Peter Viney's Blog

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 

Directed by J.A. Bayona
Writers: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
Based on characters created by Michael Crichton.

cast:
Chris Pratt – Owen Grady
Bryce Dallas Howard  – Claire Dearing
Rafe Spall – Eli Mills
Justice Smith- Franklin Webb
Daniella Inada – Zia Rodriguez
James Cromwell- Benjamin Lockwood
Toby Jones – Mr Eversol
Ted Levine – Ken Wheatley
Jeff Goldblum – Ian Malcolm
B.D. Wong – Dr Wu
Geraldine Chaplin – Iris
Isabella Sermon – Maisie Lockwood
Peter Jason – Senator Sherwood

The second one in the second trilogy … following 2015’s Jurassic World. By the time we got to see it it had already passed $1 billion, and was 25th highest grossing film of all time.  And yes, as predicted last time, Dr Wu is back. And Jeff Goldblum gets a cameo role.

We used to be very involved with the first trilogy. Our kids were the right age. Then years later, I watched my grandkids with their play farms. My granddaughter used to place a toy unicorn in the stable with the horses and donkeys. Makes perfect sense when you’re three or four. Then my grandson thought a model T-Rex would be fun to chase the farm cows with. Gender-marked behaviour? Yes, but true. If you’re checking the frequency of children’s vocabulary for stories, dinosaur, T-Rex and raptor all now feature heavily. That was mainly down to the original Jurassic Park. Yes, OK, I admit it, we bought bits of amber with insects in.

We saw the film in iSense. That had impressed me in the past, especially with Dunkirk. They killed it with the trailers to three atrocious films (Ant Man & Wasp Man, Skyscraperand the latest Mission Impossible). These were a festival of surround sound explosions, SFX monsters, gunfire and high speed crashes and by the time Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom started I had vowed to avoid iSense forever after and to avoid anything to do with the three atrocious trailers. There was a fourth, but it was so atrocious and another super-hero franchise, that thankfully I instantly forgot the title.

Say “Ahh …” or if you prefer “Arghh!!!”

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  starts with mercenaries grabbing some 2015 movie Indominus Rex DNA from old bones left underwater since Part One  and escaping the island. This is a pre-title sequence and it followed on seamlessly from the mindless surround sound pre-teen bangs and crashes of the trailers and continued them, and was SO bad. Total rubbish from the sound mix. It also made me groan in expectation of two more hours of the same, but at least we got SOME talking

Then we got the titles and the story started, narrative at last!

The dinosaur survivors on Isla Nubar are threatened by a volcanic eruption. The Senate in the USA debate whether they should perish or be saved. (No one asks whether they have jurisdiction over Isla Nubar.)  Jeff Goldblum turns up from the original series to give evidence. They decide to let them die, so Claire is summoned to save them and transport them to a new home by Benjamin Lockwood, Hammond’s former partner.

Let’s freeze frame there … and “go off on one.” When I was a kid, you were asked to report adders at Hengistbury Head, a popular area east of Bournemouth. Then the wardens went out and killed them. In the 1960s we knew why the Irish revered St Patrick for freeing the country from poisonous reptiles. We wanted our toddlers to toddle, and our dogs to shit on the grass without fear of a potentially lethal snake bite.

Go on 20 or 30 years and there are mass protests a few miles away because a housing development will threaten the adders’ heathland habitat. What? Then when the A338 road was modernized leading into Bournemouth, they spent months on reptile barriers and moving reptiles including adders back beyond a fence during construction. Many were annoyed at the traffic hold-ups. Do we need adders? No … (end of “going off on one.”)

So for me the Senate were right. OK, as the volcano erupted we saw a lone Brontosaurus, or possibly the sweet Dippy the Diplodocus from a children’s story swaying as it was engulfed in lava. Ow! Hot! As my grandson says when confronted with any food over stone cold. I believe we were supposed to see why Claire’s Dinosaur Protection League was right and shed a tear. Not a tear was shed by us.

Anyway, Eli Mils (Rafe Spall), Lockwood’s evil employee, has secretly built a three story underground research complex with dinosaur cages right under the mansion, but old Mr Lockwood (James Cromwell), being poorly, hasn’t noticed the construction work. Obviously it’s been done by some of those “Considerate Constructors” we saw advertised on hoardings outside building sites with a minimum of noise and disruption. Eli has recruited the mercenaries led by Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine). Eli tells Claire  (Bryce Dallas Howard ) that the dinosaurs will be rescued and transported to a new island where they will frolic happily in the grass BUT guess what? He’s fibbing. They’re going to be rounded up and sold off to the highest bidder from the California mansion.

Hey, Blue – you remember me? I brought you up …

So the easily-duped Claire goes off to recruit Owen (Chris Pratt), the raptor trainer from the last film. It’s obvious they had an affair after the last episode and broke up. We have some sweet (and actually funny) touches of Clark Gable / Claudette Colbert attempts to deny their mutual attraction throughout. They take Dr Zia Rodrigeuez (Daniella Ineda), a paleolithic veterinary surgeon – I believe they do a three year course in it at one of the new universities – and her assistant Franklin Webb.

Owen, Franklin, Claire and Zia tend to the empathetic raptor, Blue.

Franklin is the comic interest throughout, and played by Justice Smith, who at some point in his later career will have to play a judge, thus totally confusing the IMDB. He does get one great moment when dinosaur blood is spurted on his face and he yells “Ergh! Is it on my mouth?” and Owen looks and offers a kind lie, “No …”

Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial … (with Maisie)

These four are our heroes, later joined when they get to the mansion by Maisie (Isabella Sermon), Lockwood’s granddaughter. She is looked after by Geraldine Chaplin, a fine actress who has eschewed Botox.  There is a hall of dinosaurs in the mansion, I spent time trying to recall if it looked more like the museum dinosaur section in Chicago or in London, or possibly Oxford. We thought Maisie unusually good for a child with so much violent action to perform. One of our party said “if you can CGI dinosaurs, and CGI Gollum, you can CGI  Maisie. She’s probably a 35 year old actress,” I checked. Not so. She’s real, British and has an agent. Maybe she was just made smaller.

Fine British actors abound actually, with Toby Jones as the villainous auctioneer. To be fair all the principals are premier league actors, and no one begrudges them their payday. It finances (e.g.) Toby Jones to act on small stages in plays like The Birthday Party so that’s positive.

Funniest moment: The granddaughter Maisie gets locked in a room by evil villain Eli Mills (Rafe Spall). She escapes by pushing a sheet of paper under the door and wiggling the key out to drop on the paper and be pulled back in. Ah. I’ve used that three times. It’s the plot hinge in the best-selling  of all my ELT graded readers, The Locked Room, now in its third rewritten edition (Garnet ). I used it again in an exercise in another ELT book – the door is locked from the outside. The key is in the lock. You have a pen and a piece of paper. Describe how you can escape. THEN I used in English Channel Three: Double Identity an ELT comedy thriller (OUP). As the director is Spanish and the graded reader in its OUP version and the OUP video were mega sellers in Spain, I began to wonder … but as Karen points out I got the original idea from Enid Blyton’s Mystery of the Secret Room AND it was a regular puzzle in boys comics of the 1950s and 1960s. So it’s not mine (unfortunately) but it really is an incredibly well-known plot hinge!  My defence is that I used it to practise the verbs put, push, pull, drop for EFL learners. I don’t know if they have a defence.

Let’s add that all four of us guessed Maisie was a clone long before the script told us. Then again, that’s also the key to the mystery in the same video English Channel Three: Double Identity which won the IVCA Silver Award (he boasted). Hang on, that’s why I remember the dinosaur hall in the Oxford Museum. We set a major chase scene there!

I don’t think its seen us … Owen, Claire and Maisie

Can you say something is plain ludicrous when the base story involves re-created intelligent and empathetic dinosaurs? OK, but the dastardly Eli Mills hopes to get $4 million for a dinosaur, and is delighted when it gets to $10 million at auction. Even the patented weaponized hunter killer new model Indomino-raptor goes for $28 million to his delight. Basic economics. Any large truck costs $1 million. He has built an extensive custom fleet of outsized armoured ones with cages, a purpose built very large ship to carry them, Arcadia, a new purpose built dock on the California coast and a three level underground research facility with cages. He has employed a small army to transport them, with huge helicopters. Hang on, even our teenage companions noted, Mills may know about rounding up criminal Russians to bid for dinosaurs, but he has failed at Economics 101. He’d have to multiply every figure by at least ten to even begin to cover overheads. The main bidder is Russian. Perhaps he believes it will be more effective than nerve agents and plans to release it in Salisbury High Street to eliminate an ex-spy.

Weaponized animals comes from Robert Merles’ The Day of The Dolphin (a superb book and much less successful film).

It was never boring. The CGI gets ever better and as usual, on screen the dinosaurs look real, but as soon as you freeze them in a still photo as here- they look fake. Weird.

The bangs and crashes were thankfully fewer than in the trailers. There were major errors – mainly in having the bangs and crashes festival pre-title sequence which undermined the later surprises when they needed them. Also they have five good guys. To get full dinosaur movie shock, really one of them should die. We know that the baddies will go, except for Dr Wu / Dr Who who will escape to plot in Episode Three. Dr Wu remains enigmatic and a small role. On the other hand, placing a major dinosaur attack in the sanctuary of Maisie’s kiddie bedroom should ensure just a few nightmares when the kids get home, especially as the one time the iSense really impressed me was the sound of dinosaur feet crunching on the tiled roof above her bed (and above us).

The star? I vote for the volcano.

IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME …

English Channel 3: Double Identity, Episode 4. Peter Viney & Karen Viney (OUP, 1999)

The Locked Room: Streamline Graded Readers (OUP), Storylines (OUP) Oracle Readers (Garnet)