters are fine, but inconsistent. In the last movie, Dallas Howard portrayed a go-getter businesswoman who cared very little about the dino-assets but now she’s in charge of a non-profit championing dinosaur rights? And apparently Starlord is an animal behaviorist/MMA fighter who can take out 5 trained mercenaries without blinking an eye (I think this was also the Rock’s character in Rampage). So if you skim over all those nonsensical plot points, the movie itself is actually a lot of fun and truly frightening in sections with great, and sometimes contrived, cinematography. Also there is a heartfelt moment with a brachiosaur, along with an interesting idea about what role cloning should play in our world of endangered and disappearing species (an idea which I wished they had leaned more into). And one last complaint about the advertising campaign, it also did the cardinal sin of putting in the last shot of the movie into the promotional materials. Shame on marketing!

In case you’re curious here’s my ranking of all the Jurassic Park Movies:

Jurassic Park 5 stars (Greatest of all time)

Jurassic World 4 stars

The Lost World 3 ½ stars

Fallen Kingdom 3 ½ stars

Jurassic Park 3 2 stars (The worst by far)

Quick Hits:

Ocean’s 8

3 ½ stars

Slick heist movie with fun characters, Ocean’s 8 is pretty solid entry into the mixed bag of Ocean’s movies. However, I thought the heist itself could have used a little bit more tension and there was character change of heart in the third act that I didn’t quite buy.

 

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

4 stars

I’ve admired Fred Rogers for quite some time, the actual TV program was a little slow for me as a kid, but he along with the Jim Henson Workshop worked wonders for PBS and children’s entertainment. And he was actually a good, wholesome human being. So often it’s revealed that someone we admire isn’t actually who we think they are, so in that way this film was refreshing and inspiring, if not overly straightforward. However if you’re for tension or a big twist, you will be disappointed. I enjoyed all the behind the scenes look and insight into Fred’s life and idealism. Something that stood out to me about the film, was that it showed that Mr. Rogers wasn’t an extraordinarily talented at anything. He wasn’t the best musician or singer or songwriter or artist. His show (and his life) was purely driven by his honesty and his idealism. That’s worth a watch.