The Thing Is... Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
lacks any bite
By now, as sad as it is to say, I try not to expect too much from Jurassic Park movies. A franchise that was birthed by a masterclass of film-making, has for the most part, dwindled into popcorn fare with mega visuals and light thrills. Say what you will about the overall quality of Lost World and Jurassic Park 3, they still didn't feel like empty blockbusters. They presented some sort of serious story thread and character development, and at the very least, the dinosaurs were always scary and thrilling to watch. Sadly, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, has stripped this franchise of whatever fun it had left.
Here are a few reasons why Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom fails:
The Characters are flatter than a pancake
Remember that time when we actually had realistic multi-dimensional characters who actually have a story arc in Jurassic Park movies? They've successfully been driven into extinction in this movie. Sure, Chris Pratt is charming as always, but Bryce Dallas Howard is really the only character given at least an inch of space to develop. The supporting characters are tired stereotypes and one-sided at best.
The dinosaurs just aren't scary anymore
The T-Rex and The Raptors from the older movies were always creatures that inspired fear. We could appreciate them as finely tuned predators, but they could just as easily haunt our nightmares. Jurassic World did away with this, by creating a new villainous dinosaur, and making the old ones heroes. Fallen Kingdom tries to continue this trend, but this time around, the new predator doesn't inspire awe or fear. I scare really easily, but even I sailed through this movie without feeling a twinge of fear. Actually, by the end of the film, I was actually rooting for the supposed "big bad" dinosaur.
The villains are cartoons
The villain characters might as well twirl their moustaches and wear name-badges that identify them as bad-guys. They have no dimension, no complexity, and beyond that, their plans are laughably bad. I'm talking Loony Tunes Willey Cayote bad.
Plot holes and shallow call-backs
The movie is really a series of accidents and lucky-breaks, that are never consistent with what the story has set up as fact. Here's a dinosaur who's built to be an expert hunter with heightened senses to track prey in complex environments. But it can't locate 3 people crouched behind a pillar a couple of feet away. Here's a dinosaur that's brutishly strong and rips through wood and glass easily, but when confronted with a closed window, it doesn't just bust through, but gingerly turns the handle to open it. Simply because we must, must, must have a call-back to that iconic raptor scene in the first movie. A scene, which I must add, made more sense, since the raptor was opening a thick steel door that it couldn't break through.
There's nothing to worry about anymore
The villains hugely outnumber the heroes in this movie. So more often than not, we have scores of people in the vicinity of a dangerous dinosaur, but every single one of them is a bad-guy. Having a villainous dinosaur up against villainous humans, sucks out every ounce of tension in the scene. This movie actually succeeded in making dinosaur attacks boring.
All in all, even with my low expectations, this movie was a disappointment. If you're planning on spending money on seeing this, I would recommend you save yourself the trouble and just watch the original Jurassic Park movie again. Now that was a damn good movie.