Things were starting to get bloated in the Jurassic Park franchise. After the two sequels to the first blockbuster failed to live up to that original film, almost two decades passed before Jurassic World re-launched the franchise with a new cast and crew that still considered the original movies canon.
That first Jurassic World movie was a film that polarized audiences — critics hating it but fans loving it enough to make it the fifth highest grossing movie worldwide of all-time.
Now, with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the franchise is trying to move it forward in a way that seems slightly similar to what the Planet of the Apes reboot did. The dinosaurs are moved off the island and the next movie looks like it could be apocalyptic in nature.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back again as the human leads in a movie that is not quite as enamored with the dinosaurs as before. However, before we see them, the film opens with a Senate hearing about trying to save the dinosaurs from a volcano that is going to destroy the island that Jurassic Park is on.
At that meeting, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum reprising his role from the original trilogy) is on the stand and suggests that they let these dinosaurs die because cloning is a dangerous thing that could cause a lot of problems in the future.
He convinces the United States to just turn their head and let the dinosaurs die.
Owen and Claire had broken up since the first movie but she comes to him for help when Sir Benjamin Lockwood, the former partner of John Hammond that developed the cloning technology, wants to invest his money to save some of the dinosaurs and transport them to his own safe, private island for them to live in peace.
That doesn’t happen as Lockwood is betrayed and the dinosaurs are brought back to America to auction off to private governments and weapons developers. It is up to Owen, Claire and Lockwood’s granddaughter Maisie to try to disrupt the auction and stop the sale of the dinosaurs.
What makes this movie interesting is that it only takes place on the island for a short time and then moves to an old mansion in America where the movie becomes a gothic horror film with the latest cloned dinosaur hunting its prey.
It is this part of the movie that works so well, with J.A. Bayona proving to be the perfect director for this sort of movie. There is little fresh here in the relationship between Owen and Claire — and the sexual tension from the first movie is gone completely.
However, and this will be kept short to avoid spoilers, Maisie is the most important new cast member here and it might be her story that drives the upcoming third movie in the franchise.
The end of this movie is extremely twisted and brings a very controversial and interesting twist to the story of Jurassic World and it looks like the next movie will be completely different than fans of the franchise have gotten used to.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a good movie that gets better in the second half and is taking this entire franchise into a brand-new world.
