As much as I have enjoyed the Jurassic Park franchise, each movie makes me wonder if they’ve exhausted all the premises for getting characters back to face the dinosaurs again. Each time they find a reason, but it’s never a very good one. The action sequences and the visual effects are typically enough to carry these movies. However, there’s an undercurrent in this movie that suggests that the filmmakers are trying to do more (not to mention the pretentious title: “Fallen Kingdom” made me expect some kind of Game of Thrones-style high-fantasy element to a movie that was basically (again) about dinosaurs getting out of hand). Seems like they want to examine the potential impact of a world with dinosaurs in it. It’s a noble effort (one that is not unlike the recent Planet of the Apes reboots) to give the franchise some sci-fi gravitas, but unfortunately this movie doesn’t commit hard enough to a gritty, brainy makeover and ends up back in the same matinee-cinema, action-adventure boat as is predecessors.

This time, after the chaos of the last Jurassic World movie, everyone has learned about the dinosaurs, so apparently the next logical step is to get animal rights involved. Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) has formed a dino rights group, and when dino island is about to erupt and kill all the dinos with lava, she drags Owen (Chris Pratt) back to help her save them. (It just occurred to me how tragic it is that after millions of years since the last extinction-level event that brought all their species to an end, the dinos get reincarnated onto an island that also blows up, potentially exterminating them all again. It’s a bit like being ‘rescued’ from the Titanic by a leaky raft. We may have found another verse for Alanis’s “Ironic”, donchathink?). The first third of the movie seems like an epilogue to the previous, where our heroes track down Blue (the smarter-than-average raptor from the last movie) and save her and the other dinos with the help of a crew of mercenaries. Once again there are dinos running everywhere, and big monsters are eaten by even bigger ones (making me wonder if dinos are really so instinctual that even as they are running from lava and volcanic ash, they need to slow down to chomp on each other).

Circumstances bring the team back to mainland US to the grand estate of billionaire Benjamin Lockwood, the estranged business partner of billionaire John Hammond (the guy who created the original Park), where shady dealings are afoot. Under these circumstances the movie puts its thinking cap on to explore how things might go wrong if cloned dinosaurs are made available to greedy billionaires. Unfortunately the story veers in a direction that potentially reflects director JA Bayona’s gothic horror past, all villainy and moustache-twirling. In fact, thinking caps are clearly put aside because the story all but ignores a scientifically huge, game-changing twist that we learn about the billionaire’s family (perhaps because it doesn’t involve dinos).

I was really not impressed with Bayona’s directing. He tried so hard to put a gothic horror spin on the movie, with the raptor’s scary claws creeping towards a little girl in her bedroom, and there was even a scene that was so cliché it was almost funny. At the height of chaos, another super-bad cross-breed of dino, called the Indoraptor (I don’t know why the real dinos are such a valuable commodity when it seems like these genetic wizards have the ability to mix all kinds of DNA to create viable creatures), chased our heroes across the Victorian rooftops of the Lockwood estate. It was a dark and stormy night (that’s right) and the rain was pouring down in buckets as the creature lifted up its head and let out a roar, silhouetted against the light of a full moon. After that, I was pretty surprised that no were-dinos were added to the story. On top of that, the soundtrack (by the typically moody but artistic Michael Giacchino) was so heavy-handed and organ-music schlocky that I found it not only un-scary, but very distracting.

By the end of the movie, we are faced with Dr. Ian Malcom (played by Jeff Goldblum reprising his original-movie role) wagging his finger at everyone, once again saying essentially “I told you not to play God, now look what you’ve done”. The ending leaves an opening for big changes to come if there is another sequel, but by then none of it feels fresh or surprising. It’s all been so obvious since the first movie. It feels sadly like we’ve been waiting for this outcome all along. Interestingly, there is a parallel between these movies and the reality within the films themselves. In the first Jurassic Park, the amazement of the characters at seeing dinosaurs brought to life through cloning was mirrored in the way movie audiences were amazed at the way special effects brought dinosaurs to life on-screen. Now by the fifth movie, unscrupulous characters try to expand their profits by taking advantage of their creations and there once again seem to be parallels to the producers who also want to use new methods and technology to expand their profits at the expense of the movie and the franchise’s integrity. My own position is even more ambivalent, as I enjoy seeing dino movies. Nevertheless, I also feel that if they don’t inject some intelligence and inventiveness into the franchise (again, like they did for Planet of the Apes), it’s already teetering on the brink of campiness and might just fall over. (3.5 out of 5)