- UK release: June 2018
- Director: J. A. Bayona · Writers: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Legendary Pictures
- Genre: Science fiction adventure / creature thriller · Runtime: 128 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World) as Owen Grady; Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, Jurassic World) as Claire Dearing; Rafe Spall (Prometheus, The Big Short) as Eli Mills; Daniella Pineda as Zia Rodriguez; Isabella Sermon as Maisie Lockwood
- Rotten Tomatoes: 47% critics / 48% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Three years after Jurassic World reopened the park and took a billion and a half pounds at the global box office, the question facing the fifth film in the series was always going to be where on earth it goes next. Colin Trevorrow, who directed the last one, has stepped back to write and produce, and into his chair comes J. A. Bayona, the Spanish director of The Orphanage and The Impossible, a man who knows precisely how to make a corridor frightening. That choice tells you more about the film than any trailer. Universal has hired a horror craftsman and pointed him at the dinosaurs, and for a good stretch of the second half it lets him cut loose.
The setup
Isla Nublar, the island that has hosted the park’s various catastrophes, now has a more elemental problem: a long-dormant volcano is waking up, and the dinosaurs left behind after the last disaster are about to be wiped out for good. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), once the park’s buttoned-up operations manager and now running a dinosaur rights group, is recruited to help mount a rescue, and she in turn pulls in Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), the ex-Navy animal handler who raised the velociraptor Blue from a hatchling. What starts as a salvage mission curdles quickly. The money behind the rescue has other plans, and the animals pulled off the island are bound not for a sanctuary but for a private auction. The back half of the film abandons the jungle altogether and relocates to a vast gothic estate, where the genre quietly shifts from adventure to something closer to a monster movie in a haunted mansion.
The cast
Pratt and Howard slot back into their roles without strain. Pratt plays Owen with the same easy, faintly self-mocking swagger he brought to Guardians of the Galaxy, and his scenes with Blue are the emotional spine the franchise has been building since the last film. Howard does the heavier lifting; Claire has been written with more conviction this time, an activist rather than a foil, and Howard sells both the competence and the dawning horror as the scheme reveals itself. Rafe Spall, so good as the squirming numbers man in The Big Short, makes a satisfyingly oily corporate villain in Eli Mills, the kind of smooth functionary who has talked himself into believing the indefensible. Newcomer Isabella Sermon, as the young Maisie Lockwood, is handed the film’s strangest and most interesting thread and plays it with a poise that steadies the gothic stretch considerably.
The craft
Bayona is the reason to watch. He shoots the volcanic escape as a genuine set piece, all ash and orange light and animals stampeding through smoke, and there is one image of a lone dinosaur on a sinking dock that is unexpectedly moving. Once the action moves indoors he is properly in his element. He stages the auction-house sequences and the night-time stalking through the Lockwood estate like classic horror, with a creature, the engineered Indoraptor, prowling rain-streaked rooftops and reaching long-clawed hands under doors. Óscar Faura’s cinematography leans into deep shadow and lightning rather than the bright open spaces of the earlier films, and Michael Giacchino’s score knows when to fall silent and let a claw scrape across a floorboard do the work. It is a handsome, atmospheric film with a real sense of dread in it, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a fifth Jurassic picture.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is The Lost World, the previous time the series tried to get the dinosaurs off the island and into the wider world, and this is the better film, more coherent in its escalation and far more confident in its set pieces. The volcano half plays as a bigger, louder Jurassic World; the mansion half is something the franchise has never attempted, closer in spirit to old Universal monster pictures or even King Kong, with its captured beast and its auction of the wondrous. The two halves do not entirely fuse, and the screenplay asks you to swallow some thin plotting to get from one to the other. But the willingness to take the formula somewhere genuinely odd counts for a great deal in a series this far in.
Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are not kind. Critics are sitting around 47%, audiences barely higher at 48%, and the recurring complaints are familiar: the plot logic frays, the franchise keeps escalating for its own sake, and the human characters make the convenient mistakes the story requires. Those criticisms are fair on their own terms. Where I part company is on the verdict that follows. The escalation is the point of buying a ticket to a film like this, and Bayona delivers it with more style and atmosphere than the material strictly deserves. A lukewarm critical reception for an entertaining popcorn film is a pattern I have learned to read past.
Verdict
This is a film I enjoyed rather more than I can entirely defend, and I am content with that. It is loud, occasionally daft, and held together by a director working well above his brief. The volcano sequence is a proper spectacle, the gothic second half is the most distinctive thing the franchise has done, and Pratt and Howard remain good company throughout. It will not change anyone’s mind about big-budget sequels, and it does not need to. As a rainy-afternoon creature feature with genuine craft in the frame, it does the job and then some, and I would happily watch it again. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with 3D and IMAX showings worth seeking out for the volcano set piece. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow later in the year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the trilogy was rounded off by Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which finally let the dinosaurs loose across the wider world the ending of this film promised, to a markedly cooler reception than even this one received. Bayona moved on to other projects, and Fallen Kingdom has settled into its reputation as the odd, gothic middle chapter, the one entry in the modern run that tried something genuinely different with the formula. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on various platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat, occasional bloody moments, action violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Action violence and occasional bloody moments include blood on a dinosaur’s teeth as a dinosaur bites off a man’s arm before devouring him, and elbow blows, taser shots and punches as a man evades bad guys and dinosaurs.
Threat and horror: Moderate threat includes a man and a woman trying to escape a vehicle rapidly filling with water and a girl hiding in terror in her bed as a dinosaur scrapes a talon on her bedclothes.
Language: There is some mild bad language, such as ‘piss’, ‘bloody’ and ‘shit’.
Injury detail: There is some sight of the blood in the aftermath of violence and dinosaur attacks.
Alcohol and smoking: Adult characters drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
