Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, Toby Jones, James Cromwell, B D Wong, Rafe Spall, Daniella Pineda, Justice Smith, Geraldine Chaplin, Peter Jason, Robert Emms, Isabella Sermon.
By taking the beast out of its environment you increase the terror, you bring the creature into the home, you escalate the fear and by bringing that monster into one small, almost perfect, bedroom, where everything is neat, where everything is in its natural place and ordered, you have the makings of something that makes the imagination run wild, that makes the latest in the Jurassic Park/World series so much darker, so more in tune with the modern world and the debate of the human factor in the destruction of the eco system.
It seems such a long time ago now that Richard Attenborough, in the guise of John Hammond, first welcomed visitors to an island in which a group of dinosaurs were brought back from extinction and in which the ethics of such a move were discussed. Nature doesn’t care for niceties, nature perhaps couldn’t care less who was the dominant species on the planet, but as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is ready to point out, our arrogance, our greed, and lack of humility, is enough to make us the ready meal of a lifetime; we are the walking goats tethered to the pole at the dinosaur dinner table, tied and chained by our own sense of infallible hubris.
Where Jurassic World towers over the original Jurassic Park films is its scope, not relying on the sense of wonder, but the sense of guilt, of the unbound recklessness of humanity, and the dedication to a series of films that is not born out a one hit smash which caught people by surprise and not having everything in place to keep the tension rising. In both Jurassic World and now its sequel, what comes across is the immense pleasure taken in taking a story and blowing it completely up, making the terror more real because it is driven by the real monsters, the soldiers, the trophy hunters and the money men.
You can make all the ecological documentaries you want, sometimes what grabs people’s true attention, is the shock and roar of a creature who has every right to live, but to whom by doing so, surely makes us and all that we have achieved, redundant, nature’s own peculiar smile as she allows the beast to die out.
It is a beast that keeps giving and the potential is there to go beyond a third film in this latest franchise, especially with the dramatic and ingenious way the direction of this particular film was taken.
With stand out performances from Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, reprising their roles as Claire Dearing and Owen Grady, Jeff Goldblum, in what has to be one of the shortest and yet exceedingly profound couple of minutes on screen in his whole career, and Rafe Spall as Eli Mills, a part that perhaps takes him out of his comfort zone and reinforces his appeal as one of the greats of his generation.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is chilling in parts, the realisation of just exactly what it is that we are capable of doing to the future of our own species and the planet we live on, of bringing about our own destruction, is enough to keep the audience on its nerves; a masterly sequel.
Ian D. Hall