‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ is pretty much “Establishing Shots: The Movie”

Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. As if the story in these films actually matters.

Do you like exposition? Do you like thirty minutes of establishing shots? Do you like waiting until the second act to see the only awesome actions scenes? Then this is the movie for you. As fun as the Jurassic series has been, there comes a point where they just don’t seem to know what they were doing. You might think I’m talking about Jurassic Park III, but no, I fully mean Fallen Kingdom.

The awesome

While Fallen Kingdom has many faults, it’s also much better than its predecessor when it comes to certain things, like the action. The film also does a decently good job of diversifying its extinct animals and has one of the most heart wrenching scenes known to cinema. RIP Longneck Dino.

Another thing the film did an excellent job on was dividing the audience on the ethical question on whether or not the dinosaurs should be left to die. Most people probably had their minds made up going into the theater, but it was nice to see both sides of the argument shown.

The why bother?

There were so many moments during this film where you just sit there and think “this is great and all, but why? Why do any of this?” The action is fun, but character development is cool too. I hardly felt close to these characters at all. Even Owen, who had the most character development, was hard to connect to. It was nice to see some backstory of Blue, but again I don’t feel attached. I fully expected Blue to die along with the Indoraptor and it didn’t even matter to me.

Fallen Kingdom didn’t really have a strong antagonist. It had many antagonists but none of them were well developed, besides Dr. Wu. There’s several people and animals that are antagonists, and even the volcano itself, but none of which felt like a real threat. We all knew none of the main characters were going to die, so why bother acting like they were in real danger?

Another failing point are the new characters. We have Ms. Badass (Daniella Pineda), Mr. Geek (Justice Smith). Cloney McCloneface (Isabella Sermon), and the list goes on. Did any of them stand out to you besides Cloney? No?

Perhaps one of the largest bombshells in Fallen Kingdom is that Lockwood created an actual living clone of his daughter. That’s insane, but then there’s no mention of it again. Why bother bringing something like that to the table just to gloss over it. Is that the direction the Jurassic series is headed? I certainly hope not.

One of my personal complaints is that the movie decided to release the Mosasaurus first and did nothing with it until the end of the film. That’s perhaps one of the more interesting animals but they underutilize it. Speaking of underutilizing characters, one of the biggest gripes for the film is the fact that it severely underutilized Jeff Goldblum. He’s in a court hearing and that’s it. His character doesn’t help out in any way other than arguing that the dino’s should die. It’s nice that’s he’s back, but at that point, why both including him?

In the end

At the end of the day, this is a filler film. They clearly want to set up some HUGE things in the next film like dinosaurs living among people and human cloning, but it took an entire movie to set that up. Because of that, Fallen Kingdom fell short of what it could have been.