Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom-A Dino Movie for Monster Kids

The reason why I don't think the latest "Jurassic" movie is as bad as everyone's telling you it is.

By: Josh McCormack

It's a Tuesday morning here at the beautiful campus of UNC Asheville. I finished my homework early, I have no classes and I'm pretty fueled up on coffee. So why not start the day off with a pointless blog post about a movie that came out nearly three months ago, and that most of you have forgotten about? I am of course talking about the trashy masterpiece (trashterpiece?) that is "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom".

When "Fallen Kingdom" was released this past summer it was met with some pretty rough reviews. Even the critics that didn't hate it were mostly saying, "I mean, it could've been worse".

"It's bad. It's really bad," said Leigh Monson of Birth. Movies. Death.

"Egregious," said Meg Downey of CBR

And Brendan Collins of Medium Popcorn (?) said, "As infuriating as 'Jurassic Park III'. Nobody wanted this." 

That one's just wrong. As we all know, "Jurassic Park III" kicks ass. 

I'm going to diverge from the topic real quick and explain what a "monster kid" is for those of you who might be confused by the title of this blog post.

In the 1950s and 60s, the television was starting to become the dominating force in American pop culture. In addition to the programs being specifically made for the television, local channels would air late night movies and many of these were the classic monster films pulled from the prior two decades.

With this and the arrival of Forrest J Ackerman's monster movie based magazine, "Famous Monsters of Filmland" the first generation of "monster kids" were born. These were baby boomers who grew up in front of the tv set watching Frankenstein's monster terrorizing a town or Godzilla destroying a model of Tokyo. 

From this crowd, filmmakers arose. Directors like Joe Dante ("Gremlins", "Innerspace"), John Landis ("Blues Brothers", "An American Werewolf in London") and yes, even Steven Spielberg was a product of this monster movie revolution. 

Spielberg would be the first to admit that the original "Jurassic Park" is a straight up monster movie, even with its moments of awe and wonder. Honestly, the "wondrous" moments of the original film only take up less than five minutes of the movie's runtime, the rest being an expertly crafted horror/chase film. 

My father was born in 1970, at the tail end of when many major networks were still showing the classic monster films of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. But he still managed to catch them in their last run and became obsessed like so many before him and wound up passing that love on to me. 

Yes, I'm a monster kid and proud of it. 

Director of "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom", J.A. Bayona, is also a monster kid. With works like "The Orphanage", a couple of "Penny Dreadful" episodes and "A Monster Calls" (great movie, btw) at his belt, he has proven himself to be a fan of all things monstrous and gothic. 

Hell, there's even a scene in "Fallen Kingdom" that is a direct recreation of a moment from the 1979 adaption of "Dracula". That's the kind of niche inspiration that's been lacking in modern summer blockbusters, if you ask me. 

With all that aside, I want to make it absolutely clear that most of my positive feelings toward "Fallen Kingdom" are based on its cosmetics. The script and all the characters are pretty much a mess. Granted, a far more interesting mess than its predecessor, but still a mess.

Thankfully, Colin Trevorrow stepped back from his directing position in the previous film (his shooting style is like a Judd Apatow comedy and the color-grading is so terrible that a lot of characters look orange), but he couldn't step aside without getting his dino-dung covered hands on the script. And boy, does it show.

Inconsistencies abound in this thing. Like how does a character who's never interacted with a dinosaur know how to repair its wound? Or why the hell would John Hammond have built his park on an active volcano? Plus, the whole dinosaur auction is so goofy that it feels like something taken from an '80s Saturday morning cartoon. Not to mention, the dialogue is absolutely cringe-worthy. It's especially bad between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. There's a ten to fifteen minute stretch in the first act that sets up where these characters have been in the years after the first film and I honestly thought I was in store for one of the year's worst movies.

What holds this thing together, in my opinion, is everything on the technical side and how J.A. Bayona takes this terrible (TERRIBLE) script and directs the living hell out of it. From the thrilling opening sequence to the last frame of Blue roaring into the distance, every shot seems to be designed for maximum impact. He throws away many of the conventions that Trevorrow relied too heavily on in the last film and just injects these sequences with his own flair and love for gothic horror.

You could say that this isn't a strong enough reason to like a movie. And that the director is favoring style over substance, which is fair. However, when the substance you're given is so shitty, why not throw in some style?

I've already mentioned how great the "Dracula"/"Nosferatu" influence is in the film's final confrontation, but the opening sequence is wonderful too. The dinosaurs are only illuminated when lightning strikes, creating a very "Alien"-esque sense of suspense. There's also a pretty impressive one-shot where the camera is placed within a sinking gyrosphere with our supporting characters fighting for air as Chris Pratt swims around trying to safely free them. It's thrilling in a way many of the CG heavy blockbusters aren't nowadays. 

If there's one sequence that illustrates how convicted Bayona is to making something special out of this messy plot, it would be the moment in which Chris Pratt's Owen Grady follows the little girl in need of help up to her room, not knowing that the villainous Indoraptor (what a name, am I right?) is on the roof above the girl's bedroom. 

Just when I was writing that, I was getting bored. It's a moment that is probably summed up in one or two sentences in the script. Trevorrow probably just wrote this moment as a quick interlude between set pieces and didn't really have a particular vision of how this scene was going to be done. There wasn't really any need to, it's just a nonchalant moment of character movement.

Yet, this is what Bayona did with it:

That music, the silhouette, the rain and the composition of the creature against the full moon. It's a genuinely epic moment at the service of nothing. Nothing more than a terrible script. But just in that thirty second clip, you can feel the passion and enthusiasm from the director and you can hear how that enthusiasm rubs off on Michael Giacchino's incredible score. Bayona took a moment that was so unimportant to the overall story and used it as a way to make his mark on this franchise. 

This is why I'm so fascinated by this movie. It's such a mess, but behind its unavoidable flaws is a filmmaker who is so excited to create his own "Jurassic" movie and gives it everything he's got. 

When I woke up this morning, I was honestly excited to see that "Fallen Kingdom" was in my iTunes library. Yes, I did pre-order it and you can withhold your judgement until after I have made my point.

Why was I excited? Why do I usually scoff at movies of this type, but let this one slide? Why am I willing to ignore all the very apparent issues this movie has and still enjoy it?

When you're a kid, you watch a lot of stupid stuff. For my generation we got the "Star Wars" prequels, the first "Transformers" movie and even the "Spy Kids"films. While we can look back now and laugh at the plot inconsistencies and stupid jokes, you still can't help but get a rush watching them again, because when you were little you didn't care about stuff like that. You just thought it was fun.

As a monster kid, you expose yourself to a lot of enjoyable crap. I enjoyed dinosaur movies like "Jurassic Park III" or Disney's "Dinosaur"(an underrated gem). And I watched monster movies like "Revenge of the Creature" or "The Monster Squad". You can criticize these movies for days, but they all leave me with a special feeling in my heart and led me to wind up discovering more in the monster/horror film territory. 

Perhaps why I enjoy "Fallen Kingdom" as much as I do is because J.A. Bayona knows this is a stupid movie. He knows it doesn't make any sense. But as a monster kid himself, perhaps he was trying to take me back to a simpler time when I could just enjoy Velociraptors and T-Rexes bursting through walls and eating bad guys without having to think about its context within the plot. 

Maybe the reason I enjoy "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" as much as I do is because for the first time in a long while, someone made a movie that made me feel like a little kid again.

A monster kid.