Rating: C+
Dir: Gareth Edwards
Star: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend
And it was going so well, too. Ok, perhaps not necessarily “well,” but I would accept “adequately,” after the way the series has been in slow decline. I was thinking before we started watching how almost every moment I remember from the franchise comes from the original movie, and the sense of awed wonder it provoked. After that? Chris Pratt doing hand gestures at a velociraptor is about my only lasting impression. I’d completely forgotten the dinoparkour which impressed me so much in the last installment, until I re-read my review. Initially, this seemed to be getting back to basics. Big Pharma rep Martin Krebs (Friend) recruits merc Zora Bennett (Johansson) to go to Dino Island and retrieve samples.
They should have left it at that. Sure, add team members, like Zora’s lieutenant, Duncan Kincaid (Ali), and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Bailey), who is there to say crypto-communist things like, “What if we get the samples and we don’t give them over to a company that makes a lifesaving drug, and then prices it so 99% of the planet can’t afford it?” Well, then: the drug doesn’t get made at all, Bernie, despite your blabber about “open source” research. Anyway, they need samples from the biggest dinos on land, sea and air. A potentially perfect scenario, especially when you’ve got the guy who rebooted Godzilla in the director’s chair. It’s all you need. Unfortunately, 25 minutes in, la familia irritante show up.
Their yacht, conveniently near the supposedly ultra off-limits island where the creatures live, is attacked by a Mosasaurus. Naturally, the special ops team have to go rescue them, and they then tag along on the mission, get separated and into perils of their own. Do any of them get eaten? That was certainly my increasingly fervent wish. It appears that the entire Jurassic franchise is contractually obliged, not just to have dinosaurs, but annoying brats too. There’s three of them here: don’t tell me the makers couldn’t sacrifice one child to a T-Rex. Instead, it only gets to chew down on a rubber dinghy. In a sterling testament to its robustness, the dinghy is next seen floating sturdily and intact down the river, family of four aboard. I’ll take two, please.
When doing what it should be doing, I didn’t think the film was bad. Though Chris? She hated it. I thought the scene where they have to go into a Quetzalcoatlus nest to get their sample, is a lot of fun. As is the boss level, which resembles the idiot cousin of a Tyrannosaur (Retardosaurus Rex?) crossed with the xenomorph from Alien. Sadly, it still insists on eating only the bad people, not Senor Irritante and his brood. At least it did concentrate on Man vs. Very Large Reptiles, rather than faffing around with locusts or whatever. However, I have a feeling that, come the time of the next installment, I am going to have forgotten just about everything from this installment too.