Review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) by Njlake — 04 Jul 2018

These movies are supposed to be fun, or, at the very least, entertaining. But this is a mess and suffers from a lot of the problems the previous sequels did which was "we need to find a way to get people back on the island!" I can shut my brain off and live with watching a popcorn flick that is generally absurd, but there usually has to be some fun or thrills involved. This had none. Everything was totally predictable from and completely telegraphed from start to finish and even with that, how they pulled it off was lazy at best.

The other thing it suffers from is the entire movie is a snowball effect onto itself. Every time something goes wrong, something else that's equally dramatic or more-so goes wrong. And this continues through the entirety of the film. There's no chance to breathe and start to react to what happened. You're just continuing to be flooded with disasters and unfortunate events even up to and through the end which is another issue... this movie has no real ending, rather, it's a lead up to yet another sequel (which, I'll be honest, I'm more excited about that than I was at any point for this).

Another issue is the characters... you're normally supposed to have strong feelings for or against a character, but in this film, they are so surface level and boring that you don't feel anything for them. They have very little motivation, and even what little motivation they do have is so contrived and forced that it makes you care even less. It's entirely exposition (go here to do this, then find this thing and then do that, then go here so we can do this, all the while having someone overly explain everything that's going on).

Is it my least favorite Jurassic movie? No. That still belongs the JP3. But this is not far off. If you haven't seen this, I wouldn't bother going to the theater for it. I wouldn't even waste a Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu subscription on it because, trust me, your time is more valuable than watching this. Unless you literally have two-and-a-half hours to sit and veg out... no, even then I'd say to find something else to watch.