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ultrahpfan5blog · 2 years

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Retrospective Review: Jurassic Park III (2001)

I was not a fan of this movie when I had watched it as an 11 year old in 2001. I didn't like that Alan and Ellie weren't together, I didn't like that the Spino defeated the T-rex, I didn't like the new characters, and I didn't like how short it was. So it was a fairly pleasant surprise when I watched this film after a long while and I ended up quite enjoying it. Its definitely 3rd best in the JP trilogy, but its certainly not as bad as I remember it to be.

I think what works for the film watching it again is its brevity. Unlike the previous two films which dealt with themes of man trying to play god with science and how that backfires, or corporate greed leading to terribly misguided actions, this film is very straightforward. This is a Dinosaur action movie. The film essentially just puts characters on the Island and then its one Dinosaur set piece after another with the thing story strand of the group of characters trying to rescue a stranded kid from the Island. I think if this film had stretched the same content to 2 hours like the other movies, then it would have felt too long and drawn out. The film does the necessary setup quite quickly. It establishes the reason the boy is stranded on the Island, though I still am not sure what exactly happened to the people on the boat in the opening scene because the film never explicitly explains it. Then it establishes where Alan Grant is and his financial situation in the research and it doesn't take long for the two parents to hoodwink Alan and his student Billy, off to Isla Sorna. Once the characters are on the island, the action is non stop.

There are some pretty good Dinosaur action sequences. The first Spino sequence is fairly terrifying. I like the final Spino sequence in the river, with the fire. That's probably the best of the Spinosaurus sequences. I think my favorite overall Dinosaur sequence is the Birdcage scene with the Pteranodons. That is probably the best staged action sequence in the film and that's the portion of the film where the CGI/animatronic blend is at its best. The film also has an interesting thread about Raptor intelligence, which is carried forward in JW films. That's the one element of the film which has carried on in the franchise. Whereas TLW didn't really use the Raptors other than as monsters in the 2nd act climax, this film uses them in a bit specific manner. I quite liked the Alan and Billy dynamic in the film. Its always great to have Alan Grant but I did feel that Billy was pretty identifiable, even if he makes a really stupid mistake. The film actually takes away from his noble sacrifice in the Pteranodon by bringing him back inexplicably at the end. I also think Eric was decent. Resourceful and not one who has to be constantly rescued, barring in one scene. Also was nice to see Ellie back, albeit briefly. While I was sad that Alan and Ellie weren't together, I did like how their was still a closeness between them.

The film definitely has a fair share of issues. Certainly this is the most thinly plotted of the Jurassic movies so far. There is no real story based impact of this movie to the rest of the franchise. There is no connection to InGen and no real conversation about how the rest of the world is dealing with the revelations of TLW barring one lecture scene. It does make the film feel a bit empty. Also, from a technical standpoint, its obvious that Joe Johnston was not as smart as Spielberg when it comes to presentation of the Dinosaurs. Whereas Spielberg knew his limitations with CGI and used shadow and darkness expertly to make the Dinosaurs seem real, almost all of the Dinosaur sequences in this movie are in broad daylight and the CGI definitely shows. The Spino animatronic also looks like an animatronic with limited movement in some sequences. It just doesn't look as scary as the T-Rex. The film also makes the Spino seem like the boogeyman, chasing the main characters across the Island. They also perhaps take the Raptor intelligence angle a bit too far at times. The two parent characters are also a bit annoying, especially Tea Leoni's character, who basically screams a lot during the movie.

In terms of performances, Sam Neill back as Alan Grant is an obvious highlight. He plays an older and wearier version, but you still feel his intelligence and knowledge of the creatures. William H. Macy is solid as the father, though the character is a little annoying initially but Macy is innately likable and he gets a bit of a hero moment towards the end. Tea Leoni grates on the nerves a bit. Alessandro Nivola is solid as Billy, as is Trevor Morgan as Eric. The film doesn't really offer much scope to anyone else.

Joe Johnston does a decent enough job directing this film. Its obvious that he doesn't quite have the mastery of Spielberg, but then again, who does, but he wisely keeps the pace of the film tight. Stand Winston's animatronics and ILM works is strong for the most part. Its essentially a fairly breezy and enjoyable 92 minutes or so, but its just not particularly memorable. For me, this ranks around a 6.5/10.

#jurassic park iii #joe johnston #alan grant #sam neill #william h macy #tea leoni #alessandro nivola #trevor morgan #spinosaurus #velociraptor #dinosaur #stan winston #ilm #jurassic park 3

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holographic-bone-jester · 4 years

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Hello,here to ask ur opinion on why you think Wu is also a villain in the franchise. I personally see him as just doing his job and think jw did him very dirty. In jp and in the book he's this hardworking guy excited to have accomplished the thought impossible. He got no bad intentions and as opposed to Masrani and the guy from fallen kingdom (forgot name) he actually cares for the dinos he made. You can see how proud he is of the irex not just as his creation but as animal in itself.

Wu wasn’t a villain in JP, that’s for sure, and we are on the same train with the “JW did him very dirty”, however i think that he does have some of the responsibility for the making of those monster dinosaurs in JW, and he admits himself that they’re not meant to even be dinosaurs anymore, but just custom made to awe the public, he knew what he was doing when designing the I.rex and he knew that thing would be dangerous, yet he kept it’s genetic makeup secret, which, even if the events of JW didn’t happen, would still put staff in danger.

He could have easily been redeemed if it turned out he had been pressured to make monster “dinosaurs” and hide the Indominus’s genome if he wanted to keep his job, which would have been believabe, and would have given him the occasion to side with the protagonists and allow the plot to get more depth of lore into what happened between JP and JW (since Wu is pretty much the only one left around who saw behind the scenes of both JP and JW), but instead he was given a generic “evil scientist siding with evil for profit” plot.

And even if he was more subtly grey morally with a redemption arc, it still doesn’t make up for the fact that he and Masrani are the ones who essentially caused the first movie’s catastrophy, and it then was up to obnoxious generic white male actor and generic white love interest in heels to fix it and save the day.

On the topic of Masrani, note how instead of giving him depth like John Hammon to make him more of a realistic character (which, btw, was purposefully done in JP, because the novel’s Hammon was just a one dimensional cunt), they instead just made him a generic evil capitalist big CEO.

He’s also the second (or well, technically he came first, but i had forgotten about him until now) indian/indian-coded rich bad guy megacompany CEO character that i’ve encountered in media despite not being so much of a pop culture buff and not knowing a lot of franchises, and i don’t know how to feel about that.

#asks #not paleo #pop culture #jurassic world

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indowolfgang · 4 years

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About Jurassic Park’s lack of feathers: (y’all this is long)

most dinosaur related media doesn’t have feathered dinosaurs and a lot of people blame Jurassic Park. dinosaurs are my special interest and Jurassic Park is a big part of that so ima prove them wrong. first off i wanna say haters get owned: 2011: NASA scientists said it was the 7th best SciFi movie and 2012: Popular Mechanics said it was the 6th accurate and “was faithful to early '90s speculative genetics theories”

anyways... lets get into it

Games (that i have lol):

Ark: Survival Evolved: 10/29 dinosaurs

Compsognathus, Deinonychus, Gallimimus, Megalosaurus, Microraptor, Oviraptor, Raptor, Therizinosaur, Troodon, Yutyrannus (this dino was actually found with direct evidence of feathers!)

at first i had no idea what type of ‘raptor’ they were referring to, but i checked and its a Utahraptor. the largest-known individual of Utahraptor was about 7 meters (23 feet) long so size is a-okay with me

i debated including the Pegomastax because the wiki says it has fur and quills, which could be argued as protofeathers, but since its from the early Jurassic its hard to say.. just to be safe i left it out

i only looked at dinosaurs cause there are a ton of made-up/mythical creatures, prehistoric birds/reptiles, and just a straight up vulture

The Isle: 3/30 dinosaurs

Therizinosaurus, Orodromeus (AI), Austroraptor

none of these are playable in survival mode btw

also i’m not sure if the game is going for accuracy or not, Dilophosaurus and Velociraptor are the right size but still... no feathers on known feathered dinos: Velo, Rex, or Utahraptor

technically feathers have never been found on Utahraptors but there is strong evidence that all dromaeosaurids had them since Microraptor and Dakotaraptor had them

Jurassic World Evolution: 0/69 (nice) dinosaurs

based on the movies Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, and eventually they added a Jurassic Park DLC. despite the Jurassic World movies not counting the Jurassic Park sequels (Lost World and JP3) as part of its time line, the Jurassic Park DLC includes skins from those movies. not much to say here... i’ll get into the movies further down

i didn’t count the pteranodon, cause its not a dinosaur and, still, no feathers

Saurian: 4/8 dinosaurs

Dakotaraptor, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Acheroraptor, Ornithomimid

i’ve only included the dinos that are currently in-game, the wiki says they are planing to add another playable dino, Anzu (feathered), but so far it hasn’t even been added as an AI yet

they are actually going for scientific accuracy so all the dinos that should have feathers do and they are, as far as i can tell, realistically placed. Good Job!

games are hard to talk about... usually games that feature dinos will have an element of ‘fantasy’ (Ark especially) and JWE is based on the Jurassic World movies so its dinos can only look like the movies dinos. The Isle is most likely suffering from the status quo, most dinos in popular media look like big lizards so they didn’t want to take a risk. the game isn’t finished and its possible it’ll go from a dinosaur sim to a shooter, since there are human models in game and controls for weapons. i’ve also heard players rumor that you’re not actually playing as the dino but as a camera that follows it around (which would explain the nigh vision mode). chances are The Isle will end up like Ark: man vs dino

Movies:

i thought about discussing The Land Before Time movies (cause i was obsessed with them as a kid lol), but that was pre-Jurassic Park so i’ll give it an honorable mention. ANYWAYS... Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park: Lost World, Jurassic Park 3, Jurassic World, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. none of them have feathered dinos. lets look at why that might be 🤔

Jurassic Park:

no feathered dinosaurs. BUT, feathered dinosaurs were not very mainstream in the scientific community until about 3 years after the movie came out,

“Three years after the first Jurassic Park debuted, paleontologists announced that the small theropod Sinosauropteryx was covered in a fine coat of fuzzy protofeathers. This was just the initial drop in a flood of feathery dinosaur discoveries which confirmed that a wide variety of dinosaurs bore archaic forms of plumage, from simple filaments to asymmetrical feathers that would have allowed them to fly.”

[from this National Geographic article (x)]

looking more into the history of feathered dinos, i found well... a lot. its really difficult to find a concrete time for when paleontologists discovered (and agreed on) feathered dinos, some places say 1860, 1923, 1979, 1983, it goes on forever, one source even said 2001. Archaeopteryx, which an early Jurassic creature, had complex, bird-like feathers. so why no feathers on other dinosaur reconstructions? its possible these discoveries were ignored by the larger scientific community in favor of the well established depictions of big, slow lizards

[if u wanna do even more reading about feathers check out this All About Birds article (x) and the History of discovery section on the Archaeopteryx’s wiki (x)]

JP definitely upped the Velociraptor’s size and did my Dilophosaurus dirty, so i will fault them for that. the big ass raptor has stayed in pop culture for-fucking-ever. it feels like everyone is making naked Utahraptors and calling them Velociraptors. and g*d... my poor Dilophosaurus... why’d they make you spit? and why so small? you’re really 6-7 meters (20-23 feet) long! you are a large carnivore!! also it is possible that Dilophosaurus had feathers, though again, because its from the early Jurassic, it would have been more like a fur

Lost World:

no feathered dinosaurs. i cant really fault them for not changing the dinosaurs looks in a sequel, also trust me when i say it could have been worse the dino depictions in the book are insane... Chameleon Carnotaurus anyone?

the movie also didn’t explain why there were different dinos at Site B compared to the actual park. my best explanation is from the book: Site B was where the dinosaurs were actually hatched and raised, they were moved to the park just before they got to big to handle. so we are to assume that any non-Jurassic Park dinos we saw in Lost World were originally planned to be moved. sucks that they left this detail out of the movie adaptation, cause a lot of fans got confused (including me lol)

Jurassic Park 3:

no feathered dinosaurs. an incredibly mild attempt at ‘feathered’ raptors was made in JP3 by giving the males quills, but at that point the movies had an established ‘science’ and completely changing the look of the animals at the end of a trilogy might have confused a few people (even if it was more scientifically accurate)

Jurassic World:

no feathered dinosaurs. they literally stated in the movie that they left out accurate feathered dinosaurs because Dr. Wu was asked to create: “Dinosaurs that look like what the public expects dinosaurs to look like. Scary. Scaly. Wild.” Dr. Wu also states that the dinosaurs have never been actual dinosaurs. their DNA is a melting pot of DNA.

(i swear i read something about Dr. Wu attempting to make feathered dinos, but because of all the non-dino DNA he couldn’t get the genes to stick, i can’t find a source or any proof of this so i guess that can be our lil headcanon lol)

though for a more real life reason,

“The reasoning behind this being continued through the subsequent movies, though, is more about how imposing the featherless versions look.” ... “It seems more likely that the filmmakers went with how most people would perceive dinosaurs in the hopes that dino experts would take notice.”

[from this Screen Rant article (x)]

so basically JW cared more about scary, recognizable dinos than accurate ones

Fallen Kingdom:

no feathered dinosaurs. again a sequel is a bit too late to change up your designs. unfortunately the change had to happen in JW or not at all

In Closing:

basically Jurassic Park came out just before paleontologists announced Sinosauropteryx, which popularized feathered dinos. even then Jurassic Park was restricted by the technology of the time. the early ninety’s was not the best time for CGI and i can’t imaging making feathered animatronic dinosaurs that could stand up to the rain they filmed in. new media is definitely stuck in the past, look at the movies that come out and compare how many are sequels or prequels or remakes or whatever. Jurassic Park was a great movie and obviously the vultures that make movies are gonna try and ride its brand into the sunset. blaming the movie for stopping new scientific discoveries from entering the mainstream isn’t fair. the movie did a lot to bring current science into the lime light, it popularized warmblooded, avian dinos and showed them as intelligent, fast moving animals instead of slow movie monsters

but JW had no excuse! they should get majority of the blame for making the public afraid of feathers cause they themselves were afraid of feathers! they had the technology, the budget, and the opportunity to follow in its parent movie’s footsteps. they could have at least TRIED to be accurate but they just stuck to what people knew cause that was more profitable. science is only as interesting as the toys you can make of it i guess...

a final note, just for my sanity: JP dinos aren’t real dinosaurs. not even in fiction. they’re DNA is so full of garbage that their inaccurate appearances could be explained away with that alone. the books get into this more, talking about all the failed embryos and how many diseases these creatures had. even delving into their lack of social skills and how the raptors didn’t act like a pack, but a group of aggressive individuals. unfortunately the average viewer isn’t gonna know about all this set dressing. hell, i didn’t even read the 2 books until recently (end of 2019/ start of 2020) so i was as ready to believe whatever the movies showed me. honestly the books and movies are all good in different ways, not accurate, but good. read the books if you want more gore and technical explanations and the movies if you want, well... more story, they add a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the books

one day i’ll get into the differences in the books and movies.. one day

[ this was originally a response to someone but tumblr hid it, cause links. so i’ve edited it to be a standalone post and also WAY longer. feel free to add on or correct any mistakes i’ve made (be respectful tho) ]

#paleoblr #jurassic park #jurassic world #Jurassic #originals

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armorbirdpress · 4 years

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Armor Bird Reviews: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - A One-And-A-Half-Year Retrospective

If you have been following my writings and ramblings and original works and DeviantArt favorites for long enough, you'll know that I am unashamedly a dinosaur fan - I never outgrew the phase because despite what people have told me both online and off, palaeontology, like other sciences, is not specifically a child's thing - obviously dinosaurs are cool, but there is a lot of technical stuff that you'd need college degrees to understand in the field, too. While I certainly am a stickler for accuracy when it comes to dinosaur portrayals, however, I am also not ashamed to admit that I have a love for fictional portrayals of them as monsters, too. Jurassic Park, which was - for its time - pretty much a reconciliation between the "prehistoric monster" imagery of dinosaurs in popular culture and the latest discoveries about the actual fossil animals during its production, is my favorite movie of all time, partly for this reason and partly because there's a lot of depth and sophistication to it as well - a sophistication that modern movies seem to be utilizing less and less. Even the Jurassic Park franchise itself was not immune to this trend, and although it still remains my top favorite franchise of fictional media, the changing conceit of what audiences want in an entertaining film has dragged it along for as much of a long and bumpy ride as just about everything else Hollywood has to offer. Still, even in spite of it all, there are a lot of things to like about the sequels we got since that groundbreaking original - I'm admittedly one of those people who actually enjoyed Jurassic Park III, though in fairness I was too young upon first watching it to really pick it apart and analyze its numerous flaws, and I also heaped a lot of praise on Jurassic World upon my first review of it... in hindsight, perhaps a little generously. Although I won't pretend that everything since The Lost World (including TLW itself) is flawless and that the complainers are wrong, even the infamously controversial JP3 had some enjoyable moments in its own right, despite being seen by many as the worst installment of the franchise by quite a margin.

Which leads us to the most recent film of the franchise, 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

I had intended to review this movie for a good, long while - back when I was a more prolific writer I used to write film reviews shortly after seeing the movies in the theater, though schedule concerns have obviously made that too difficult. But there's a silver lining here, in that by not reviewing a film I've seen until much later (...well, much, much, much later as the case may be), I have the time to really sit down and think about what made the movie tick or not, and oftentimes have come down from my rush of excitement by the time I actually get off my tail and write the review itself. There are exceptions, of course, with certain films actually leaving me disappointed as soon as I left the building, but these cases are mercifully rare. I'm happy to say that despite being horrendously imperfect, Fallen Kingdom wasn't one of those cases. I was genuinely entertained by it more than 50% of the time - which is, for better or for worse, the highest compliment I can give the film because, as we shall see, in some ways it really is quite terrible.

As always with my movie reviews: SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!

I watched Fallen Kingdom twice since its release - first in the theater at my home town, and then on rental DVD - and both times, my impression was the same: this movie, in retrospect, plays out much like a big-budget, cinematic fanfiction of the Jurassic Park films or even of Jurassic World (the latter of which I actually consider darkly hilarious for reasons that are highly specific to me exclusively, which you'd only understand if you know what I've written in the past - I'll get to that shortly). This is perfectly understandable, seeing as the director, screenwriter, and production crew have changed considerably from the team that helmed the original trilogy during the ten-year gap between JP3 and JW. Even if the work is canon, it's essentially someone else taking a look at the original franchise material, picking out what they liked about it, and building an original story off of it, oftentimes borrowing characters from the original work and inserting them in (most notably Rexy, and yes, I consider her as much of a character as the humans she menaced in the original movie). Across the board, in all kinds of franchises, this approach tends to fall flat if you don't know about the original work, though I do have to say that there was one very notable exception in the case of Jurassic World, that climactic fight scene with the Indominus rex, which is my favorite part of the movie even if it isn't entirely perfect. Now, I realize that I'm being a bit of a hypocrite by saying that these films are imperfect, because almost a decade ago, a friend and I co-wrote a megacrossover fanfic where Jurassic Park was the most prominent franchise by quite a margin (and didn't even start out that way to boot - my own selfish preferences caused elements of the franchise to slowly bleed in until a recycled plot of the second and third movies took over the whole thing). What makes it truly embarrassing to me is that the fic didn't even need the series' involvement in the first place, and my choice to shove it in anyway was one of the numerous factors that led to it going completely off the rails and turning into a tremendous tangled mess of clumsy writing and mishandled characterization, not just with JP itself but with almost all of the dozen other continua that got dragged in as well. Obviously, the fact that Fallen Kingdom is restricted by its very nature as a sequel to the one franchise only thankfully precludes the sheer absurdity of what my co-writer and I had inadvertently wrought back then, but upon rewatching the film I couldn't help but notice that in a few ways, it does ironically come off as being quite similar to my own old shame, albeit coincidentally, though it still earns points for choosing to be a Jurassic Park/World film and sticking with that conceit, rather than an entirely different film with JP elements shoehorned into it. I've harped on my stupidity as an immature fanfic writer back in the day for long enough, I think, but I felt this was worth mentioning regardless, because like the fic I touched upon above, this is a work I only started having issues with long after the fact, but these days I can't unsee these issues now that I've considered them.

One of the biggest things that stood out to me regarding Fallen Kingdom was that no matter how you slice it, it was trying to be two films at once, and had less time for both than most would have desired. The first half of the movie concerns Isla Sorna being destroyed by a volcano, and everyone trying to get the dinosaurs off of it before they are rendered extinct once again, with another island being noted as their new sanctuary (though of course, one of the antagonists quickly screws that plan over, but more on that later). You could easily make an entire film out of that - exploring the island one last time, dodging potential threats from both the volcano and the dinosaurs themselves, and coming to terms with the fact that not every creature can be saved, and that the end is coming for everyone eventually. The scene with the Brachiosaurus being overtaken by the eruption, with its plaintive wails and iconic rearing silhouette, is proof that such a moral could make a solid closing for this kind of movie, and heck, you could even have the subplot with the executives hoping to exploit the dinosaurs bleed into the movie until, at the very end, you get a scene where their true intentions with the animals are revealed as a sequel hook, rather than being resolved over the course of like half an hour or so in a rushed manner that gives people too little time to consider the implications. And this brings me to my next point.

Remember what I said about that dumb fanfiction I co-wrote having the elements I personally wanted more than my co-writer did slowly fester in true plot tumor fashion until they took over the entire story like literal cancer? As it turns out, what I witnessed in Fallen Kingdom wasn't quite as ridiculous, but kinda sorta similar in its own way. Obviously, Fallen Kingdom isn't so audacious (or ignorant of copyright laws and plain old common sense for that matter) as to let an entirely different franchise stage a gradual hostile takeover of itself, but the somewhat cliched plot of capitalist exploitation being the absolute worst roommate imaginable with a whole franchise's worth of temporally misplaced creatures that can and will kill you if you look at them funny - already done in both the original movie and TLW, and to some extent in JW as well, but still relatable in our current social climate even after so much repetition - still manages to... well, stage a gradual hostile takeover of the movie, and enforces itself in full force during the remaining third or so of the runtime. The antagonists, a pair of cartoonishly evil and somewhat flat executives, sabotage the plan so that the dinosaurs are diverted to the Lockwood Mansion instead of the sanctuary island, and then things escalate when the prototype Indoraptor is bought in and, inevitably, raises hell for everyone involved. As with my previous pitch, the idea of bidding wars over the dinosaurs and the moral debate over the ownership and exploitation of living creatures - something which does happen in the real world - could have made for something interesting, again, if the script wasn't so rushed. Continuing where the hypothetical sequel hook left off, we could open with a discussion between the villains about the implications of what they are doing, followed by the heroes having to deal with the ramifications of such actions along with the involvement of Dr. Wu, the Indoraptor, and of course Blue as a potential prize-winner. Of course this runs the risk of becoming the original Jurassic Park except on the mainland, and thus not really trying anything new, but it could at least give audiences the time to digest the film and appreciate the moments where it makes a genuine impact, even before the dinosaurs end up getting released into the mainland like what happened in the movie itself, complete with the insane amount of ramifications thereof. The Stygimoloch plowing its way through the bidders on its way to freedom was almost as cathartic for me to watch as the climactic fight in JW, and I wish it could've gotten more screentime, or even plucked up the guts to fend off the Indoraptor in a situation that doesn't seem forced, e.g. the hybrid and the Stiggy getting trapped in the same complex, or even Owen luring it over as backup (which is stupider but, given how he got it to bust him and Claire out in the movie itself, isn't entirely unreasonable). As for the Indoraptor itself, I feel like they could have done a bit better with its design, as even underneath the paint job and altered proportions it's still more or less "Indominus 2: Genetic Boogaloo", as I have called it at least once. Still, it has its own appeal as a monster design and, if it weren't for the presence of similar-looking creatures in previous installments of the series, it would certainly have made an impact as a monster. It's almost wolf-like in movement and mannerisms, even werewolf-like, which is intentional given the vintage horror movie homages the production team was going for. The way it menaces Maisie - who has her own set of plot-related craziness to her, but that's a can of worms I'd rather not open - makes you worry for her life, and even fear for Blue when she engages it in battle. I know I'm one of those who actually prefers antagonistic Velociraptors (the inaccurate variety from the films, not the smaller and fully feathered real-world version which I would absolutely take home with me if I could find a way to retrieve it from Cretaceous Mongolia and have it housetrained and okay I'll stop now), but Blue as always is awesome, and after seeing her actually manage to hold her own in her fight against the Indoraptor if only for a short while, there's no denying that anymore - even if that scene with her outrunning the explosion in the boiler room is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this movie. There is of course no way a spectacle-driven, plaid-speed-paced romp like Fallen Kingdom could surpass the bar set by The Big One and the legendary kitchen scene, but on its own merits, the Indoraptor is a wonderfully serviceable and formidable threat that I just wish could've gotten more screentime and room to develop as a character, rather than just remaining as an unhinged killing machine that exists just to terrorize everyone before exiting the film (the same is true for all the dinosaurs here besides Blue, really, which is sad because, again, I much prefer when films develop monsters as characters rather than mere plot devices). With a little more design work to make him stand out more among the other critters in the franchise and more time to explore his nature, he could easily have become almost as iconic as The Big One as movie monsters go, or at least as much as the I. rex, though the latter bar is admittedly a good deal lower in the wake of how the movie industry has, ahem, evolved.

With that thought in mind, I will now spell out the biggest problem I had with this movie: the fact that it was trying to do so much in such a short space of time. Humorously and ironically, I know almost enough about the issues with my own writing to recognize the signs of that, with significant events being spaced too close to each other, too many characters at once (though admittedly, Zia and Maisie are a treat to watch, Franklin a bit less so but far from unbearable for my taste), and at least one questionable decision on the part of everyone at some point or another, up to and including the writers. There are a lot of things I liked, but not enough time for me to let them sink in, like I was being bombarded with one spectacle after another. It feels like overkill more than anything, and alas, far too many films in recent years have tried to shove that method into people's faces as though trying to say, "Here's your action, here's your fanservice, here's your whatever the whoopity-freaking-doo you consider entertainment, are you happy now?!" (Well, not quite as vitriolic and sarcastic, but you get the idea.) If the filmmakers and the owners of the franchise rights had been willing to accept four movies in the newer series rather than just three, and let Fallen Kingdom be broken up into two separate, slightly slower-paced movies, the problems with each individual portion would likely not have been as significant, and audiences would not have noticed them so readily. Sadly, though, the rapid-fire, dozen-blockbusters-a-year rush-job environment of the modern movie industry was not kind to this film, which is a crying shame. We need more movies that are more relaxed and subdued half the time, the way the original JP film was, and while audiences may have to take the time to once again get used to movies like that, I think it would be a welcome change of pace from the current influx of chaotic, nonstop slugfests and pyrotechnic displays we've become so familiar with.

In tl;dr form, it is with a heavy heart that I have to say that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is, in fact, the worst film of the entire Jurassic Park franchise, even more so than JP3 - though don't get me wrong, as with JP3, I still very much enjoyed it as its own movie, as clumsily handled as it was at times (though even then, the movie itself isn't entirely at fault for it). There's a difference between a movie being the low point in its franchise and a low point among movies in general, a difference which a lot of reviewers need to understand before taking an undeserved dump over movies that could've been so much better if Hollywood had worked just a bit differently. You have to actually try to make a work of entertainment media I consider genuinely terrible, and it was actually a relief to me that even the lowest points of Fallen Kingdom still ranked somewhat midway between "meh" and "shakes hand eeeeehhhhhh" from my own subjective standpoint. I truly hope that the next and presumably final JP film will turn out for the better, especially given that Alan, Ellie, and Ian are all slated to have major roles in it, but I'm not going to dismiss Fallen Kingdom off the bat just because of the issues I have with its writing. If nothing else, it's a perfectly decent popcorn flick with prehistoric monsters in it - and hey, that was pretty much what everyone was there for, wasn't it?

Grading Scheme:

96 - 100: A+

93 - 96: A

90 - 92.9: A-

87 - 89.9: B+

83 - 86.9: B

80 - 82.9: B-

77 - 79.9: C+

73 - 76.9: C

70 - 72.9: C-

67 - 69.9: D+

60 - 66.9: D

Below 60: E

Grades:

Writing: 6

Characterization: 6

Pacing: 7

Creativity: 8

Consistency: 8

Cinematography: 9

World Building: 7

Music and Sound: 8

Effects: 10

Engagement: 9

Final Grade: 78 (C+)

#Armor Bird Reviews #Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

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