4 stars out of 5
Spoiler alert: This whole movie is about Liz Cheney and her Deep State cronies hiding all the compromised Dominion voting machines on Isla Nublar where they’re attacked by velociraptors and the TRUTH.
OK, no, it’s just another installment in the Jurassic Park/World series, and if we can believe the hype, it’s the final one. (Though I have to imagine in my 70s I’ll be dragging my sorry old ass to the VirtuoPlex for the new reboot Jurassic Universe: Reawakening starring Prince Louis and a genderless android named Glip.)
Speaking of being older at the movie theater: The only reason I saw this movie in Real3D was the showing time was 15 minutes later than a standard screening, and I really had to go to the bathroom. If the price differential is substantial, you absolutely don’t need to see this flick in 3D; there are no coming-at-ya moments and almost no wow-look-at-the-sense-of-depth scenes.
Does it seem like I’m about to give this movie a snarky, negative review? I know, right? And yet, I kind of loved it. Maybe I’m just a sentimental sucker for these Star Wars/Ghostbusters old-cast-meets-new-cast ploys, but, it’s nice! I’m older, they’re older, it works by gum!
Picking up from the fairly dreadful Fallen Kingdom, Earth is slowly becoming Planet of the Dinosaurs and it is not going fantastically well. Chris Pratt and Ron Howard’s daughter are hiding the British tween clone granddaughter of Jurassic Park cofounder Lockwood. (They’re really ramped up the stupid in these Jurassic World movies.) Then, in a none-too-subtle metaphor, giant locusts arrive. Laura Dern (yay!) recruits a looking-better-than-he-has-any-right Sam Neill to find out who’s behind these nasty bugs. Oh and by the way? If they don’t stop the locusts they’ll destroy our food chain and we’ll all die.
So this is all entertaining enough, pretty good, but then here’s the thing: The effects and the action sequences are AMAZING. And they don’t skimp on the thrills through this 2-hour, 20-minute extravaganza. It is literally action-packed. A brilliant truck/motorcycle/dinosaur chase scene had me cheering and laughing. Many sequences were similarly delightful.
Other old pals round out the cast, notably Jeff Goldblum who was in Fallen Kingdom for a hot second, but really gets to be his glorious self here. BD Wong is back as the morally compromised yet still probably a good guy researcher. Isabella Sermon returns as 14-year-old Maisie Lockwood and definitely holds her own; she can roll her eyes and storm off with the best of them. And the villain is… I had to look this up because the character was briefly in Jurassic Park and that was half a lifetime ago… Campbell Scott who is not as young and dashing as you remember him. Except wait, Campbell Scott wasn’t in Jurassic Park. What happened to the original actor? I’ll let you Google it yourself, but, just so you’re prepared: ewwww.
The emotional payoffs are OK, though certainly would’ve been a lot stronger if handled by executive producer Spielberg himself. Still, the end result is the best entry in the series since the original film, and the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year.
Jack Silbert, curator