I disagree. And the various relationships he has in the comics, including marriages and fatherhood, affirm my point. Furthermore, I also disagree in your assessment of the "Vanessa" character in DP1.
Movie review rant 2018
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
The Wade and Vanessa relationship is one of the best relationships from a comic book movie, which is why it is annoying she gets underused here. I liked the sequel, but thought the story was a bit sloppy. Still hilarious, though, and I do like how they've moved a bit more away from the "hey look at my balls!" type of humor in the first one (except for that one hilarious scene, you all know). I found the first 20-30 minutes pretty slow and hard to get into, but I did enjoy it more and more as it went through. I think I'm in the minority there, though. Cable is great, Josh Brolin is really conquering the superhero genre this summer! Domino is quite possibly the best part of the movie. They portrayed her powers really well and Zazie Beetz (actress' actual name) did a great job. Looking forward to seeing the character again and hopefully seeing Zazie in more roles. I did get the "can't draw feet" joke. After Domino I think my favorite part had to be the surprise character, whose appearance is something I had suspected for a while (they left clues in the marketing if you know where to look). They were a great addition, and their theme music was fantastic. Excellent cameos by several well-known actors. Arguably the best end credit scenes ever.
~Thylo
~Thylo
As I've said, it's been a while since ive seen it, what am I missing?
Maybe you should watch it again then...
I think deadpool is a type of superhero that really doesn't work with a romantic subplot. Other superheroes like super man or Spider-Man etc., whose stories are built around their balance between their superhero lives and regular lives, so they have romantic subplots.
Deadpool is different because he's always in his character, he can't turn it off by just taking off the suit like others can. His stories are more about coming to terms with himself and deciding what he wants to be. He is depressed and upset with his life, which is why he turns to humor to deal with it.
Deadpool is different because he's always in his character, he can't turn it off by just taking off the suit like others can. His stories are more about coming to terms with himself and deciding what he wants to be. He is depressed and upset with his life, which is why he turns to humor to deal with it.
The editors apparently filmed a suicide montage for this movie, of deadpool trying to kill himself, but they had to cut it. It illustrates my point though.
Well I've just watched Deadpool 2 and I thought it was quite a good film, not as good as the first one but still an enjoyable action-filled blockbuster. I think Josh Brolin makes a much better Cable than he does Thanos and I loved his portrayal of the Mad Titan so that is high praise from me! And for a Ryan Reynolds movie there was a fair bit of emotion throughout, not what I was expecting.
Now I've got to wait until a month (a whole bloody month!) longer than the rest of the world for Ant-Man & The Wasp, all because of some football tournament...
Now I've got to wait until a month (a whole bloody month!) longer than the rest of the world for Ant-Man & The Wasp, all because of some football tournament...
Again I think you should rewatch the first movie because the romance works very well. A huge chunk of the first film is the relationship. And those other heroes are always in their character also. Their personality and behavior remains the same whether in or out of the suit.
~Thylo
So, in preparation for Infinity War, I watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Spoiler Alert: it was good.
Then I watched Thor:Ragnarok. Twice. It was very very good. I might watch it again later.
I think I liked Ragnarok so much because it was very kiwi in its humour. It was just a fun movie to watch. Lots of cameos, and little kiwi jokes scattered through it too. Matt Damon, Liam Hemsworth, and Sam Neill all together in the play was fun. (Speaking of unexpected cameos - Miley Cyrus as the voice of Mainframe in Guardians 2!).
I liked Guardians 2 but found the characters much less likeable than in the first one. Drax, for example, had turned into just a mean-spirited dummy. And all the characters were now invincible gods apparently - what's that about? Also there was an inescapable feeling that the movie existed for no other reason than to fit in a last jigsaw piece before Infinity War, whereas Ragnarok didn't. Baby Groot was awesome though.
Aaaand I watched Infinity War tonight. Did I like it? Not so much. I mean, it was okay as these things go but the different parts of the movie simply didn't gel. It was like bits of entirely separate movies cut up and stuck together. Not a great plan.
Then I watched Thor:Ragnarok. Twice. It was very very good. I might watch it again later.
I think I liked Ragnarok so much because it was very kiwi in its humour. It was just a fun movie to watch. Lots of cameos, and little kiwi jokes scattered through it too. Matt Damon, Liam Hemsworth, and Sam Neill all together in the play was fun. (Speaking of unexpected cameos - Miley Cyrus as the voice of Mainframe in Guardians 2!).
I liked Guardians 2 but found the characters much less likeable than in the first one. Drax, for example, had turned into just a mean-spirited dummy. And all the characters were now invincible gods apparently - what's that about? Also there was an inescapable feeling that the movie existed for no other reason than to fit in a last jigsaw piece before Infinity War, whereas Ragnarok didn't. Baby Groot was awesome though.
Aaaand I watched Infinity War tonight. Did I like it? Not so much. I mean, it was okay as these things go but the different parts of the movie simply didn't gel. It was like bits of entirely separate movies cut up and stuck together. Not a great plan.
Well Ragnarok was directed by a kiwi so that makes sense.
Shame you didn't like IW as much as a lot of us did.
~Thylo
Shame you didn't like IW as much as a lot of us did.
~Thylo
I knew you would appreciate the humour, Taika Watiti has a mind of pure comedy genius and his portrayal of Korg was the stand out of the movie. Some fantastic lines, especially the discussion about Mjolinir. "The hammer used to pull you off?"
I thoroughly enjoyed GOTG2, any film that starts with Baby Groot attacking space rats whilst dancing to Mr Blue Sky gets an automatic pass from me! I found the whole funeral scene emotionally brilliant, Kurt Russell was fantastic as Ego and Sean Gunn as the (criminally under-used) Kraglin was an unexpected stand out. I agree with your criticisms but the good outweighed the bad by a considerable margin.
I disagree with your statement that the different parts didn't work, I think it was the only feasible way to make the whole cast seem needed. My favourite arc was the Thor/Rocket/Groot journey, followed by the battle in Wakanda. I wasn't too struck on the Team Iron Man story once they landed on Titan, and seeing them with The Guardians wasn't as exciting/interesting as it should have been. The exchange between Quill, Stark and Drax regarding Gamora was probably the funniest bit of dialogue in the movie, so props for that!
I notice you haven't mentioned Josh Brolin's turn as Thanos, were you not impressed?
I've recently watched GOTG2, Ragnarok and Infinity War too. I agree with most of what @Chlidonias said about the former two.
However, I agree with @Brum on Infinity war. The different part each had it's own atmosphere, or as @Vision said earlier:
However, I agree with @Brum on Infinity war. The different part each had it's own atmosphere, or as @Vision said earlier:
That was kind of my point. Each "different part", for want of a better term, was different - and really the only way they could make the movie "work" was by splitting it into separate bits which didn't work together. I don't want to watch a Thor movie and an Iron Man movie and a Wakanda movie all spaghettied together. It's just annoying. Yay Thor... oh now it's Black Panther, yawn... oh cool it's Mantis... bleah why is Captain America being so bland...and so on.
Thanos was great. It's just that I'm aware that a lot of people may not have seen the movie and won't want spoilers, so I deliberately kept it to a brief "this is how I felt" rather than any sort of review.
I think most people on this thread (who care) have seen the movie now, and Thanos being awesome isn't a spoiler, he makes Infinity War!
I could write a proper review of it. But you won't like it.I think most people on this thread (who care) have seen the movie now, and Thanos being awesome isn't a spoiler, he makes Infinity War!
Go for it, I like reading others opinions, even if they don't tally with my own. Variety is the spice of life, it would be a sad world if we all agreed, more random cliches...
I watched a couple of girl-hero movies today, Wonder Woman and Tomb Raider (the crappy 2018 one, not the Angelina Jolie one).
Wonder Woman was amazing! On a scale of one to ten, think of this as an eleven (80s reference for anyone that gets it). Back before this movie came out and I heard Gal Gadot was playing Wonder Woman I was not impressed. I only knew her from the Fast & Furious franchise, and I couldn't see how she could possibly play an Amazon, especially not a Lynda Carter Amazon. I was so wrong. If Infinity War had been half as good as Wonder Woman I'd have been happy. I can't really think of much to criticise about the movie, apart for little nit-picks like "why was the island so easy to find if it was hidden by the gods?", "where did that German battle cruiser go?", "where did they farm on that little island, or did they have some sort of magic never-emptying fridge of food?". Quite a bit of the CGI was pretty ropey too, but I let all of that slide. They should do a Wonder Woman meets Thor movie.
Next I watched the recent Tomb Raider. I know that not everyone appreciates the Angelina Jolie versions, but they were crazy fun actioners, and I think she was fantastic in the role. She had exactly the right look, and that arched-eyebrow amused smile like she was simply enjoying the whole ride. She was also a proper action hero in the role. Unlike Alicia Vikander, who not only looks like a starving child but spends most of the movie squeaking and shrieking and annoying the hell out of me. Lara Croft is supposed to be an ass-kicking Indiana Jones with lady parts, not a crying baby. But maybe the movie was action-filled to compensate? No. Dull, dull, dull. Even where it should have been exciting the director just couldn't pull it off beyond "oh... yawn". Everything about this movie just pissed me off. I might go watch the first Angelina Jolie one to get the bad taste out of my eyes.
Wonder Woman was amazing! On a scale of one to ten, think of this as an eleven (80s reference for anyone that gets it). Back before this movie came out and I heard Gal Gadot was playing Wonder Woman I was not impressed. I only knew her from the Fast & Furious franchise, and I couldn't see how she could possibly play an Amazon, especially not a Lynda Carter Amazon. I was so wrong. If Infinity War had been half as good as Wonder Woman I'd have been happy. I can't really think of much to criticise about the movie, apart for little nit-picks like "why was the island so easy to find if it was hidden by the gods?", "where did that German battle cruiser go?", "where did they farm on that little island, or did they have some sort of magic never-emptying fridge of food?". Quite a bit of the CGI was pretty ropey too, but I let all of that slide. They should do a Wonder Woman meets Thor movie.
Next I watched the recent Tomb Raider. I know that not everyone appreciates the Angelina Jolie versions, but they were crazy fun actioners, and I think she was fantastic in the role. She had exactly the right look, and that arched-eyebrow amused smile like she was simply enjoying the whole ride. She was also a proper action hero in the role. Unlike Alicia Vikander, who not only looks like a starving child but spends most of the movie squeaking and shrieking and annoying the hell out of me. Lara Croft is supposed to be an ass-kicking Indiana Jones with lady parts, not a crying baby. But maybe the movie was action-filled to compensate? No. Dull, dull, dull. Even where it should have been exciting the director just couldn't pull it off beyond "oh... yawn". Everything about this movie just pissed me off. I might go watch the first Angelina Jolie one to get the bad taste out of my eyes.
I liked Wonder Woman but didn't like how the third act turned into a giant blue (I think it was blue or maybe orange?) tinted CGI action fest whereas most of the rest of the movie was more grounded and better choreographed than that.
~Thylo
~Thylo
Ok so I watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with my brother the other day and now I’m going to go on a rant about why this franchise is awful and I hate it. Heavy spoilers for the entire “film” so if you haven’t seen/don’t want to know what happens then look away!
This was supposed to be a rant/review, but I ended up mostly summarizing the story, though to me that seems to be a good enough review in and of itself. All else I'd say is that these new movies are missing the sense of wonder and suspense that the original three had. Whenever the raptors or a T. rex made an appearance, it was a statement and it was intense and magical. Sometimes they wouldn't even show up under halfway through the movie, sometimes the third act in the raptor's case. These movies, however, just cram in as many dinos as they can, as fast as they can. Part of this movie's marketing is that they have more dino species present than any other, but it's at a complete loss to the franchise's continuity and this film's quality. I'd say it's style over substance but it's not, as these films look worse than their predecessors. None of the JP sequels are great, but now they're just terrible and nonsensical. They're pushing out these movies are quickly and seemingly cheaply as possible so they can make more box office and toy sales. It's awful and I hate that I keep going to see these even though I know they'll suck. I think it's only because I, and I think many others, just want to see Dinosaurs be done well on-screen again. But instead of a suspenseful, deep, inspiring science-fiction horror-thriller, they feed us this crap.
So I’ll just leave this here for you, and I hope to hear what you all think. Maybe PM me if you want to discuss spoilers in-depth so not to ruin the film for anyone who genuinely wants to see it?
~Thylo
While I’m probably going to dissect certain scenes here and there throughout the film I’m not going to do a scene by scene review of the whole movie as that’d take too long and there are way too many stupid moments for me to even begin to try and point out. However, I will start by breaking down the entire opening scene just so you can all get a feel for the overall tone of the movie and how seriously the makers took the fifth installment of one of the most iconic franchises of all time. The movie starts in the Mosasaurus tank sometime after the events of the first Jurassic World. This here already represents one major flaw with the film that will come up several times: the geography. From maps of the park released during the first film’s marketing, it is clearly shown that this tank was built inland directly next to the main plaza (why they built a tank for an incredibly dangerous predator right at the edge of the main plaza with nothing but a small fence stopping it from jumping out and grabbing living things too close to the edge is beyond me, especially when it does just this at the end of the first movie in order to save the day). Now, the tank is directly next to ocean with nothing separating them but a single wall. Well, a wall with a Mosasaurus-sized gate in it. That’s right, the tank has a giant underwater gate that opens into the open-f*****g-ocean. Back to the scene, we see this gate opened so that a small two-man submarine can enter in order to search for the perfectly intact “Indominus rex” skeleton. We see that said opening of the gate was only possible thanks a single tech-guy plugging his iPad into an outdoor control panel. Back underwater, one of the two men piloting the sub is very clearly nervous but the other one calms him down by saying, “Don’t worry, anything in here would be dead by now,” acknowledging that there’s no way a giant 120ft long predatory reptile could survive unassisted in an enclosed area with no food or filtration for the bare minimum of however long it would take for the skeleton of the “I. rex” to be completely cleaned of flesh. They very easily find the skeleton and proceed to saw off a single rib, attaching it to a floatation device and sending it to the service to be picked up. A helicopter picks up the sample and proceeds to land about a chase scene’s distance away from the tech-guy for literally no reason. The tech-guy then tells the sub to get out so he can close the gate again for some reason. Unfortunately before doing so, the sub gets eaten by the Mosasaurus. We start to hear the Dilophosaurus calls from the first movie coming from the forest in front of the tech-guy. Nervous and frustrated at the lack of response from the sub, he begins to close the gate- a process which appears as a green loading screen given the percentage of how closed the gate is. At this point the pilots and armed guards in the helicopter who never stepped out to guard the tech-guy see something in the forest and start screaming at the tech-guy to return to the chopper so they can leave. Despite the guards screaming and waving their arms around, the tech-guy completely misses the intent of their message and thinks they’re just being impatient. Presumably subverting our expectations of seeing a Dilophosaurus again, the Tyrannosaurus rex steps out of the forest about 10 feet in front of this guy. He screams, unplugs his iPad from the control panel which somehow does not sever the connection, and then manages to not only consistently outrun the animal but also catch up to the chopper which begins to fly away without him. At some point he drops the iPad and the T. rex steps on it, causing the screen to only crack a bit and the loading screen turns red and stops closing the gate at only around 50%. Right before reaching the end of the dock that apparently hangs over the tank for some reason, the tech-guy catches a ladder the chopper dropped for him. The chopper then pauses for some reason, allowing the T. rex to bite onto the end of the ladder and thrash its head violently. This thankfully only causes the chopper to rock lightly back and forth and eventually the ladder tears because dinos have sharp teeth. The chopper begins flying away very low over the tank and everyone starts celebrating their successful escape. The Mosasaurus then jumps out of the water and eats the tech-guy but the ladder is cut even shorter now because sharp teeth so the chopper is fine. Completely unaffected by this, one of the guards calls home base and tells them they’re returning with the “I. rex” sample. The Mosasaurus then swims out into the open ocean. This will never be mentioned again. The title forms out of CGI lava. At this point you may be wondering how the Mosasaurus is still alive. And why they wouldn’t scan the tank first to be certain. Or just send in an unmanned sub. And why wouldn’t they just drop the tiny sub into the tank from above so that no one would ever have to step foot on the island? And how come the gate can only be closed if there’s a constant connection present? And why would anyone ever build a gate that large leading out into the wild? And why- The movie will never answer these questions. This is just the first five minutes of the film and already there’s an endless supply of ignorance and stupidity, and this isn’t even the most ridiculous sequence imo.
The movie continues three years after the events of JW, where the once dormant volcano on Isla Nublar is now active and threatening to destroy the entire island. The US government is debating whether or not they should save these “endangered species” and asks for the opinion of Jeff “is he crazy or is he acting” Goldblum. Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm is one of the best parts of the original Jurassic Park and the movie pushed hard on the fact that the character was returning, something I was very excited for and couldn’t wait to see just how they utilized him in the story. Malcolm tells the government to let the Dinosaurs die and then promptly disappears. I could go on this sub-rant in a number of places throughout this review but I’m going to get it out of the way now. In this scene a governor names the second island, Isla Sorna, present in the second and third installments of the JP franchise. The marketing of this film even uses footage of the T. rex in San Diego from The Lost World. After Malcolm’s scene ends, the film then goes on pretending that Isla Sorna and the middle two movies never existed. The entire plot rests on Sorna not being an option for the animals to be transferred to, and that nobody knows just how bad of an idea it is to try and bring these creatures to the mainland. Yet they simply ignore that the island exists past namedropping it once, and act as though no one has concerns about bringing giant Dinosaurs into the United States outside of the cost. These movies exist, you have a character from them in your film, you acknowledge they’re canon in your marketing, you namedrop the island the take place on, yet you then act as though they don’t exist and don’t make the entire plot of this film nonsensical. I read somewhere that, in the expanded canon, all the Dinosaurs on Sorna were captured and moved to Nublar for the opening of Jurassic World, but this is utter ********. Sorna was well-established to be vastly greater in size than Nublar and housed many more species than were ever present at Jurassic World according to the film’s official list published during marketing. Additionally, the island was known for being home to at least two packs of Velociraptor and seven individual T. rex whereas all four of the raptors present on Nublar in the new movies were shown as being born and raised there, and there’s only ever been one T. rex on Nublar (as a side note, how long is this animal going to live for? She’s 50 as is and keeps getting in fights with other large dinos). Also, where’s the Spinosaurus then? It’s certainly not the skeleton of one shown in the first movie because I already Googled that and the animal shown in the third film was larger and had a different shaped head. In fact, all the animals in the two JW films look completely different- aka sh*t. This leads me into another sub-rant that I might as well get out of the way now: these movies look awful. It is beyond me how a movie that came out in 1993 can have better special effects in certain scenes than the best of what these new movies have given us. Rewatch the scene from the original where the T. rex chases the Jeep and the scene from the beginning of this movie where the same T. rex chases the tech-guy and tell me which looks better. Both scenes include the same animal, both take place at night, both take place in the rain, both involve an animal running, yet the 1993 version somehow looks more realistic. And the T. rex is the best looking of them all! The new raptor design just looks silly to me and the Gallimimus specifically just look awful. Yeah the raptor design was changed in Jurassic Park III, but for that movie there was an extended canon explanation that Dr. Wu had been experimenting with adding feathers to some of the animals, leading them to look different. And that was one animal, in a change that ended up looking the best out of all the movies. Here we just have all new dino designs just ‘cause. Not to mention their few practical effects look terribly. Remember that scene in the first JW with the Apatosaurus? Well Howard the Duck called and he thinks you look fake as sh*t.
Anyway I’ve already ranted longer than I anticipated and we’re still in the first 10 minutes so I’m going to rush the rest of this. Basically Claire (ginger lady) from the first movie now runs the “Dinosaur Protection Group” and she wants to fund a rescue op to save the dinos from the island because our children shouldn’t have to grow up in a world without Dinosaurs… This is where we’re introduced to two useless side characters whose names I don’t remember and will not bother to look up. The guy is another nerdy tech-guy and the girl is a “paleo-veterinarian” and they also want to save the dinos. Claire gets a call from the “Lockwood Estate” and is invited over, where she meets John Hammond’s secret partner that helped set-up the original park, yet has never been mentioned until now. He tells her that he’s bought a new island called “not Island Sorna” and he wants to move all the dinos there. Here we also meet obvious bad guy, who’s running the operation and is in charge of all of Hammond 2.0’s assets, and Hammond 2.0’s “granddaughter” Maisie, who will be filling the role of the new “child of divorce” in this JP film. Obviously bad guy tells Claire that he can save exactly 11 species but he needs her help to get Owen (Star Lord) from the first movie to track down Blue, the last of the raptors. Claire tracks Owen down to a mountaintop where he is building a cabin all by himself and we discover that they’ve broken up again. Apparently a bad and repeatedly failing relationship getting another new spark is what is supposed to pass as character development in this franchise. Owen rightly tells Claire that the dinos should be allowed to die and that he doesn’t care about Blue. She then reminds him that he raised Blue and that he’s “a good man,” which leads Owen to decide to help.
Owen, Claire, nerdy tech-guy, and p-vet all go to the island where they meet a man who is basically the hunter from The Lost World but with a teeth pulling fetish. They first go to the main plaza, which is exactly where it was in the last film despite everything else being relocated, and there’s a knockoff Brachiosaurus scene of the original JP. They then all go to the command center from the first movie- which is now almost entirely underground and looks out over a grassy cliff instead of the park because plot- and Claire and nerd get the power started, reactivating the tracking system which tells them where all the dinos are. This is bizarre shot because it implies that there are only about two dozen dinos on the whole island, and also does not show the dozens that have- spoiler- already been captured by the hunters. They use this tracking system to find Blue and Owen, p-vet, and the hunters head out to find her. They do quite easily and she does not immediately eat Owen. I can buy that she might recognize him and maybe would hesitate, but she was shown to clearly want to eat him in the first film and due to her decision to aid him in that film, she’s lost her entire pack and sustained serious injuries. She also got shot up by the people Owen was working with in the first movie. There is no reason why she should trust him, and that point only gets more solidified as she gets hurt more and more around him as this film goes on (but of course she becomes even more loyal). Despite this, Owen is about to make a connection with her when one of the hunters shoots her with a tranquilizer dart. The hunters then surround her, causing her to freak out and begin taking her sweet time ripping one of their faces off while everyone else does nothing. While she does this, the man being attacked pulls his gun and shoots her in the stomach, causing her to fall to the ground, dying. Here is where I got mad. In all four movies leading up this point we have watched people fruitlessly fire countless rounds of bullets at these raptors and not once has it done anything other than piss them off. Personally this has been a big criticism of mine of the older films, but I accepted it for what it was. That is how suspension of disbelief works- you tell us the rules of your universe and we accept them, in return we expect that you simply follow your own rules. Now here we are, being shown that a single pistol shot to the gut is all it takes to down a Velociraptor, the coolest and deadliest creature to ever walk the Earth in these films.
Expectedly, Owen freaks out and rushes towards injured face-less man, leading tooth fairy to shoot him with the dino-tranquilizer. Owen goes down and p-vet randomly pulls a gun on tooth fairy despite no one ever doing anything to her. She tells them that if they kill her or Owen then Blue will die as she’s the only one who can save her, and tooth fairy tells her that if she doesn’t save Blue then he will shoot her. They all then leave and abandon Owen there. Face-less man is never seen again. Meanwhile, the hunters randomly turn on Claire and nerd and lock them inside the command center. Nerd cannot open the door now for some reason but can open a random giant tunnel that leads to elsewhere in the park. Before they can escape through it, however, a Baryonyx shows up and enters the control center. Back in the jungle, a Sinoceratops comically licks Owen’s face, waking him up just in time to see a lava flow approaching him. For added comedy, instead of killing him the tranquilizer has made it so only one of his limbs work at a time, meaning he must flop away from the destructive power of a PS3 game’s highest quality CGI lava. Just before regaining his full motor control, his hand lands in the lava but does nothing. I kid you not, his hand literally goes into a lava flow but this does not even remotely burn his hand and it’s never even acknowledged. Since the hunters decided to execute this operation on the exact day the volcano was erupting, lava is now spilling everywhere including through the roof of the command center in a dripping straight line. Some of this lava falls on the Baryonyx’s head, but this also has no effect on the animal. Cornered, Claire spots a ladder that leads up to the surface literally right next to where they were standing the whole time and escape, making a point to actually trap the Baryonyx inside the burning structure. Even though the entire area around then is covered in lava, slightly up the hill at the forest’s edge there is no lava and Owen runs out followed by a stampede of dinos. All three of them run down the hill and find a Gyrosphere from the first film sitting against a giant log. How did it get here? Who knows. The next minute or so shows all the stampeding dinos crashing into the log around them, slowly chipping away at it. Ignoring that fact that these animals are not indestructible battering rams, it’s miraculous that none of them ever hit the see-through glass ball. Claire and nerd get into the Gyrosphere, but a Carnotaurus shows up from Disney’s 2000 film Dinosaur (since they were not present at the park in the first JW) and rushes at Owen before he can get in. Luckily the T. rex is a small, silent vigilante that can sneak up on other dinos in an open field during a stampede and kills the Carnotaurus for some reason as the entire island behind her explodes.
…
The gyrosphere then tumbles down the hill towards the cliff edge while Owen runs behind it. A pyroclastic flow then engulfs all of them and the dinos but it’s ok because they then just fall off the cliff 200 feet into the ocean below perfectly fine. The gyrosphere then begins to sink, and Owen must swim back to the surface to retrieve a knife (???) so he can stab the glass to death. Our heroes then swim to a shore somewhere and presumably all the dinos drown. Claire then yells out “it was all a lie!” which makes no sense because there was no lie, they did capture all 11 species. This did make me wonder why exactly the bad guys revealed themselves so early, however, considering there was no reason to. The good guys still thought they were all on the same side and the bad guys could have used their help transporting the dinos still, there was no reason to leave them behind or try to kill them. We then see various shots of a bunch of previously captured dinos being loading onto a boat. We also see that the hunters have somehow captured both the T. rex and the Baryonyx despite there being no possible way for this to have happened. We then see tooth fairy stop to admire a Stegosaurus before ripping one of its teeth out for a necklace(?) he’s making so that we know he’s really a bad guy now. As the island explodes, our heroes make a break for the boat, whose capture has conveniently decided to leave the gate open (there’s literally a shot of it falling into the ocean as the boat pulls out and it’s still never closed). They all jump into a truck whose keys have been left in the ignition and is only 40ish feet from the boat and perfectly fits on the boat that has been left behind for some reason. Claire floors it and the boat randomly jumps into the air as she reaches the end of the dock and flies onto the boat with a huge crash. Literally no one who is shown to be standing right there and looking in that direction witnesses this. Since Claire is the only woman here, she throws on the Marvel patented disguise kit of a baseball cap and sunglasses so no one will recognize here. We then have a scene where the Brachiosaurus from earlier runs down the dock as the entire island burns behind her and calls out to the ship as though it’s asking not to be left behind. … Everyone is sad as we watch the animal disappear into a cloud of fire and ash. Isla Nublar, the last remnant of the original film aside from the T. rex has been burned back into the ocean.
Back at dino mansion, obvious bad guy meets with Arnim Zola from Captain America and discusses plans to have Dr. Henry Wu from the first JP and JW create a new dino super solider to sell to idk Hyrda probably but they need Blue the raptor to mother it as she possesses empathy and respect for people that their prototype does not. Ignoring the fact that Blue immediately betrayed and straight up ate multiple people during the events of the first film and barely respected Owen, why the hell do these movies keep trying to sell us on weaponized Dinosaurs? No one liked it in the first film and it makes absolutely no sense, especially if they’ve now made it that regular old bullets can kill them. Later on they’ll describe an Ankylosaurus as a “living tank” but why would you want a large, slow-moving animal you’d have to train, house, feed, and heal when you could buy a real tank that’s actually armored, fits 10 soldiers inside, and has a giant gun on the front of it!? Nonetheless, here we are. Maisie of course hears all of this somehow and even almost gets eaten by the prototype, the “Indoraptor”. Despite obvious bad guy locking her in her roof, picks the lock with the keys that’s left sitting directly outside her door and tells Hammond 2.0, but he tells her to go to bed as she likely misheard and that they’ll discuss it in the morning so that he can get murdered first.
Back on the boat our heroes decided that the hunters are actually hunters and that the dinos are going to be sold at auction despite no one, not even obvious bad guy, ever actually saying this before this point. They then track down p-vet and find Blue hemorrhaging to death. She tells them that she needs to perform an emergency blood transfusion before she can remove the bullet or else Blue will die. Since Blue is the last raptor she needs the blood of another “three-fingered carnivorous biped” so of course Owen and Claire go off to syphon blood from the tranquilized T. rex. It’s hard to pinpoint the most ridiculous aspect of this film, but this is a strong contenders. The scene includes guards finding the door to the cage open but simply shutting it without a worry in the world, Claire riding the T. rex, and the T. rex waking up, causing Owen to jump through her jaws before she shuts them in order to escape. Despite there before aforementioned guards in the area and the second most dangerous animal on the ship being awake and roaring her head off, literally no one comes to investigate and I guess she just goes right back to sleep for the remainder of the boat ride. They then perform the blood transfusion and Blue doesn’t immediately die. P-vet removes the bullet and Blue instantly is fine. Shortly after this, nerd is spotted but mistaken for a ship hand and pulled away to prepare the boat for docking.
Hammond 2.0 calls obvious bad guy into his room, screams at him for betraying him, and then demands that he call the police on himself. Hammond 2.0 is murdered.
Upon arriving at dino mansion for the auction, Owen and Claire are immediately spotted by tooth fairy and thrown into one of the dino holding cells underneath the mansion (oh yeah there’s a secret lab/dino holding facility under the mansion that Hammond 2.0 didn’t know about. I mean they do state that the first dino DNA was extracted and cloned beneath the mansion, but it definitely appears as though the majority of this facility was built much more recently than the 60s at earliest). A bunch of evil rich people arrive from rival companies, the American 1%, and the Russian government and start buying the auctioned dinos for millions a piece. If these things are so valuable idk why no one ever bothered going to the completely unprotected island and getting some themselves but whatever. Obvious bad guy reveals he is obviously the bad guy to Claire and Owen and claims that what he is doing is no different to what they did with the Jurassic World park. Neither Claire nor Owen have any sort of rebuttal to this despite it not being true whatsoever. Bad guy then tells them how there’s no purpose in keeping them alive but then the scene hard cuts to I think Maisie discovering murdered grandpa and then the bad guy is just at the auction again. Zola and bad guy bring out the Indoraptor to preview it but once the Russians start bidding tens of millions they just role with it much to Wu’s dismay. The Indoraptor is so special, by the way, because it has an orange stripe. It is also a smaller version of the I. rex that is programmed to hunt people on command. This is done using the help of a gun whose laser sight locks onto a target, and then the trigger releases a noise that causing the Indoraptor to relentlessly attack the target. I don’t why having a gun that shoots a Murdersaurus hex instead of a bullet when you have to have the victim in a laser sight anyway is better, but it is.
This is now the perfect time to discuss another major criticism of mine with the JW franchise as a whole: the presence of good and bad Dinosaurs. In the original trilogy, none of the dinos were inherently good or bad, they were just animals. The raptors and T. rex never attacked people or other dinos based off of whether they were good or bad, they did it because they’re carnivores and they were either hungry or defending their territory/young. Even the herbivores could be dangerous if you threatened them, such as the Stegosaurus attacking Sarah Harding in The Lost World after she seemingly posed a threat to their young. The only animal that ever seemed to relentlessly hunt the heroes was the Spinosaurus, but even in that movie the raptors only hunted down the heroes because one of them stole their eggs and the Pteranodon attacked because they had chicks to feed. In the JW movies, the herbivores are inherently good and only help the heroes while attacking only the bad guys, and the carnivores are supposedly inherently bad attacking anyone and everyone. We even have carnivores in this movie who are running for their lies from an erupting volcano pausing just to attack the good guys. But even with the carnivores we now have good and bad ones. Blue and the T. rex only ever attack bad guys and bad dinos, and all the other carnivores are just bloodthirsty now. The Indominus rex and Indoraptor are the worst examples of this, going on psychopathic murderous rampages with a major kill-boner for the children of divorce and our other heroes. It’s stupid.
Meanwhile in dino dungeon, Owen and Claire discover that they’re being locked up next to a Stygimoloch, who will apparently head-butt anything upon being whistled at. Owen has the animal smash into the wall between them over and over until it bursts through. Instead of proceeding to maul both Owen and Claire, the animal then responds to the whistle again and head-butts the call door open. I guess the movie forgot that all of these cells were designed to hold Dinosaurs much stronger than a Stygimoloch so this should not have been possible. The animal then runs off until the plot needs her again. Owen and Claire then run into Maisie, who trusts them for some reason despite her seeing Claire with bad guy earlier in the film. They decide they need to stop this auction and Owen puts the Stygimoloch into an elevator, which then opens into the auction room. The animal then goes on a rampage and mauls the entire crowd while Owen beats up all the armed guards in hand-to-hand combat. This is another perfect example of that whole “good & bad dinos” thing. Not going to lie, I was sort of waiting/wanting this movie to go all Cabin in the Woods and release all the dinos on everyone, but it turns out this one animal managed to single-handedly take down the whole operation. All the bidders run out of the mansion and take their already purchased dinos with them. The Stygimoloch then runs out of the mansion and into the woods.
The auction room is now cleared completely, with Own gone as well, leaving the Indoraptor completely alone. Tooth fairy then walks in, sees the animal for the first time, shoots it twice with tranquilizers, and then OPENS THE CAGE DOOR, WALKS IN, AND LEAVES THE DOOR WIDE OPEN SO HE CAN PULL OUT ONE OF ITS TEETH. This stupidity, ladies and gentlemen, is the act that puts the entire finale of the movie into action. The Indoraptor, as it turns out, is faking unconsciousness even raises its tail behind tooth fairy to distract him. It then literally opens its eye, grins, winks at the camera, and then mauls tooth fairy before escaping. It then goes on a murderous rampage, killing Zola and several other bidders who had not all left yet for some reason in the elevator (worth mentioning that the elevator is closed and the only reason this is possible is because the Indoraptor accidentally bumps its tail into the control panel and reopened the doors). There’s then this hallway scene where bad guy runs into Claire, Owen, and Maisie (whom I will refer to as Dream Team from now on) and bad guy informs them that Maisie is a clone of Hammond 2.0’s daughter, who had died in a car accident many years prior. This doesn’t not make sense, and is supposed to explain why he’s not mentioned in the original movie as this caused him and Hammond to have a falling out, but the issue is that this girl is like 8-years-old, 10 max. Idk if they forgot that it’s been 25 years since the first movie came out or something, or if there was supposed to be this twisted story about Hammond 2.0 repeatedly cloning this girl or something, but it’s never explained. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet and are thinking that this came out of nowhere and doesn’t serve the plot whatsoever, you are absolutely correct. Anyway the Indoraptor randomly shows up and start killing random guards so that Dream Team can run away from bad guy.
Downstairs Wu is emptying the lab of all research, DNA, and incubating eggs when nerd pops back up again and is somehow a lab assistant to Wu now??? P-vet is also there with Blue and the two of them release Blue who starts killing guards while Wu gets dragged out unconscious. Worth mentioning that the only thing keeping Blue locked up was a simple door handle with no lock on it, something the raptors in this franchise are definitely smart enough to open. It’s also very clearly in both Blue’s eyesight and reach so idk why she didn’t escape already and eat p-vet. Regardless, she’s out now and somewhere in her fight she releases explosive gas and her and side quest (nerd and pe-vet) all escape just before the lab explodes. Unfortunately this is now causing toxic gas to spill into the dino dungeon and threatens to kill all the dinos.
I’m getting tired now so the rest of this movie is a run of the mill chase/fight scene with the Indoraptor ruthlessly trying to kill dream team and more specifically Maisie. There are various scenes ripped right out of the original movie where the power is being restored section by section by side quest at a very dangerous moment for dream team, and another where Maisie is in a dumbwaiter and the door gets jammed open like Tim in the kitchen with the raptors. This time, though, she gets it shut and the Indoraptor smashes head first into the wooden wall, which doesn’t even bend despite these animals being shown to be able to decimate fallen trees on the island. Maisie locks herself in her room and the Indoraptor turns into a horror movie monster slowly and creepily sneaking down from the roof, opening the door, and looming over the little girl single claw raised pointing at her (it’s in one of the trailers if you don’t believe me). Owen then bursts in and shoots the Indoraptor several times to no effect. Blue then appears out of thin air and attacks the Indoraptor. Despite being half its size, Blue is winning and throws the Indoraptor out of a window onto the roof, where dream team was trying to escape. Now cornered at the edge of an all glass roof with the Indoraptor lurking towards them (Blue disappeared again), Claire picks up the dino gun (oh she also got impaled by a claw earlier but this has no bearing on her abilities now) and points it at not the ground or in any other direction, but directly at Owen. This causes the Indoraptor to go crazy and lunge for him, missing and crashing through the glass. It catches itself, however, and is climbing back up when Blue jumps in out of nowhere, knocks them both through the roof, rides the Indoraptor down, and lands perfectly on top of its body as it gets impaled by the horns of a Triceratops skull.
Dream team and side quest now meet up and discover that the toxic gas is killing the dinos. In an extremely impulsive move, Claire opens all the pens and the dinos flood into the main corridor yet don’t crush each other. Maisie is being held tightly in p-vet’s arms. Claire now has to decide whether or not to open the main door which will somehow lead to the outside despite this room being very far underground. No one tells her this is a bad idea. Luckily, she decides that that is a bad idea and does not release the dinos. Moments later, however, the doors do open and the camera pans to reveal that Maisie teleported out of p-vet’s arms without anyone noticing. She has now released dozens of Dinosaurs into the continental United States because, “they’re [clones], just like me.”
…
Bad guy somehow hasn’t left the mansion yet but is doing so now with the I. rex rib in hand, hoping to create another Indoraptor at some point in the future. Before he can leave, however, the stampede of dinos rush out around him, killing his few remaining guards and destroying his only car. What follows is another over-the-top death scene that is rivaled in this franchise only by the babysitter death in the firs JW. First we see a Carnotaurus in the background, stalking bad guy who thinks he’s now safe. The T. rex then comes out of absolutely nowhere and bites bad guy. She then drops bad guy, and picks him up again. The Carnotaurus is eager to get in on this action and bites the other half of bad guy, tearing him in half. The T. rex then bops the Carnotaurus on its head, and it drops the lower half of bad guy and runs off. Several Compsognathus rush in to feed on the dropped remains. The T. rex roars victoriously and walks away, crushing the I. rex rub as she goes. At the front of the mansion, our heroes walk out and are greeted by Blue, who fondly touches Owen’s hand before running off into the forest because she wants to be free.
We now have Malcolm returning again for the ending, finishing his speech to congress from earlier. He states starts talking about why bringing dinos to the mainland is a horrible idea. In front of this plays various scenes of Owen and Claire driving off with Maisie who they just kidnapped I guess, the T. rex breaking into a Lion enclosure at a zoo, the Mosasaurus eating a surfer, and Blue running through a desert (another example of changing geography, as the mansion was clearly somewhere in upstate California/Oregon) and stopping at a cliff edge to overlook a suburban neighborhood. We’re left to assume four minutes after the credits started rolling she ate a preschooler. Malcolm says, “Welcome to Jurassic World.” In the mid-credits several Pteranodons fly over Las Vegas. Everyone who loves Jurassic Park cries.
The movie continues three years after the events of JW, where the once dormant volcano on Isla Nublar is now active and threatening to destroy the entire island. The US government is debating whether or not they should save these “endangered species” and asks for the opinion of Jeff “is he crazy or is he acting” Goldblum. Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm is one of the best parts of the original Jurassic Park and the movie pushed hard on the fact that the character was returning, something I was very excited for and couldn’t wait to see just how they utilized him in the story. Malcolm tells the government to let the Dinosaurs die and then promptly disappears. I could go on this sub-rant in a number of places throughout this review but I’m going to get it out of the way now. In this scene a governor names the second island, Isla Sorna, present in the second and third installments of the JP franchise. The marketing of this film even uses footage of the T. rex in San Diego from The Lost World. After Malcolm’s scene ends, the film then goes on pretending that Isla Sorna and the middle two movies never existed. The entire plot rests on Sorna not being an option for the animals to be transferred to, and that nobody knows just how bad of an idea it is to try and bring these creatures to the mainland. Yet they simply ignore that the island exists past namedropping it once, and act as though no one has concerns about bringing giant Dinosaurs into the United States outside of the cost. These movies exist, you have a character from them in your film, you acknowledge they’re canon in your marketing, you namedrop the island the take place on, yet you then act as though they don’t exist and don’t make the entire plot of this film nonsensical. I read somewhere that, in the expanded canon, all the Dinosaurs on Sorna were captured and moved to Nublar for the opening of Jurassic World, but this is utter ********. Sorna was well-established to be vastly greater in size than Nublar and housed many more species than were ever present at Jurassic World according to the film’s official list published during marketing. Additionally, the island was known for being home to at least two packs of Velociraptor and seven individual T. rex whereas all four of the raptors present on Nublar in the new movies were shown as being born and raised there, and there’s only ever been one T. rex on Nublar (as a side note, how long is this animal going to live for? She’s 50 as is and keeps getting in fights with other large dinos). Also, where’s the Spinosaurus then? It’s certainly not the skeleton of one shown in the first movie because I already Googled that and the animal shown in the third film was larger and had a different shaped head. In fact, all the animals in the two JW films look completely different- aka sh*t. This leads me into another sub-rant that I might as well get out of the way now: these movies look awful. It is beyond me how a movie that came out in 1993 can have better special effects in certain scenes than the best of what these new movies have given us. Rewatch the scene from the original where the T. rex chases the Jeep and the scene from the beginning of this movie where the same T. rex chases the tech-guy and tell me which looks better. Both scenes include the same animal, both take place at night, both take place in the rain, both involve an animal running, yet the 1993 version somehow looks more realistic. And the T. rex is the best looking of them all! The new raptor design just looks silly to me and the Gallimimus specifically just look awful. Yeah the raptor design was changed in Jurassic Park III, but for that movie there was an extended canon explanation that Dr. Wu had been experimenting with adding feathers to some of the animals, leading them to look different. And that was one animal, in a change that ended up looking the best out of all the movies. Here we just have all new dino designs just ‘cause. Not to mention their few practical effects look terribly. Remember that scene in the first JW with the Apatosaurus? Well Howard the Duck called and he thinks you look fake as sh*t.
Anyway I’ve already ranted longer than I anticipated and we’re still in the first 10 minutes so I’m going to rush the rest of this. Basically Claire (ginger lady) from the first movie now runs the “Dinosaur Protection Group” and she wants to fund a rescue op to save the dinos from the island because our children shouldn’t have to grow up in a world without Dinosaurs… This is where we’re introduced to two useless side characters whose names I don’t remember and will not bother to look up. The guy is another nerdy tech-guy and the girl is a “paleo-veterinarian” and they also want to save the dinos. Claire gets a call from the “Lockwood Estate” and is invited over, where she meets John Hammond’s secret partner that helped set-up the original park, yet has never been mentioned until now. He tells her that he’s bought a new island called “not Island Sorna” and he wants to move all the dinos there. Here we also meet obvious bad guy, who’s running the operation and is in charge of all of Hammond 2.0’s assets, and Hammond 2.0’s “granddaughter” Maisie, who will be filling the role of the new “child of divorce” in this JP film. Obviously bad guy tells Claire that he can save exactly 11 species but he needs her help to get Owen (Star Lord) from the first movie to track down Blue, the last of the raptors. Claire tracks Owen down to a mountaintop where he is building a cabin all by himself and we discover that they’ve broken up again. Apparently a bad and repeatedly failing relationship getting another new spark is what is supposed to pass as character development in this franchise. Owen rightly tells Claire that the dinos should be allowed to die and that he doesn’t care about Blue. She then reminds him that he raised Blue and that he’s “a good man,” which leads Owen to decide to help.
Owen, Claire, nerdy tech-guy, and p-vet all go to the island where they meet a man who is basically the hunter from The Lost World but with a teeth pulling fetish. They first go to the main plaza, which is exactly where it was in the last film despite everything else being relocated, and there’s a knockoff Brachiosaurus scene of the original JP. They then all go to the command center from the first movie- which is now almost entirely underground and looks out over a grassy cliff instead of the park because plot- and Claire and nerd get the power started, reactivating the tracking system which tells them where all the dinos are. This is bizarre shot because it implies that there are only about two dozen dinos on the whole island, and also does not show the dozens that have- spoiler- already been captured by the hunters. They use this tracking system to find Blue and Owen, p-vet, and the hunters head out to find her. They do quite easily and she does not immediately eat Owen. I can buy that she might recognize him and maybe would hesitate, but she was shown to clearly want to eat him in the first film and due to her decision to aid him in that film, she’s lost her entire pack and sustained serious injuries. She also got shot up by the people Owen was working with in the first movie. There is no reason why she should trust him, and that point only gets more solidified as she gets hurt more and more around him as this film goes on (but of course she becomes even more loyal). Despite this, Owen is about to make a connection with her when one of the hunters shoots her with a tranquilizer dart. The hunters then surround her, causing her to freak out and begin taking her sweet time ripping one of their faces off while everyone else does nothing. While she does this, the man being attacked pulls his gun and shoots her in the stomach, causing her to fall to the ground, dying. Here is where I got mad. In all four movies leading up this point we have watched people fruitlessly fire countless rounds of bullets at these raptors and not once has it done anything other than piss them off. Personally this has been a big criticism of mine of the older films, but I accepted it for what it was. That is how suspension of disbelief works- you tell us the rules of your universe and we accept them, in return we expect that you simply follow your own rules. Now here we are, being shown that a single pistol shot to the gut is all it takes to down a Velociraptor, the coolest and deadliest creature to ever walk the Earth in these films.
Expectedly, Owen freaks out and rushes towards injured face-less man, leading tooth fairy to shoot him with the dino-tranquilizer. Owen goes down and p-vet randomly pulls a gun on tooth fairy despite no one ever doing anything to her. She tells them that if they kill her or Owen then Blue will die as she’s the only one who can save her, and tooth fairy tells her that if she doesn’t save Blue then he will shoot her. They all then leave and abandon Owen there. Face-less man is never seen again. Meanwhile, the hunters randomly turn on Claire and nerd and lock them inside the command center. Nerd cannot open the door now for some reason but can open a random giant tunnel that leads to elsewhere in the park. Before they can escape through it, however, a Baryonyx shows up and enters the control center. Back in the jungle, a Sinoceratops comically licks Owen’s face, waking him up just in time to see a lava flow approaching him. For added comedy, instead of killing him the tranquilizer has made it so only one of his limbs work at a time, meaning he must flop away from the destructive power of a PS3 game’s highest quality CGI lava. Just before regaining his full motor control, his hand lands in the lava but does nothing. I kid you not, his hand literally goes into a lava flow but this does not even remotely burn his hand and it’s never even acknowledged. Since the hunters decided to execute this operation on the exact day the volcano was erupting, lava is now spilling everywhere including through the roof of the command center in a dripping straight line. Some of this lava falls on the Baryonyx’s head, but this also has no effect on the animal. Cornered, Claire spots a ladder that leads up to the surface literally right next to where they were standing the whole time and escape, making a point to actually trap the Baryonyx inside the burning structure. Even though the entire area around then is covered in lava, slightly up the hill at the forest’s edge there is no lava and Owen runs out followed by a stampede of dinos. All three of them run down the hill and find a Gyrosphere from the first film sitting against a giant log. How did it get here? Who knows. The next minute or so shows all the stampeding dinos crashing into the log around them, slowly chipping away at it. Ignoring that fact that these animals are not indestructible battering rams, it’s miraculous that none of them ever hit the see-through glass ball. Claire and nerd get into the Gyrosphere, but a Carnotaurus shows up from Disney’s 2000 film Dinosaur (since they were not present at the park in the first JW) and rushes at Owen before he can get in. Luckily the T. rex is a small, silent vigilante that can sneak up on other dinos in an open field during a stampede and kills the Carnotaurus for some reason as the entire island behind her explodes.
…
The gyrosphere then tumbles down the hill towards the cliff edge while Owen runs behind it. A pyroclastic flow then engulfs all of them and the dinos but it’s ok because they then just fall off the cliff 200 feet into the ocean below perfectly fine. The gyrosphere then begins to sink, and Owen must swim back to the surface to retrieve a knife (???) so he can stab the glass to death. Our heroes then swim to a shore somewhere and presumably all the dinos drown. Claire then yells out “it was all a lie!” which makes no sense because there was no lie, they did capture all 11 species. This did make me wonder why exactly the bad guys revealed themselves so early, however, considering there was no reason to. The good guys still thought they were all on the same side and the bad guys could have used their help transporting the dinos still, there was no reason to leave them behind or try to kill them. We then see various shots of a bunch of previously captured dinos being loading onto a boat. We also see that the hunters have somehow captured both the T. rex and the Baryonyx despite there being no possible way for this to have happened. We then see tooth fairy stop to admire a Stegosaurus before ripping one of its teeth out for a necklace(?) he’s making so that we know he’s really a bad guy now. As the island explodes, our heroes make a break for the boat, whose capture has conveniently decided to leave the gate open (there’s literally a shot of it falling into the ocean as the boat pulls out and it’s still never closed). They all jump into a truck whose keys have been left in the ignition and is only 40ish feet from the boat and perfectly fits on the boat that has been left behind for some reason. Claire floors it and the boat randomly jumps into the air as she reaches the end of the dock and flies onto the boat with a huge crash. Literally no one who is shown to be standing right there and looking in that direction witnesses this. Since Claire is the only woman here, she throws on the Marvel patented disguise kit of a baseball cap and sunglasses so no one will recognize here. We then have a scene where the Brachiosaurus from earlier runs down the dock as the entire island burns behind her and calls out to the ship as though it’s asking not to be left behind. … Everyone is sad as we watch the animal disappear into a cloud of fire and ash. Isla Nublar, the last remnant of the original film aside from the T. rex has been burned back into the ocean.
Back at dino mansion, obvious bad guy meets with Arnim Zola from Captain America and discusses plans to have Dr. Henry Wu from the first JP and JW create a new dino super solider to sell to idk Hyrda probably but they need Blue the raptor to mother it as she possesses empathy and respect for people that their prototype does not. Ignoring the fact that Blue immediately betrayed and straight up ate multiple people during the events of the first film and barely respected Owen, why the hell do these movies keep trying to sell us on weaponized Dinosaurs? No one liked it in the first film and it makes absolutely no sense, especially if they’ve now made it that regular old bullets can kill them. Later on they’ll describe an Ankylosaurus as a “living tank” but why would you want a large, slow-moving animal you’d have to train, house, feed, and heal when you could buy a real tank that’s actually armored, fits 10 soldiers inside, and has a giant gun on the front of it!? Nonetheless, here we are. Maisie of course hears all of this somehow and even almost gets eaten by the prototype, the “Indoraptor”. Despite obvious bad guy locking her in her roof, picks the lock with the keys that’s left sitting directly outside her door and tells Hammond 2.0, but he tells her to go to bed as she likely misheard and that they’ll discuss it in the morning so that he can get murdered first.
Back on the boat our heroes decided that the hunters are actually hunters and that the dinos are going to be sold at auction despite no one, not even obvious bad guy, ever actually saying this before this point. They then track down p-vet and find Blue hemorrhaging to death. She tells them that she needs to perform an emergency blood transfusion before she can remove the bullet or else Blue will die. Since Blue is the last raptor she needs the blood of another “three-fingered carnivorous biped” so of course Owen and Claire go off to syphon blood from the tranquilized T. rex. It’s hard to pinpoint the most ridiculous aspect of this film, but this is a strong contenders. The scene includes guards finding the door to the cage open but simply shutting it without a worry in the world, Claire riding the T. rex, and the T. rex waking up, causing Owen to jump through her jaws before she shuts them in order to escape. Despite there before aforementioned guards in the area and the second most dangerous animal on the ship being awake and roaring her head off, literally no one comes to investigate and I guess she just goes right back to sleep for the remainder of the boat ride. They then perform the blood transfusion and Blue doesn’t immediately die. P-vet removes the bullet and Blue instantly is fine. Shortly after this, nerd is spotted but mistaken for a ship hand and pulled away to prepare the boat for docking.
Hammond 2.0 calls obvious bad guy into his room, screams at him for betraying him, and then demands that he call the police on himself. Hammond 2.0 is murdered.
Upon arriving at dino mansion for the auction, Owen and Claire are immediately spotted by tooth fairy and thrown into one of the dino holding cells underneath the mansion (oh yeah there’s a secret lab/dino holding facility under the mansion that Hammond 2.0 didn’t know about. I mean they do state that the first dino DNA was extracted and cloned beneath the mansion, but it definitely appears as though the majority of this facility was built much more recently than the 60s at earliest). A bunch of evil rich people arrive from rival companies, the American 1%, and the Russian government and start buying the auctioned dinos for millions a piece. If these things are so valuable idk why no one ever bothered going to the completely unprotected island and getting some themselves but whatever. Obvious bad guy reveals he is obviously the bad guy to Claire and Owen and claims that what he is doing is no different to what they did with the Jurassic World park. Neither Claire nor Owen have any sort of rebuttal to this despite it not being true whatsoever. Bad guy then tells them how there’s no purpose in keeping them alive but then the scene hard cuts to I think Maisie discovering murdered grandpa and then the bad guy is just at the auction again. Zola and bad guy bring out the Indoraptor to preview it but once the Russians start bidding tens of millions they just role with it much to Wu’s dismay. The Indoraptor is so special, by the way, because it has an orange stripe. It is also a smaller version of the I. rex that is programmed to hunt people on command. This is done using the help of a gun whose laser sight locks onto a target, and then the trigger releases a noise that causing the Indoraptor to relentlessly attack the target. I don’t why having a gun that shoots a Murdersaurus hex instead of a bullet when you have to have the victim in a laser sight anyway is better, but it is.
This is now the perfect time to discuss another major criticism of mine with the JW franchise as a whole: the presence of good and bad Dinosaurs. In the original trilogy, none of the dinos were inherently good or bad, they were just animals. The raptors and T. rex never attacked people or other dinos based off of whether they were good or bad, they did it because they’re carnivores and they were either hungry or defending their territory/young. Even the herbivores could be dangerous if you threatened them, such as the Stegosaurus attacking Sarah Harding in The Lost World after she seemingly posed a threat to their young. The only animal that ever seemed to relentlessly hunt the heroes was the Spinosaurus, but even in that movie the raptors only hunted down the heroes because one of them stole their eggs and the Pteranodon attacked because they had chicks to feed. In the JW movies, the herbivores are inherently good and only help the heroes while attacking only the bad guys, and the carnivores are supposedly inherently bad attacking anyone and everyone. We even have carnivores in this movie who are running for their lies from an erupting volcano pausing just to attack the good guys. But even with the carnivores we now have good and bad ones. Blue and the T. rex only ever attack bad guys and bad dinos, and all the other carnivores are just bloodthirsty now. The Indominus rex and Indoraptor are the worst examples of this, going on psychopathic murderous rampages with a major kill-boner for the children of divorce and our other heroes. It’s stupid.
Meanwhile in dino dungeon, Owen and Claire discover that they’re being locked up next to a Stygimoloch, who will apparently head-butt anything upon being whistled at. Owen has the animal smash into the wall between them over and over until it bursts through. Instead of proceeding to maul both Owen and Claire, the animal then responds to the whistle again and head-butts the call door open. I guess the movie forgot that all of these cells were designed to hold Dinosaurs much stronger than a Stygimoloch so this should not have been possible. The animal then runs off until the plot needs her again. Owen and Claire then run into Maisie, who trusts them for some reason despite her seeing Claire with bad guy earlier in the film. They decide they need to stop this auction and Owen puts the Stygimoloch into an elevator, which then opens into the auction room. The animal then goes on a rampage and mauls the entire crowd while Owen beats up all the armed guards in hand-to-hand combat. This is another perfect example of that whole “good & bad dinos” thing. Not going to lie, I was sort of waiting/wanting this movie to go all Cabin in the Woods and release all the dinos on everyone, but it turns out this one animal managed to single-handedly take down the whole operation. All the bidders run out of the mansion and take their already purchased dinos with them. The Stygimoloch then runs out of the mansion and into the woods.
The auction room is now cleared completely, with Own gone as well, leaving the Indoraptor completely alone. Tooth fairy then walks in, sees the animal for the first time, shoots it twice with tranquilizers, and then OPENS THE CAGE DOOR, WALKS IN, AND LEAVES THE DOOR WIDE OPEN SO HE CAN PULL OUT ONE OF ITS TEETH. This stupidity, ladies and gentlemen, is the act that puts the entire finale of the movie into action. The Indoraptor, as it turns out, is faking unconsciousness even raises its tail behind tooth fairy to distract him. It then literally opens its eye, grins, winks at the camera, and then mauls tooth fairy before escaping. It then goes on a murderous rampage, killing Zola and several other bidders who had not all left yet for some reason in the elevator (worth mentioning that the elevator is closed and the only reason this is possible is because the Indoraptor accidentally bumps its tail into the control panel and reopened the doors). There’s then this hallway scene where bad guy runs into Claire, Owen, and Maisie (whom I will refer to as Dream Team from now on) and bad guy informs them that Maisie is a clone of Hammond 2.0’s daughter, who had died in a car accident many years prior. This doesn’t not make sense, and is supposed to explain why he’s not mentioned in the original movie as this caused him and Hammond to have a falling out, but the issue is that this girl is like 8-years-old, 10 max. Idk if they forgot that it’s been 25 years since the first movie came out or something, or if there was supposed to be this twisted story about Hammond 2.0 repeatedly cloning this girl or something, but it’s never explained. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet and are thinking that this came out of nowhere and doesn’t serve the plot whatsoever, you are absolutely correct. Anyway the Indoraptor randomly shows up and start killing random guards so that Dream Team can run away from bad guy.
Downstairs Wu is emptying the lab of all research, DNA, and incubating eggs when nerd pops back up again and is somehow a lab assistant to Wu now??? P-vet is also there with Blue and the two of them release Blue who starts killing guards while Wu gets dragged out unconscious. Worth mentioning that the only thing keeping Blue locked up was a simple door handle with no lock on it, something the raptors in this franchise are definitely smart enough to open. It’s also very clearly in both Blue’s eyesight and reach so idk why she didn’t escape already and eat p-vet. Regardless, she’s out now and somewhere in her fight she releases explosive gas and her and side quest (nerd and pe-vet) all escape just before the lab explodes. Unfortunately this is now causing toxic gas to spill into the dino dungeon and threatens to kill all the dinos.
I’m getting tired now so the rest of this movie is a run of the mill chase/fight scene with the Indoraptor ruthlessly trying to kill dream team and more specifically Maisie. There are various scenes ripped right out of the original movie where the power is being restored section by section by side quest at a very dangerous moment for dream team, and another where Maisie is in a dumbwaiter and the door gets jammed open like Tim in the kitchen with the raptors. This time, though, she gets it shut and the Indoraptor smashes head first into the wooden wall, which doesn’t even bend despite these animals being shown to be able to decimate fallen trees on the island. Maisie locks herself in her room and the Indoraptor turns into a horror movie monster slowly and creepily sneaking down from the roof, opening the door, and looming over the little girl single claw raised pointing at her (it’s in one of the trailers if you don’t believe me). Owen then bursts in and shoots the Indoraptor several times to no effect. Blue then appears out of thin air and attacks the Indoraptor. Despite being half its size, Blue is winning and throws the Indoraptor out of a window onto the roof, where dream team was trying to escape. Now cornered at the edge of an all glass roof with the Indoraptor lurking towards them (Blue disappeared again), Claire picks up the dino gun (oh she also got impaled by a claw earlier but this has no bearing on her abilities now) and points it at not the ground or in any other direction, but directly at Owen. This causes the Indoraptor to go crazy and lunge for him, missing and crashing through the glass. It catches itself, however, and is climbing back up when Blue jumps in out of nowhere, knocks them both through the roof, rides the Indoraptor down, and lands perfectly on top of its body as it gets impaled by the horns of a Triceratops skull.
Dream team and side quest now meet up and discover that the toxic gas is killing the dinos. In an extremely impulsive move, Claire opens all the pens and the dinos flood into the main corridor yet don’t crush each other. Maisie is being held tightly in p-vet’s arms. Claire now has to decide whether or not to open the main door which will somehow lead to the outside despite this room being very far underground. No one tells her this is a bad idea. Luckily, she decides that that is a bad idea and does not release the dinos. Moments later, however, the doors do open and the camera pans to reveal that Maisie teleported out of p-vet’s arms without anyone noticing. She has now released dozens of Dinosaurs into the continental United States because, “they’re [clones], just like me.”
…
Bad guy somehow hasn’t left the mansion yet but is doing so now with the I. rex rib in hand, hoping to create another Indoraptor at some point in the future. Before he can leave, however, the stampede of dinos rush out around him, killing his few remaining guards and destroying his only car. What follows is another over-the-top death scene that is rivaled in this franchise only by the babysitter death in the firs JW. First we see a Carnotaurus in the background, stalking bad guy who thinks he’s now safe. The T. rex then comes out of absolutely nowhere and bites bad guy. She then drops bad guy, and picks him up again. The Carnotaurus is eager to get in on this action and bites the other half of bad guy, tearing him in half. The T. rex then bops the Carnotaurus on its head, and it drops the lower half of bad guy and runs off. Several Compsognathus rush in to feed on the dropped remains. The T. rex roars victoriously and walks away, crushing the I. rex rub as she goes. At the front of the mansion, our heroes walk out and are greeted by Blue, who fondly touches Owen’s hand before running off into the forest because she wants to be free.
We now have Malcolm returning again for the ending, finishing his speech to congress from earlier. He states starts talking about why bringing dinos to the mainland is a horrible idea. In front of this plays various scenes of Owen and Claire driving off with Maisie who they just kidnapped I guess, the T. rex breaking into a Lion enclosure at a zoo, the Mosasaurus eating a surfer, and Blue running through a desert (another example of changing geography, as the mansion was clearly somewhere in upstate California/Oregon) and stopping at a cliff edge to overlook a suburban neighborhood. We’re left to assume four minutes after the credits started rolling she ate a preschooler. Malcolm says, “Welcome to Jurassic World.” In the mid-credits several Pteranodons fly over Las Vegas. Everyone who loves Jurassic Park cries.
This was supposed to be a rant/review, but I ended up mostly summarizing the story, though to me that seems to be a good enough review in and of itself. All else I'd say is that these new movies are missing the sense of wonder and suspense that the original three had. Whenever the raptors or a T. rex made an appearance, it was a statement and it was intense and magical. Sometimes they wouldn't even show up under halfway through the movie, sometimes the third act in the raptor's case. These movies, however, just cram in as many dinos as they can, as fast as they can. Part of this movie's marketing is that they have more dino species present than any other, but it's at a complete loss to the franchise's continuity and this film's quality. I'd say it's style over substance but it's not, as these films look worse than their predecessors. None of the JP sequels are great, but now they're just terrible and nonsensical. They're pushing out these movies are quickly and seemingly cheaply as possible so they can make more box office and toy sales. It's awful and I hate that I keep going to see these even though I know they'll suck. I think it's only because I, and I think many others, just want to see Dinosaurs be done well on-screen again. But instead of a suspenseful, deep, inspiring science-fiction horror-thriller, they feed us this crap.
So I’ll just leave this here for you, and I hope to hear what you all think. Maybe PM me if you want to discuss spoilers in-depth so not to ruin the film for anyone who genuinely wants to see it?
~Thylo
Another non-spoiler criticism: These movies do not have characters we can relate to or even remotely care about. They're just there and they can do what they can do because they can. One of the few things I liked about this film is they showed us more into Blue and Owen's relationship from when she was a hatchling, it gave us more of a reason why she might have trusted him at one point even though she shouldn't now. I genuinely liked that small portion of the movie but unfortunately it is the only example of real character building we get in this new franchise. These characters relationships and chemistries are not believable and there is no build up to characters changing the way they do. In the original JW Owen and Claire reunite as a couple only because they both just killed a couple of Pterosaurs to save one another. It does not feel earned, it feels forced, and is especially hard to accept when the moment takes place at a completely inappropriate time (ie while other Pterosaurs are still killing people all around them). There are no slower moments where these characters can breath and grow and interact with one another. There is no deep conversation, no passionate arguments. These are the things that made the original movies, especially the first one, so much better and so much more relatable. These films are both basically one non-stop action sequence that never has time to breath. It's "visual noise" and just comes across as a clunky cash-grab. I should not have to "turn off my brain" to enjoy a film. No it does not make the original films any less enjoyable or magical as they remain the same individually but it does still take something away from the overall story because I now know that this is where it all leads. This is where this world builds to and this is what happened to these characters/places/animals, and that is disappointing to say the least.
~Thylo
~Thylo
Then don't watch them. The only reason they keep on making movies in inferior quality is because people still watch them and buy the merchandise. Lots of people.
As for the CGI quality 1993 vs. 2018: I guess that back in the days, the responsible staff took more time to create a realistic dinosaur while entering virtual "virgin soil". Now that creating dinosaurs and other creatures via computers has become routine and thus "sloppy" at times.