FIRST of all, I really had fun with Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom. As with the park inspired by those prehistoric beings, the movie was like a wild ride: once it starts, you only have two options—to ride forever or get down and realize things are only fun up to a certain point.
The generation of kids whose talents when they were 6 or 7 years of age were identifying these prehistoric giants have all grown by now. Unlike the Star Wars franchise, the Jurassic tale and its accompanying dinosaurs—again contrary to the interminable geologic time—have quite dated. I mean, what can you do with dinosaurs? What can you do with a park?
What can you do with an island?
By the time Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom opens, the dinosaurs are about to be extinct again. On Nublar Island, a massive volcanic eruption is about to take place. There are dinosaurs living on that island. In mainland USA, the Senate is conducting a hearing. As key resource speaker, Dr. Ian Malcolm is speaking out his mind. He reminds us of what happened many years ago when a scientist John Hammond started the cloning of dinosaurs. That was an intervention, which ruined the nature of nature. Malcolm is saying how nature has been tampered and, presently, with the animals there on that island facing destruction, nature should be allowed to take its course.
Meanwhile, a group is fighting for the preservation of the dinosaurs on that island. The movement is ran by the Dinosaur Protection Group and is spearheaded by Claire, the same person who once managed the Jurassic World theme park. The hearing at the Senate results in the decision not to protect or save anymore the dinosaurs if and when the volcanic operation becomes cataclysmic. The contention is that the dinosaurs should not have been brought back in the first place, as their species were meant to serve or be a part of one era.
Claire is summoned by Benjamin Lockwood, the partner of Hammond. Claire goes to the rich man’s mansion and shares with him her desire to bring into fruition a more systematic way of protecting dinosaurs. Lockwood has a fantastic idea: for his and his money to find people who will assist him in his desire to transfer the dinosaurs to another island where they will be allowed to live but without human presence and participation.
Lockwood, now lacking physical mobility, relies on his assistant, Eli Mills. The plan is fantastic and formidable. But uppermost in Claire’s mind is her dream to save all the dinosaurs. She contacts Owen Grady, the famous velociraptor-trainer.
It is difficult enough to transfer some 11 species of dinosaurs but the film tells us of the velociraptor. Some years back, the cloning process had produced several velociraptors; one of these is Blue, so called because of different blue scaly strips on its back. Blue was trained by Owen Grady and, already, we can always anticipate what will happen if Blue and Owen meet again.
Up to the point where Clair and Owen are traveling to the island, the whole film offers grittiness and suspense, and even intellectual questions about human beings and nature.
Indeed, on the island, Owen and Claire discover too soon that not everyone has a heart for dinosaurs and their welfare.
The people contracted to save the dinosaurs have a different design on these vestiges of prehistory.
Several things in Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom refuses to play. When the team out to preserve the dinosaur arrives on the island, they confront a world where grasses seem thicker, trees more massive and the dinosaurs as big as the heavens. Placed inside steel cages, the dinosaurs loses their gargantuan size. Transported, they even look mighty smaller. But transported they all are, except for many left on the island.
The premise of how dinosaurs and human beings could interact is flawed. The dinosaur, if we go back to our natural history, were present in another period when man was still not around. But this whole Jurassic enterprise place the two together, with the same old conceit that man tames nature, even if the representation of that nature is in the form of a behemoth. And Owen tames no less than the velociraptor.
The problem with the film is not in the suspension of disbelief that dinosaurs can live in the modern world; the crisis is really in the myth of man—the regular white man and white woman, the intrepid American, brave and selfless enough to save a wild beast.
What works in the film is really the proposition of dinosaurs in a sense taken from their time, from a geologic past, and brought to our time. The implication in that experiment and cloning is a veritable treasure chest of gems about science and technology. Men and women play god in this film without their knowing it. This is the magic of the film before the tricks are not only revealed but resolved toward the end, when dinosaurs once more roam the earth as if everything is fine and dandy.
There is a magical scene in the film, which tells us what is wrong with the aim of Claire and all the members of the Dinosaur Protection Group in the first place. This is the scene where the big boat carrying several species of dinosaurs leave the island and, out there in the smoke, the tallest of the dinosaur is “abandoned.” Strangely, the film makes us feel for the dinosaurs, as if we are leaving a kin, a friend on an island that is about to split apart or be swallowed by the earth and the sea. But, of course, when in the real natural history, when dinosaurs started fading away, we were not there to pine for them, to cry our hearts out as they vanished into thousands and thousands of years. But now, we are given that problem, an unnecessary problem when it comes to species and survival in the world that will always remain natural.
Bryce Dallas-Howard and Chris Pratt are the typical Hollywood specimen of men and women with unnatural strength and capacity to sympathize with anyone—including dinosaurs. Geraldine Chaplin and James Cromwell are presences. The other actors in the film are the dinosaurs themselves filling the screen with their fabulous sizes, height, width and gravitas. When the volcano starts to rumble and spew lava, the scene of dinosaurs running for their lives will touch anyone, give and take some scientific insights.
Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom is directed by J. A. Bayona. It’s distributed by Universal Pictures.