Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

I had a yen today to watch Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It was the fourth film in the series, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s very refreshing to see a lot of rich fat-heads choking on their hubris. The world needs more of that in real life.

Fallen Kingdom, like all the others in the series, is a parable. “There was once a man, or group of them, who thought he could do absolutely anything…” We know where this is going–to the Land of Nothing Works. Just a couple of minutes into the film, we see an elevator door that doesn’t work. It’s telling us what to expect.

And it’s not just the machines that fall down on the job. The shambles, the disaster, is caused entirely by Real Smart People blinded by their own reflections in the mirror. But we know from history that most of the really stupid things done by the human race–Original Sin, in fact–are done by idiots who think they’re geniuses.

Our world already has too much of that.

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We rented Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom this weekend, and it was everything we wanted from it. We weren’t looking for Shakespearean soliloquies.

So what we got were dinosaurs, and plenty of ’em, including some nice ones that haven’t been seen in the earlier Jurassic Park movies: a very nice Carnotaurus, and of course a new genetically-engineered man-made not-natural dinosaur that looks like New Jersey’s own Dryptosaurus. Three cheers! Plus the Mosasaur as big as your average township: surfers beware.

As usual, there are bad guys trying to exploit the dinosaurs, good guys trying to stop them, and the dinosaurs get loose and everything goes all pear-shaped, fanabla… I really don’t want to hit you with any spoilers, so suffice it to say that Fallen Kingdom offers a lot of the original Jurassic Park motifs, plus a couple of brand-new ones, at least one of which is just spectacular and you wonder why no one ever did it before. This is a dinosaur chase scene like none you’ve ever seen. Patty wound up dreaming she was being chased by an alligator, and I got kicked a dozen times before I could wake her up.

There are critics who want to put the whole Jurassic Park franchise out to pasture, they’re tired of these dinosaurs, the story line’s always the same, blah-blah. Bunch of spoil-sports. Sure, there are downright silly moments in any Jurassic Park movie–especially JP No. 2, The Lost World, which boasts a virtual dictionary of silly moments–but we don’t watch these movies in search of whatever it is that some of these critics are searching for. We watch ’em for dinosaurs, we get dinosaurs, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, the story line suggests yet another sequel, and we come away satisfied. What’s not to like?