5 Best And 5 Worst Things About Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Ladies and gentlemen, the park is open for business yet again. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is here, bringing with it laughs, scares, and a whole lot of dinosaurs. Picking up after the events of 2015's Jurassic World, the film sees Chris Pratt's Owen Grady and Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing team back up at the behest of one of the park's original benefactors. Why? So they can save the dinosaurs still residing on Isla Nublar from a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that would wipe dinosaurs from the planet yet again. As you could probably guess, it doesn't quite go as planned. The film is full of thrills sure to satisfy longtime fans of the franchise, but it certainly isn't without its imperfections. For every high there's a low to match, and anyone expecting the best film of the franchise may want to temper their expectations. Be warned: there are spoilers ahead as we break down the five best and five worst things about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. 

We get what the filmmakers behind the two Jurassic World films are going for with Chris Pratt's Owen Grady. He is, in theory, the perfect action hero. He's cool and suave as he shamelessly flirts with Claire and dripping machismo as he rides a motorcycle alongside a pack of Velociraptors in the first Jurassic World film (admittedly maybe the coolest thing a person could do onscreen). Owen should be a franchise highlight. Instead he's one of Jurassic World's biggest detriments. That carries over in his return in Fallen Kingdom.

Owen is clearly modeled after characters like Han Solo and Pratt's own Star-Lord. The problem is that Owen's writing and performance lacks the self-awareness of that sort of character. We only like watching sleazy jerks in the hero role if they have an arc, if they learn to be better. It also helps to examine why the characters act that way, often revealing that their machismo is a front for insecurity. Owen has none of this. He's a pompous jerk and, instead of realizing he needs to improve, stays the same and is rewarded for doing so. It makes for an utterly insufferable character that you can't help but wish would get turned into T-Rex chow so we could spend more time with less-awful characters.

There's a rule of storytelling that has been dubbed "Double Mumbo Jumbo." It argues that your audience can buy one drastic otherworldly twist or function in the world of the story, but never two. So, for example, an audience can absolutely buy a world in which dinosaurs have been brought back to life through genetic engineering. However, the fabric of that story is irreparably torn if another twist is thrown in. 

That's exactly what happens in Fallen Kingdom. The entire film series is structured around the idea of dinosaurs existing via genetic experimentation. Even some of the weirder elements like the creation of genetically-spliced dinosaurs feel true to that fiction. Fallen Kingdom invokes Double Mumbo Jumbo in its second act, though. A human character, the apparent granddaughter of the former partner of park founder John Hammond, is revealed to be a clone of his deceased daughter. It's a bizarre moment, one that feels massively disruptive to the universe. Despite having a tie to the film's original fictional twist, it feels completely alien here. What's worse is that after being revealed, it's never mentioned again. There's a vague allusion to it during part of the film's climax, but otherwise at no point does anyone acknowledge this game-changing revelation. In a film filled with ridiculous moments, this is perhaps the single most ridiculous.

Sometimes bad decisions in movies make a certain degree of sense in the world's established fiction. We understand the temptation to revisit Jurassic Park in the fiction of the films in the series. While we, as viewers, can observe that there's literally no way a third trip to the ruins of Jurassic Park will go well, we can suspend our disbelief enough to buy into the story. However, this suspension has limits and Fallen Kingdom shatters those limits like a brick through a window.

The downfall of the second park, Jurassic World, is due almost entirely to the creation of Indominus Rex, a genetically engineered dinosaur created by Dr. Henry Wu, a character who's been around since the very first film. It wreaks havoc on the park and destroys the work of everyone involved in its creation. Wu, having now experienced the fall of not one but two dinosaur theme parks, should clearly know better than to play God by now. But Fallen Kingdom asks us to believe that he's dumb enough to create a second genetically engineered dinosaur using the DNA of Indominus Rex, the creature that destroyed Jurassic World to begin with. Not only is the Indoraptor a lazy recycled plot point, it's wholly unbelievable at this point that any character would dare try to create it. Because it's such a huge part of the film's story, it hinges the audience's suspension of disbelief on a flimsy plot point that doesn't hold up at all.

Most Jurassic Park films are ultimately pretty cut and dry. There are people on an island, or perhaps in a city. There happen to be dinosaurs on that island or in that city. The people then have to run from the dinosaurs. It's a brilliantly simple premise rooted in the human desire to survive. Fallen Kingdom tries to be more than that, and it fails miserably in the process.

There is so much going on in Fallen Kingdom. There's an extinction-level event that's going to take out all of the dinosaurs from Jurassic World. There's a rescue mission and then there's a double-cross and then there's a plot to sell those dinosaurs to shady millionaires. There's also a genetically-engineered dinosaur and a little girl with a mysterious backstory (who turns out to be a human clone). It's all needlessly complicated when all it really needs to be is a movie about people running from giant lizards who are going to kill them. Let's be clear: we're not knocking film-making ambition. Trying to become something more than a simple survival movie is admirable. Fallen Kingdom just isn't very good at it.

When it comes to villains, the Jurassic Park movies may feature the occasional greedy scientists and military contractors, but the true antagonists are usually T-Rexes and raptors and genetically engineered reptilian nightmares that want to, you know, eat our protagonists for dinner. To its credit, Fallen Kingdom tries something new in creating a situation in which we're ultimately supposed to root for the dinosaurs alongside the human protagonists. Unfortunately, it needs more villains to replace the dinos and it resorts to some genuinely bizarre measures to fill the void.

The film's second act features an cartoonish litany of black-suited bad guys showing up at the aforementioned mansion for a dinosaur auction, complete with Toby Jones – who previously played Hydra scientist-turned-computer-brain Arnim Zola — as a sinister southern auctioneer. It's a scene ripped straight from a Batman comic, a veritable legion of supervillains gathered to use their astronomically large bank accounts to buy ankylosauruses and pterodactyls to...like, have them, for some reason? The dinosaurs aren't trained and weaponized like the Indoraptor, so one has to wonder what the logic behind buying them for use as weapons might be, so there's a logical fallacy on top of the already ridiculous premise. In a movie that features a genetically engineered and fully weaponized Velociraptor hybrid, somehow the most surreal characters are a bunch of humans. Plus none of those mad scientists or men of ill repute are anywhere near as scary as a good old-fashioned Tyrannosaurus Rex.