Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – Lots of Problems

This post will contain spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

I am not a huge dinosaur fanatic. Many of my friends have been over the years. I typically gravitate to the big budget blockbuster films, so I made my usual trip for the summer to see the movie. I had been pleasantly surprised by Jurassic World. It recaptured some of the magic of Jurassic Park. So I figured I’d see this one too.

I had no real expectations for Fallen Kingdom. The trailers never really blew me away. The immediate thing you learn though is they seem to have hidden the animal rights activism perspective. In one sense, I think respecting habitats, animals, and nature is critical to a healthy planet. Humans are pretty poor stewards of God’s creation.

On the other hand, saving monstrous, unnatural, genetic concoctions birthed by humanity, splicing genes and the likes, seems bad. Such as where in the last movie thousands of people’s lives were put at risk when their peak experiment, the Indominus Rex, broke free. It pretty much ended the theme park’s viability. Sure, not everything is as dangerous as Indominus was in the first movie, but these are not natural animals. These are gene-spliced creations. I don’t know if there was a throw away line in Jurassic World that said reproduction was impossible, but if it is like Jurassic Park, these faux dinosaurs may be able to reproduce. A la the famous quote “life finds a way” from Ian Malcolm. And that is where the big problem comes into play. Even Ian Malcolm seems to realize it in his congressional interview: let them die. As a matter of fact, why didn’t some government go in and wipe them out after the disaster in the first film?

If the genetic concoctions can reproduce like they could in Jurassic Park (all female, gender changing frog DNA shenanigans), given how the movie ends, the world is going to see a whole new meaning to invasive species. From watching nature programs, I don’t think naturalists are very fond of introducing species into foreign environments. Simply living in Florida, I am keenly aware of the hardship the Florida Everglades faces with Burmese pythons, as well as some foreign trees they try to kill off unsuccessfully. You better hope those that got free cannot reproduce… but then, why would another sequel matter if only a handful of dinos got lose? Someone would kill them at some point.

Thus this is the biggest problem with the movies premise in my mind. Animal rights activists want to save something unnatural to our world today when the threat of having a massive invasive species problem exists. These huge beasts could destroy ecosystems. Indominus Rex destroyed Jurassic World’s fake ecosystem in like 30 minutes in the last movie. Speaking of which, why haven’t government’s gone into full detective mode to figure out the utter failures of the owning corporations and haven’t found out that BD Wong’s group is hiding with DNA. Why are people involved with the last park not in jail? Claire Dearing should know Dr. Wu is no good. Why hasn’t he been found out?

Let’s also take into account other problems with this movie:

  • Why did the world’s most expensive theme park get built on an island with a volcano?
  • Since when is perfect human cloning a thing in this universe? If Hammond and Lockwood had a falling out and Hammond and Lockwood were nowhere to be seen 25 years ago, does this mean this clone child is stuck as a child? Or is this an iteration of clone child? How many failures were there? The girl is like 10. Hammond has probably been dead like 20 years now. So when did Lockwood do this and how many times did he do it?
  • Why is no government agency actively monitoring an island of huge beasts?
  • How in the world do you quietly transport all those dinosaurs to some California mansion with no one knowing? The car parade of auction participants was about as absurd as the scene in Get Out too.
  • How can a dinosaur, the rarest and most unique specimen now on the globe, only be sold for a few million a piece? Each one should be worth hundreds of millions, if not billions.  And how are the purchasers going to keep them under wraps?
  • Why do they think they can weaponize dinosaurs? It was a silly plot point in the first movie, but is downright dumb now. If we cannot control lions, tigers, and other aggressive animals, why would we with things 10 times larger?

There are a lot more questions I could ask. I will say that the creature feature horror elements work pretty well.  The opening was fun, but rushed. The characters were mostly annoying, save Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Ted Levine. The special effects are a bit inconsistent, but the movie is visually fun to look at on the big screen.

Ultimately, I think the movie fails with the narrative. By comparison, I didn’t like The Lost World, but the narrative was fine. The execution and acting was awful. In the end, I don’t care enough about dinosaurs to think anymore on this movie. But I just found the animal rights activism that ultimately leads to the worst case of invasive species danger a bit inconsistent with how the world would or should probably operate today.