‘Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom’: Bigger But Not Better?

Check out excerpts from reviews of ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’.

Here’s how critics are reacting to the latest instalment in the Jurassic series. It’s engaging, has got lots of CGI and dinosaurs chomping bad people, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

There’s a lot of tsk-tsking in the fifth Jurassic movie, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, about the bad guys wanting to “weaponize” the dinos, both the original flavor and the new-formula extra-crispy. As it happens, weaponizing the dinos is exactly what the filmmakers do. The fun — such as it is — comes from watching dinosaurs chomp down on overweening bad guys who have insufficient reverence for Nature. That’ll teach them, at least until the sixth Jurassic movie.Is Fallen Kingdom a good ride? It’s okay.

David Edelstein, Vulture.com

This is a summer popcorn movie with all the trimmings - action, cheesy in-jokes, startling visual effects and a storyline with a moralising, eco-friendly subtext... The cruellest, most violent creatures here are the humans. The film ends on a graceful note, teeing affairs up nicely for what promises to be an even more apocalyptic next instalment.

Geoffrey Macnab, Independent.co.uk

Like its predecessor, Fallen Kingdom is overstuffed with ethical conundrums, and not sophisticated enough to fully engage with them. And the movie’s villains become such cartoony caricatures that it’s impossible to take Fallen Kingdom’s attempted philosophical musings seriously. This is the kind of movie where the audience knows Mills is bad because he yells at a kid, and dinosaurs are auctioned off to an international group of would-be Bond villains. It’s all absurd — even for a movie about man-made dinosaurs — and it becomes even more ridiculous when the movie leaves behind the grand, epic vistas of Isla Nublar for a much smaller dinosaur jail located beneath Lockwood’s estate.

Bryan Bishop, TheVerge.com

The film takes a long time to build up to its climactic battle with an Indoraptor, and it’s effectively done, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before — and when it arrives, you realize that this is what these films will always, at heart, be about: not “social responsibility” but monsters who want to eat us. The first “Jurassic World” was, quite simply, not a good ride. “Fallen Kingdom” is an improvement, but it’s the first “Jurassic” film to come close to pretending that it isn’t a ride at all, and as a result it ends up being just a so-so ride. I hope the next one is an all-out ride — but that for the first time since Spielberg’s 1993 original, it’s actually a great one. The audience for this series has proved that it will turn out in mega-droves. But it deserves more than a passable rerun taking itself too seriously.

Owen Gleiberman, Vareity.com