Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Well, this is the fourth Jurassic Park movie I have watched over the past month and it feels like my reviews are very similar, something I try to avoid obviously. So let me get a few similarities out of the way. Once again a child is placed at risk, though these precocious kids always seem adept at outrunning dinosaurs even while under a blind panic, so hats off to them. There are of course bad guys on the dinosaur menu, up to at least three in this Jurassic entry. And as usual a couple of times our heroes are saved from certain death by one predator Dino attacking another at the last second. What are the odds? But it looks like we are finally moving away from the small island off the coast of Costa Rica, as the island seems to have been destroyed by a volcano eruption that oddly reminded me of the lava damage in Lord of the Rings. Poor dinosaurs. First there was the comet millions of years ago, and now the volcano nearly made the score Universe 2, Dinosaurs 0. But don’t fear, a handful got away and who knows how much DNA? I am not too impressed by the whole building a super dinosaur thing. Aren’t we reaching a critical mass where they might as well end this franchise and switch to having the monsters be old fashioned alien invaders? Oh, and Jeff Goldblum is back, though perhaps it was a dry, humorless clone of the original character who was a highlight of previous Jurassic movies, but who sounded like a didactic college professor this time. But hey, we have seen much worse sequels often, haven’t we? On some surface level, this entry in the franchise was entertaining as always. That seems built into the series’s DNA as well as often accompanying Spielberg’s name in the credits. And it must be frustrating to try and fail to match the magic of the very first film.