Jurassic World
Fallen Kingdom Comprehensive Review: How Jurassic Park legacies have fallen
By Nabil Bakri
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(All pictures belong to Universal/Amblin unless indicated with (*))
OVERTURE
When Jurassic
World came out in 2015, the hype was gigantic. It was the first Jurassic Park movie after 14 years,
released in the most nostalgic decade ever during the rise of nostalgia-fever
(the 2010s). I was aware of the hype mostly because I was excited to check it
out and because I was still active in DVD/Blu-ray Collectors group on social media.
Jurassic Park came out before I was
born, so I failed to relate to elders’ reaction that Jurassic World brings back so many memories and reminds them of how
powerful Jurassic Park was. However,
I know for sure how influential Jurassic
Park was, and still is, based on my experience watching it back in 2005 and
after learning some important moments in cinema history. I love Jurassic Park, I think it has the most
solid and logical narrative, I love The
Lost World: Jurassic Park, I think it’s just exciting and adventurous, and
I dare to say that yes, I love Jurassic
Park 3 simply because I think the idea of returning to the ruins of once a
great park is interesting and the titan fight between the T-Rex and Spinosaurus
is epic.
Even though I love the franchise and I actually
planned to see it in cinema, I did not have the time so I ditched the plan and
patiently waited for the home video to be released. So I purchased the disc and
I saw it. Jurassic World is certainly
not my favourite, I feel that the story is quite odd especially when they
decided to make ‘clever’ dinosaurs that could communicate with both humans and
dinosaurs. They are so smart that they understand what should be done to fix a
problem (namely Indominus Rex, I mean how could a T-Rex and a Raptor (and a
Mosasaurus) understand that Indominus is a freak of nature and should be
destroyed and because they know they can never do that alone so they teamed up
like Dino-Rangers save the day, like wtf!). Jurassic
World, I think, is a downgrade that’s even worse than Jurassic Park 3 because it eventually drags away the sense of
‘reality’ and ‘plausibility’ that Jurassic
Park offered to the world, a sense of ‘millions of possibilities’ we find
in stories like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The
Lost World, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea or Treasure
Island, and the story of a hidden island where a giant ape lives in the
jungle beneath the ruins of a lost civilization. Jurassic World is, to be frank, too illogical and plain ridiculous.
Fortunately, the end battle, no matter how ridiculous it actually is, redeems
the overall movie. It is, similar to the last scene of Darth Vader in Rouge One, worth waiting for.
Then in 2018, Fallen
Kingdom came out. The hype was huge although I did not remember it being
bigger than Jurassic World. Maybe
that’s because I am no longer listed in any group in social media focusing on
movies (I grew tired of such group, I despise most groups in social media, too
many hypocrites, oops I didn’t mean
that, sorry). The first few trailers
were impressive and lots of people went to theatres to see it, but it went
downhill. People started to complain about how bad it is (but it made over $1
billion). So, I decided not to see it in cinema and, as usual, patiently
waiting for the Home Video to be released (and also because I still had so many
movies prior to Fallen Kingdom that I
should watch in my list). I purchased the disc when I had so many tasks and I
had multiple academic presentations to be done, so when I decided to have a ‘me
time’ for a moment and enjoy Fallen
Kingdom hoping to be entertained so I could ease my mind to finish my
tasks, I was wrong. I was so wrong that I wanted to snap the disc half. Fallen Kingdom did not ease my mind, it
does not offer any moment of catharsis to me, it doubled the burden of my brain
because not only I had to think about these presentations, I also had to think
about how bad Fallen Kingdom is, how
it broke my heart, and how I want to negatively criticize it.
So now, allow me to share my thoughts…
“I can’t hear
you!” Cliché
Fallen Kingdom opens up with a tense but frankly, stupid scene (I’m
guessing that it tries to mimic the opening sequence from Jurassic Park, trying to capture the tone and the overall
atmosphere but fails horribly). Everything in Jurassic Park was made to be as natural as possible and the
dinosaurs are essentially animals. What we see in Fallen Kingdom is that these dinosaurs are ‘beyond’ animals. They
have unique personalities like humans and they can think and plot just like
humans. The first sequence is about a bunch of people returning to the Mosasaurus
tank in the abandoned park, believing that the dinosaurs are all gone (because
they managed to set the gears and lighting and all the equipment ‘without’ any
interference or sign of any dinosaur), just to retrieve a fraction of the
Indominus Rex’s bones hidden inside the Mosasurus tank. What makes the scene so
odd, firstly, is the location of the Mosasaurus tank. It was not, as depicted
in Jurassic World, located as near to
(or as one with) the ocean. This first sequence challenges you to destroy the
part of your brain that deal with logic and reason. Putting the set up in Jurassic World aside, that the location
of the tank is somehow ‘changed’ in Fallen
Kingdom, why would they put such a dangerous animal near the ocean in the
first place? How such an enormous animal survive for years even though there’s
no ‘zookeeper’ feeding it with chunks of meat (the last meal it had was the
Indominus)? If there’s an animal with such enormity in a fish tank, why the
people fail to notice its existence (after hours setting up the equipment)? Why
does it care about tiny humans when the gate for its freedom is now open? Why?
Why? Why?
Forgive my logic, but I have to tell you Harry Potter all over again despite I’ve
talked about it many times in my reviews (MeteorGarden (2001): Looking Back to the Sensation of a Generation, Meteor Garden 2018 Review, and Boys Over Flowers: A Retrospect). I have
to say that ‘yes!’ every story is illogical, and ‘yes’ the magic in Harry Potter is illogical. However, Harry Potter is plausible and that makes
it logical according to its genre. The magic is the set up from the very
beginning. The fact that these dinosaurs ‘can think’ is not how Jurassic Park is set up. These
dinosaurs, according to the original set up, are bunch of animals that act like
animals and they can’t coordinate with different species. Jurassic Park is not a Godzilla
movie nor The Land before Time. Jurassic Park tries to be as natural and
realistic as possible, according to its genre, to make you ‘believe’ in
dinosaurs (because if the movie is too goofy,
there’s no sense of realism and ‘awe’).
What happens in Fallen Kingdom is
shifting the basic of Jurassic Park
from something natural (bounds to
reality) to something fantastical
(detaches from reality, defies logic). And believe me, there are so many ‘WHY?’
triggered by the first sequence alone. Why the T-Rex showed up unnoticed by a
man three-feet away from it while people inside a chopper miles away notice its
presence? Why the water-gate needs constant connection from the
remote-control/pad/tablet? Does the gate need the internet? Is it Wi-Fi
powered? When you press ‘CLOSE’, it should just close even though you throw away the remote to fire, you pressed
the button already, anything happened to the remote-control after you pressed
the button should not affect the result of pressing the button previously. Is
it confusing? Well, it’s because this movie, like a virus, just hit my
logic-processor and I need to knock it down with a proper anti-virus.
Why the T-Rex cares about a tiny human when it could
get bigger prey? Why the T-Rex returns to the Mosasaurus tank in the first
place? Isn’t the tank located far away from the forest where lots of prey live?
Doesn’t it aware of the Mosasaurus? Doesn’t it appear in Jurassic World or at least watch the movie? Does it know what
monster/dinosaur killed and ate the Indominus-Rex, and yet it dares
to get too close to the tank? And why
the Mosasurus loves to jump out of the water just to eat a tiny piece of meat?
Why bother? The gate is open (thanks to the T-Rex that comes out of nowhere
that squash the gate-control-tablet), you could just swim to the ocean, why
bother? Why? Why? Why? And, finally, the scene “I can’t hear you!” What? Why? How? The communication is suddenly
interrupted by something (the script-writer) so the man cannot hear the warning
from the chopper that the T-Rex is lurking just behind him and apparently he is
deaf because he can’t hear the thundering ground or feel the ground is shaking
when the T-Rex is approaching. What a coincidence. This whole scene is indeed
awesome, but stupid.
The T-Rexmachina
You might be wondering about the meaning of the term T-Rexmachina. Well, I got to tell you
that T-Rexmachina is the result of
two words combined:
01 T-Rex which is a large carnivore,
the main star of the Jurassic Park
franchise, and
02 Ex-Machina, from the Latin deus ex machina described by Merriam
Webster as “a person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is
introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an
apparently insoluble difficulty.”
So, T-Rexmachina
is a dinosaur, a T-Rex, that comes out of nowhere to save the day. This is
stupid because even the iceberg that sank the Titanic took 100,000 years to form, not just suddenly appeared in
front of the ship and it suddenly hit the ship. Now, let me share some light on
the subject…
 |
| (*National Geographic) |
Predators would love to eat a chunk of fresh meat without spending hours of hunting (just
like us getting free delicious meal). This is basic and very logical because
they need meat, they love meat. Whenever they find the opportunity to get easy
meat without the need to hunt, they’d take it. Just take a look at the
crocodiles in Mara River. Usually, they have to wait patiently until some
stupid zebras or wildebeest feel thirsty and need to drink from the river. Even
when these stupid animals literally put half of their heads inside the water,
capturing them is not always easy, so crocodiles often come home empty-handed. There are moments,
however, when the stupid animals should perform the ritual of great migration.
When this happens, this becomes a blessing for the crocodiles and they would
not miss the opportunity to snatch as many stupid animals as possible while the
migration lasts. The predators need the meat for a sole purpose: the body needs
food to survive. So what propels them to snatch the hopeless mammals crossing
the river? It’s the will to survive. This is the most basic instinct
permanently programmed to the brains of animals and humans. So even though
they’re stupid, they understand the meaning of ‘priority’, of what should be
done first before the other, by all means to survive.
The island in Fallen
Kingdom is falling apart. The herbivores come out to the open field to seek
for a save spot. This is a good opportunity for the carnivores to snatch one or
two huge mammals, just like those crocodiles during the great migration.
Apparently, a Carnotaurus has decided that it’s the perfect time to eat. But do
you remember the reason why these predators attack those mammals? Yes, to gain
food to survive. But do you realize that attacking the mammals during a massive
disaster contradicts the very reason behind it attacking the mammals (attacking
mammals to get food to survive)? As I said previously, the number one priority
is to stay alive and hunting for food
during an apocalypse is plain dumb even for animals. I honestly believe that
you believe and I too believe, that if a lot of lava poured into the Mara River
somehow during the great migration, those crocodiles would not bother to hunt
for the zebras because they would be too busy evacuating themselves to saver
spots. Now I don’t want to be the type of critic who brags about tiny dumb
details like this one, but I have to remind you that this is supposed to be a
continuation of Jurassic Park and
such dumb detail stabs the chest of Jurassic
Park. I would not mind such a scene in The
Land before Time or Land of the Lost
because being ‘logical’ and ‘natural’ is not among the highest priorities. I
have to stress this that Jurassic Park
sets the idea of “what if we could bring dinosaurs back to life” and the
actions or sequences that follow should mimic the reality, the real reactions
of people witnessing real dinosaurs. In simpler words, Jurassic Park is not Transformers
nor Fast and Furious.
It would be fun to see Little-foot knocking down a
Sharp-teeth in a Land Before Time
sequel, it would be hilariously funny if Chaka comes to the present day with
the T-Rex in Land of the Lost, it’s
cool to see Godzilla teaming up with Mothra to knock King Ghidorah down in a Godzilla movie, it’s fantastic to see
illogical drifting skills in these racers in a Fast and Furious sequel, but it would be odd to see dinosaurs act
like humans or act randomly without basic logic and instinct in a Jurassic Park sequel. I do hope that I
won’t have to stumble upon such stupidity ever again throughout the rest of the
movie so I would not brag about this ‘minor’ problem. That being said, what’s
even more dumb than a Carnotaurus hunting mammals during the apocalypse happens
few seconds after the Carnotaururs hunting for mammals during the apocalypse.
It is the sudden appearance of the T-Rex fighting the Carnotaurus just in time
to save the humans (hence the title T-Rexmachina).
Like, what? This animal feels like to fight other animals for no specific
reason even though the mountain is exploding, the lava is spreading, and the
ground is collapsing? This is a cool sequence, for a monster movie, but seems
out of place for a Jurassic Park move.
In the original Jurassic Park, the T-Rex
also comes out of nowhere, but the sequence can easily be explained with basic
logic. The easiest point to underline is that the island in which the T-Rex is
hunting for some snack in the original Jurassic
Park, is not exploding!
Stop Transformers-ifying EVERYTHING!
The bigger the
better! More explosions is better!
 |
| (*Paramount/Hasbro) |
The Jurassic
Park franchise is currently on the move toward ‘different’ franchises like Transformers and Fast and Furious. When we see Avengers:
Infinity War, the movie does not ditch the charm of a Marvel Cinematic
Universe built since the release of Iron
Man. It’s a form of franchise continuation at its best. I sincerely hope
that Jurassic Park, if they want to
make a massive franchise out of it, would follow such a continuation in story
and style like Marvel. Many attempts to copy the success of Marvel proven to be
useless and disastrous. Take a look at the live action movie Justice League which is plagued by
inconsistencies, making it a hundreds of millions of dollar mess. Instead of
building its own taste, DC tried so hard to mimic The Avengers and that’s a wrong move because DC, since day one, is
essentially different from Marvel. Universal tried to renew the Dark Universe
starting with Tom Cruise’s The Mummy
and that was a disaster. All of them, I think, forget about the important part
of Marvel’s success: Time. They
wanted to gain as much money as Marvel without wanting to live the process,
they wanted to cut that process and sadly, that’s impossible.
Even Transformers
and Fast and Furious have lived
through years and years of process to get in their current position in
Hollywood. Jurassic Park actually has
time on its side, but the new ones try to follow other huge franchises while
its base is actually very different from The
Avengers, Transformers, and Fast and Furious. The most interesting
part is that the more the studios release new Transformers and Fast and
Furious movies, the more they lose their roots. Try to watch the latest Fast and Furious and you’d be surprised
how the new ones are actually staged very different from the original
‘intention’. Jurassic Park was not
created to be and never meant to be a movie with dull narrative counting on how
many explosions it could offer to the audience. Jurassic Park is not Transformers
which is counting on special effects and explosions since day one. Jurassic Park is not a movie sacrificing
logic for spectacle because it actually counting on logic to create spectacle
(the realism in the dinosaurs starting from the scientific concept to bring
them back to life to their movement created as realistic as possible, and the
realism in the actors’ reactions toward the dinosaurs as if it is real and not
‘just a movie’, thus makes the
audience ‘believe’). Fallen Kingdom
does not look nor feel like a Jurassic
Park continuation, it looks like a spinoff of Transformers. Chris Pratt (Owen) once said that they need to
destroy the island, they need to ‘expand’.
This statement is, for me, somewhat fishy because the term ‘expand’ alone could
mean a lot of things related to current trend in the movie industry and most of
them are bad.
The people behind Jurassic
World and Fallen Kingdom also
claim repeatedly that they want to be as faithful as possible to Jurassic Park by hailing the ‘original’
T-Rex, forcing pieces of stories to relate to Jurassic Park, promoting animatronics (while also attempting to
remove it, if you investigate closer to the making of Jurassic World in which they wanted to make a sequence in which a
CGI Indominus ripping the head of an animatronic T-Rex) but at the same time they
said that the new ‘trilogy’ is meant to be different from the first Jurassic Park trilogy. Why should it be
different? Is it because you want to copy the success of Avengers, Fast and Furious,
or Transformers? Are you trying to
reach out for new fans by ditching the old ones like The Last Jedi did? Now, what makes Jurassic Park a ‘Jurassic Park movie’? I think the filmmakers
should go back to this fundamental question, an essential one that has been
missing for quite a while in the movie industry. Such a question is indeed
important and not just for Fallen Kingdom,
but also for a bigger player like Disney with their tasteless remakes.
Dinosaurs are Animals, Not E.T.
My logic is once again attacked by Fallen Kingdom when the movie shows that
Blu is a highly intelligent tame Raptor. Okay, first, it’s a highly ridiculous
idea and second, even when a predator has been domesticated, it still has basic
instinct as a wild animal and if you’re abusive to it, it would eat you up when
it gets the chance. So, even if, say, Blu is really tame, how did you maintain
its trust after so many problems you have caused upon it? Blu is tame, I got
that, but Blu experiences so many terrible things and there’s no reason for it
to trust any human ever again. If Fallen
Kingdom is at least trying to be a little bit more logical, Blu would not
be such a hero. Heck as a matter of fact, in real life, if you treat your
friend badly multiple times, he probably
would not want to know you anymore. By this point, I really am asking whether I
am watching a Jurassic Park sequel or
a Transformers spinoff with E.T crossover. They shot Blu with a
tranquilizer, then with a gun, then kidnapped it, tried to involve it in a
selfish scientific experiment, put it in a cage, and then Blu still wants to
help the humans even if it means sacrificing itself (to die, because fighting the
Indoraptor without guns is dumb)? This is exactly the flaw avoided by The Life of Pi that, after all these ‘journey’, Richard Parker, in the end, is
still a wild animal and therefore, it does not look back to say goodbye to
Piscine. This is The Life of Pi, not
a 101 Dalmatians movie.
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| (*20th Century Fox) |
Since I mentioned about E.T, I want to point people’s decision demanding the government to
save the dinosaurs from the collapsing island. If there’s an important message
that the original trilogy wants to convey, it is the fact that these creatures
were at large millions of years ago and by natural causes, they extinct. The
extinction of dinosaurs was not a man-made disaster, it was natural and there’s
nothing we can do about it. Nature knows what’s best for it and we should not
play God and messing up with nature. The first three movies show us how humans’
arrogance can bring disasters upon humanity itself. The line “…I decided not to endorse your park” in
the end of Jurassic Park sums it all,
that even an expert who loves dinosaurs ‘that
much’ realizes how dangerous it is for us humans to play God. Plus, Dr.
Sattler argues that the power Hammond has (the key to shape and change genetics
as a piece of clay) was too powerful and now that it is out of control, it
becomes a dangerous problem to humans and we should learn from it.
It is odd, for me, to see these people demanding for
the safety of these dinosaurs in Fallen
Kingdom after what happened in the late 90’s when a T-Rex escaped from a
cargo ship and starts killing people. This should open their eyes of how
dangerous it is to play with genetics. I cannot fathom how people endorse
dinosaurs and at the same time despise genetic engineering to clone humans (so
they all John Hammond and we already know that this point is his flaw as a character).
Both are unnatural and thus, both should be treated equally, that is, not to be
endorsed by the society. Everything in Jurassic
Park should verify Dr. Malcolm’s fear of Hammond’s decision to play God. It
should all be Malcolm saying, “I told you so.” Now that such an important
message that we actually need during this time of massive man-made climate
change is essentially gone in Fallen
Kingdom, what could we learn from the movie? What Fallen Kingdom tries to convey? This underlines my problem with
logical fallacies in the movie, that I failed to relate it to real life. What
happened in 2001 with the World Trade Centre was devastating. Lots of people
perished and that was a sad picture. After 9/11, the fight against terrorists
grew bigger. If a movie tries to be logical, it should follow some basic rules
from reality. Based on what happened in Jurassic
Park that took many lives, based on what happened in The Lost World: Jurassic Park that took even more lives, based on
what happened in Jurassic Park 3 that
took lives of tourists, based on what happened in Jurassic World that the Masrani Corporation has to pay $800 million
for the disaster, people should fight against such genetic engineering, such
freak of non-nature, and embrace
nature’s way to fix the problem we humans had previously created. And now we
have supporters for the dinosaurs, very funny. What Dr. Malcom said about
‘nature is fixing our problem’ is actually logical, that we should do nothing
to prevent the dinosaurs from extinction because they’re essentially extinct
creatures and their existence brings imbalance to the world.
The story would be different if it is people trying to
destroy all the dinosaurs in the island, but since it’s a natural disaster
wiping creatures that should never be existed in the 21st century in the first place, it is logical to
assume that it’s a nature’s way of balancing itself at its best.
Others
There are so many other logical fallacies, predictable
points, and dumb plot holes throughout the movie, for instance:
-A highly intelligent Indoraptor (are they trying to
move Jurassic Park to the direction
of Rise of the Planet of the Apes in which people created highly intelligent apes
and it signifies the doom of humanity?)
-A girl clone of a dead woman (really? The story is
complicated enough without this bizarre idea. Too many ideas would bring
inconsistencies)
-A predictable villain
-Stupid plan to take Blu
-Stupid auction
-Stupid cheap-version of Hammond
-Mosasurus
-Now that I think of it, Fallen Kingdom is plain stupid. There are many other terrible
aspects that would take tens of pages to finish.
-Plus, Fallen
Kingdom is basically a ‘remake’ of The
Lost World: Jurassic Park. Do these scenes ring a bell?: Living-breathing
dinosaurs in an island even though they should be long dead, the island is no
use so let’s move the dinosaurs to a different place, we are relocating but our
method looks like we are hunting them down, evil corporation under evil leader,
we got the T-Rex, the dinosaurs are out of their cages, an old man regrets his past
decisions, a man and a woman with relationship problems try to save the day
plus a little girl, and Jeff Goldblum.
 |
| (So you diggup dinosaurs? Haar Ah Ha haha haha haaarr Ar Arrrgggh) |
CODA
I was thinking that maybe I raised my expectations too
high, maybe I’m too old for a Jurassic
Park movie, or maybe I just don’t like it because of nonsensical reasons
despite of 6 pages of explanation I presented to you previously (yes, it’s a
solid 6 pages of criticism according to my MS Word). Then I decided to search
for commentaries concerning Fallen
Kingdom. I found that there are so many people dislike the movie. Then I
thought, well, maybe because they’re all adults so they can’t really enjoy the
movie. So, I decided to ask my little brothers. I asked both my 5th and
3rd grade brothers whether or not they like Fallen Kingdom. Both of them answered a solid NO. They wanted to re-watch Pacific Rim instead of re-watch Fallen
Kingdom. Hmmm…that’s interesting.
I did not want to write negative criticism about Fallen Kingdom. I was hoping to get
thrilled by it. It broke my heart whenever I have to witness something I love
turned into something I hate and then I have to criticize it with such a
negativity which is necessary and true to the objective values I hold as
important in any movie according to its own genre. I can only hope that studios
would stop destroying good narrative in favour of spectacle or trend because a
trend fades away while a solid narrative remains. So long, farewell…
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