There is one scene from "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" that was so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, it almost seemed out of place in a summer blockbuster. Our main characters have just escaped from Isla Nublar, the home of the dinosaurs from the "Jurassic Park" movies, as it is slowly consumed by the hot lava and ash clouds from an erupting volcano. When they look back to the shore, a lone brontosaurus can be seen bellowing for help. While many other dinosaurs have been saved, this one has been abandoned to die, and on some visceral level it seems to know it. As the clouds and flames overtake it, we see its body gradually lose focus and become a silhouette. With its life slowly being snuffed out, the sad and terrified beast rears on its hind legs and lets out one last, desperate call.
All of this is seen by our heroes as they can do nothing but watch helplessly with tears in their eyes. I'll confess: My eyes weren't entirely dry either.
It's the end of an era, with the dinosaurs from the "Jurassic Park" movies leaving the island jungle setting from the first four films for good and all. When director J. A. Bayona's "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" opens, we learn that the impending volcanic eruption will soon render Isla Nublar uninhabitable for the dinosaurs there, with the United States Senate deciding it would be a waste of money to try to save them (surprise surprise). Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the protagonist from "Jurassic World" who helped run the then-functional theme park, is now leading a pro-animal rights group that wants to move the dinosaurs to a new and safer preserve. Her effort seems to get a boost when Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), the former business partner of the team that created the original park, and his right-hand man Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) offer to fund an expedition to rescue as many of the animals as possible. Soon erstwhile velociraptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), mercenary Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine) and a pair of tech-savvy nerds (Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda) are recruited to help her out on her conservation mission.
The corporation's agenda is not what it seems, and before long Dearing, Grady and the pair of nerds are on a mission to thwart its plan for the surviving dinosaurs. Without getting into spoilers, this 2016 interview with Colin Trevorrow, who directed "Jurassic World" and co-wrote this film, gives a few hints:
The dinosaurs will be a parable of the treatment animals receive today: the abuse, medical experimentation, pets, having wild animals in zoos like prisons, the use the military has made of them, animals as weapons.
If that seems like an obvious attempt to insert some pro-animal rights social commentary into the movie, then you're not wrong. That said, the message of "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" is even more ambitious than that. It seems to be a direct continuation of the moral summed up by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in the first movie, when he warned that "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Here the message is that when those same greedy businessmen use science to profit without regard to the consequences, they can change the world forever — often for the worse — in ways that can never be undone.
Feel free to insert your own commentary on global warming, cyber-warfare or nuclear proliferation here (the movie actually throws in a quick reference to that last one). Like all good parables, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" doesn't belabor its point or become preachy. It simply makes it through its story.
Fortunately for us, it's a damn good story. This is without question the best "Jurassic Park" sequel — smart, scary, and even emotionally powerful.
That's not to say it doesn't have its flaws — it's not hard to guess which characters will live and die pretty much on sight, for starters. There are the same thrills, chills and laughs that one has come to expect from a "Jurassic Park" movie, but with the refreshing twist that this time they don't get hung on the worn-out narrative structure of "People are stuck in a jungle-like setting filled with dinosaurs and need to escape." While it made sense for the original "Jurassic Park" to use that template, it seemed downright lazy by the time it was employed in the second, third and fourth movies. "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" did devote its third act to a Tyrannosaurus Rex rampaging through San Diego (easily the best part of that movie, or for that matter of any of the prior "Jurassic Park" sequels) and "Jurassic World" occasionally used its theme park premise to creative effect (though not nearly as often as it could have, which is why I was deeply disappointed by that film). For the most part, however, those movies stuck to the dinosaurs-in-a-jungle setting, which made them repetitive and (especially in the case of "Jurassic Park 3") downright boring.
Fortunately "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" takes us out of the natural wilderness and into the one created by man at its halfway point. The rest of the film then creatively plays with the various ways in which dinosaurs being auctioned off to the one percent in a giant, spooky mansion could cause lots of mischief. The results alternate between being pulse-pounding tension and sweet narrative catharsis. Even better, by the time the credits are rolling, it is clear that the dinosaurs' prehistoric adventures are going to take place in the midst of human civilization from this point forward. It only took them five movies to get us to this long overdue point, but better late than never.
Which brings me back to that hapless brontosaurus. As it meets its fate, I couldn't help but think of when I saw the brontosaurus from the original "Jurassic Park" for the very first time. I was only eight, so to me I wasn't just seeing a well-crafted special effect; that seemed like a real dinosaur, and to this day I can remember being filled with wonder as the music swelled and it let out its majestic roar. A quarter century later and the world seems like a much sadder place now than it did back then, and the wonderment captured by that first glimpse of a "real" dinosaur now has been replaced — no, "joined" is a better word, nothing can replace that moment of childlike joy — with a sense of tragedy.
The world may not be that much worse in 2018 than it was in 1993, but it sure feels that way to me. Clearly it also feels that way to the minds in control of the "Jurassic Park" series, which in this case is a very good thing for the franchise.
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