Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) is the latest installment in this dinosaur-movie franchise founded by Steven Spielberg about 30 years ago.  The wonder has worn thing and the film is somewhat mean-spirited.  But mean-spirited times call for mean-spirited movies.

The plot is simple enough and designed for non-stop action.  The movie has no slow scenes and, therefore, nothing resembling acting -- it is all caricatured figures dashing wildly here and there with dinos snapping at their heels.  The biogenetically engineered creatures on the island where Jurassic Park was located are threatened by a volcanic eruption.  While Jeff Goldblum pontificates before a senate investigating committee, the dinosaurs are rescued by a sinister force of heavily armed men.  The dinosaurs are transported across the sea to what seems to be Banff in Canada.  At a huge mansion (it looks like the Gothic Banff Springs lodge) with vast underground laboratories, a sinister cabal of scientists are engineering the dinosaurs to "weaponize them".  The beasts are to be sold to arms dealers.  (This plot element is utterly absurd -- the dinos are easily tranquilized by firing poison darts into them and they fall dead when shot.  The idea of using the creatures on a modern battlefield is folly -- the first napalm-drop would carbonize the whole lot of them.)  A small group of plucky dino-lovers intervenes and the creatures escape, running amuck during their auction and slaughtering the bad guys.  After killing the bad guys, they chase the good guys.  The good guys escape.  Then, the biggest, meanest dino kills the slickest, most cruel bad guy and the film ends with the beasts escaping into the wild.  (The villain is ripped into pieces and the dinos fight over his parts and, at last, a small flock of cuddly baby raptors laps up his spilled blood -- this is, after all, family entertainment.)  In the last shot, the most vicious weaponized dinosaur stands atop the crest of a rocky ridge in California and trumpets his rage at the small suburb huddled under the hill -- it's the type of suburb you always see in Spielberg movies even though this picture was directed by J. A. Bayona. 

1.
Isla Nublar is pronounced Iss-lah Nublar.

2.
When female dino-lovers first see the Jurassic park dinosaurs, their nipples get hard.

3.
The endearing little girl who is menaced by the dinosaurs that she loves during the last third of the picture is called Maisie.  She is the only one who knows the nefarious schemes of the bad guys.  Hence, the film could be subtitled, after the Henry James novel:  What Maisie Knew.

4.
Volcanology:  you can't  outrun a pyroclastic flow -- notwithstanding what the film shows us.  At one point, the hero played by Chris Pratt is surrounded on three sides by molten lava that comes within inches of his body.  If  you were in this position, surrounded on three sides by lava, of course, you would be incinerated. 

5.
Is this a supernaturally aged Parker Posey, somehow abandoning her affiliation with quirky Indie pictures and acting as the nanny to Maisie? No, it's Geraldine Chaplin.  Who would have thought it?

6.
It would be very nice to hear more of the John Adams score for Jurassic Park, a monument, of course, in the history of film music.  But we only get to hear a few bars of that surging, triumphant theme.

7.
The world is now apoplectic with hatred.  Donald Trump has induced everyone to hate everyone else.  Cable News, for instance, is now a festival of hatred.  The bad guys can be "read" as House Republicans.  In fact, the leader of the vicious thugs who evacuate the dinos from Isla Nublar quotes President Trump:  "She such a nasty woman," he says about one of the heroines.  At the big dino auction, the plutocrats arrive in black limousines and are stated to be Russians, Serbians, Chinese, and representatives of Big Pharma (I think there's a North Korean in the group as well) -- that is, vermin who are dino fodder.  Of course, during the auction, the dinosaurs get loose and slaughter these plutocrats.  The plutocrats are, also, pretty clearly Republicans and so the liberal audience gets the pleasure of watching the bad guys literally ripped limb from limb by the raging beasts.  I saw the film with a crowd of "deplorables", probably all of them Trump supporters -- I assume that they were too ignorant to understand the film's politics.  Or even better:  I presume they read the dinosaurs as nasty immigrants, drooling Hispanic murderers and members of M3  crossing our borders who butcher a crowd of liberal Democrats at the climax of the film.

8.
In King Kong, the tall, black gorilla busts loose when  he is exhibited.  He leaps off the stage and rips members of the audience to pieces.  King Kong's aggression is aimed at the people who are watching -- the audience at the exhibition is a surrogate for the audience in the theater watching the movie.  In this film, the dinosaurs rip into folks who we are encouraged to define as our political enemies:  a bunch of climate-science denying plutocrats and arm's dealers -- the loathsome Sherman Adelson's and Koch Brothers' of the world.

9.
In one poignant scene, a poor lonely brontosaurus stands on a pier looking at the departing "Arcadia" -- that is, the "Ark."  He is engulfed in lava and flame pouring off the volcano.  Brontosaurus', I assume, could swim and you want to shout out:  "Jump into the water and swim for it, big fellow."  But he doesn't.

10.
You go to a movie like this for iconic images.  There are several.  An overturned and demolished jeep has a side mirror that we read upside-down:  Images in the mirror are closer than they look.  A raptor stands atop the huge mansion and roars at the moon:  the beast's shadow crosses the moon, huge and full, as in E.T. and the creature tilts his head back and howls in silhouette.  Near the end of the movie, a dinosaur smashes down the fence around a zoo and confronts a huge majestically maned lion:  the two predators stare at one another bathed in Spielberg's trademark honey-colored light.