Despite this franchise beginning life with a film that was one of my most re-watched as a kid, it has recently made ones that I'd rather forget and ignore.
Like many, I will forever love Jurassic Park. As a kid, I loved it for the action and dinosaurs and now as an adult I massively appreciate the writing and character development. You can see how driven it is by its ideas.
I can probably speak for a lot of people that as a kid, our favourite scenes featured a T-Rex or a Velociraptor. But as we grow up, we now know the best scene is when our main characters are having lunch.
Nowadays, it's not really working. Jurassic World did start with some promise as it was a solid entertaining watch with enough nostalgia to still make me feel it can be its own thing. But what happened in its sequel Fallen Kingdom made me go into this with the lowest of expectations.
With the marketing throwing everything at it and it being billed as the franchise finale, I was hoping it would least give us a reminder as to what made this concept work.
As much as I was heading into the film with an open mind as always, it didn't take long for me to start having doubts. While there were nice some nostalgic moments. It wasn't enough to ignore the issues. Firstly for a dinosaur film, it amazed me how little the story was actually about the dinosaurs. They were used more for background noise and in the action sequences.
There was thankfully one decent sequence for me with genuine tension, and even in that portion it blatantly copies from Skyfall and The Bourne Ultimatum.
By the end, it ends up being pretty incoherent, trying to be too many things, has no drive to be entertaining and is very unremarkable as a whole.
While the cast is a pretty cool one, they didn't deliver much. Chris Pratt was like seeing a different person. His charisma was not there which surprised me the most. It was like those aliens in Space Jam took away his talent. While Bryce Dallas Howard was fine in this, I have honestly never invested much in her character in the entire trilogy. I do like her as an actor. But apart from a few moments in the first Jurassic World, I honestly didn't really care.
There were some nice moments with Sam Neill and Laura Dern's characters. I liked that as soon as Jeff Goldbum comes on screen, it's his show. The random jokes, his mannerisms at least try to give the film some comedic relief. But the ship had already sailed for me on my view of this final installment.
Campbell Scott was an absolute waste of space. He's the closest thing to an antagonist in this film and he is as weak as weak can be. In terms of some of the new talent involved, I felt Mamoudou Athie showed the most promise.
I'm not going to take it out too much on the cast, as the script was pretty bad. There is a lot of exposition and they never mask it over with some clever structure and some of the lines the actors have to react with made me constantly rolling my eyes at. With the writers being genuine professionals and having a solid back catalogue, I'm surprised that they came up with this and it got the pass by the studio.
With a lot of the cast having plenty of development in past films to make them likable or engaging, this film diminished all of that and you had no-one to root for
The special effects continue to add to my belief that they have got progressively worse since the 1993 original. That should not be the case at all. But it at least that shows how amazing the effects were almost 30 years ago and it puts Jurassic Park on an even higher pedestal.
Even Michael Giacchino's score had barely any pieces that got my attention. For a franchise that contains probably the greatest score of all-time, there is even very little utilisation of those iconic pieces.
All of these problems I had with the film made me come to the conclusion that I honestly thought it was badly made which is something I rarely say. The camerawork was inconsistent and had annoying shaky-cam moments in the action scenes, there were far too many cuts in the editing room and I'm blaming the director on the poor acting as I know this cast can and has done far better than this.
As for positives, along with that one action sequence, they do some cool modifications to some of the dinosaurs to relate with the recent real life discoveries. That is one small part of the Jurassic Park trilogy that I liked. They were never afraid to evolve the look of the dinosaurs to keep itself up to date with new discoveries of their appearances.
There are some cool imagery that we've not seen before. But given how Fallen Kingdom ended with a tease of where this next instalment would go, we were all expected more rather than the story diverting to something totally different.
To conclude, I didn't like it. While it wasn't completely trash. It just did a lot of things that shouldn't be doing with a beloved franchise with a great concept.
It's far too long, it over-plots and it felt like Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker where they just get both generations of cast together for no viable reason.
It was as if the people making it forgot why Jurassic Park become a huge box office success and all-time classic. One reason that relates to this review is that it was essentially a disaster movie driven by its unique concept and ideas. But the more sequels that were made, the concept gradually becomes the norm and therefore nowhere near as entertaining the first time. While I feel the Park sequels still made it fun by its sequences and characters, the World sequels tried too hard for very little reward.
So as this has been billed as the finale within this Jurassic franchise, I'll give a quick summary on my views on it. We have one all-time classic, two solid fun watches, a guilty pleasure and two unmemorable concoctions with too many ingredients. I'll leave you to decide which falls into which category.
I've definitely seen much worse films than this. But for a film series that played an important part in my childhood, you naturally expect something special even in the smallest of doses. This one sadly didn't do it for me. But much like Fallen Kingdom, this at least made me appreciate The Lost World and even Jurassic Park III a lot more.
Rating: 6/10
