The image of a brachiosaurus silhouetted against a volcanic eruption, abandoned on a pier as the rescue boats pull away, is the most quietly devastating shot the Jurassic franchise has produced. J.A. Bayona earns that image through patience and visual restraint, and it briefly suggests a more interesting film than the one surrounding it.
At a Glance
Director: J.A. Bayona
Runtime: 128 minutes
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda
Release: 2018
Critics Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, a director's film let down by its screenplay)
Audience Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, visually striking and sporadically gripping)
Plot
Three years after the events of Jurassic World, Isla Nublar's volcano is about to erupt. Owen Grady and Claire Dearing are recruited to rescue the remaining dinosaurs, only to discover the operation is a cover for an illegal auction of the animals to private military contractors and wealthy collectors. The screenplay splits the film into two distinct halves: a volcanic disaster movie on the island and a gothic horror film in a Californian mansion. Neither half is fully realised, and the transition between them is jarring enough to feel like two different productions edited together. The auction sequence, which should be the dramatic centrepiece, is resolved with a speed and convenience that suggests a script more interested in reaching its next set-piece than in developing the moral questions it has raised. The ending, in which Maisie releases the dinosaurs into the wider world, is the franchise's most consequential narrative decision since the first film, handled with a brevity that does not match its significance.
Characters
Pratt and Howard return with the same chemistry and the same underwritten material as before, their relationship developing in ways that feel obligatory rather than earned. Owen's bond with Blue is the film's most emotionally engaging thread, a connection the screenplay invests in with more care than it gives to any of its human relationships. Toby Jones' auctioneer is the standout supporting performance, a creation of broad villainy that suits the darker atmosphere of the interior sequences. Isabella Sermon's Maisie Lockwood is the most significant new addition, a character whose importance to the franchise's future is established with enough care to make her feel like a genuine investment rather than a plot device. James Cromwell's Benjamin Lockwood gives the film a connection to the franchise's origins that feels considered rather than contrived, and his scenes with Sermon have a tenderness the more action-oriented passages cannot match.
Meaning / Themes
The film raises genuinely interesting questions about the moral status of engineered life and the responsibilities that creation entails, concerns the franchise introduced and that this entry develops with more seriousness than its predecessors. Maisie's revelation, and her decision to release the dinosaurs, gives these concerns a personal dimension that the more abstract corporate villainy of earlier entries could not provide. The failure is not in the questions the film asks but in its inability to pursue them with the depth they deserve, settling for dramatic shorthand where sustained argument was needed.
Direction
Bayona's direction is the film's greatest asset. The volcanic eruption sequence is staged with a scale and physical immediacy the series had not previously achieved, and the mansion sequences have an eerie atmosphere that points toward a more interesting direction for the franchise. The tonal inconsistency between the island and mansion halves is the film's most persistent structural problem, a failure of integration that prevents either half from achieving its full effect. Bayona is a capable orchestrator of dread and spectacle, but the screenplay does not give him the material to sustain either across a full two hours.
Bayona brings a command of atmosphere and spatial tension that gives the interior sequences a texture the more conventionally staged action passages cannot match. The eruption set-piece is the directorial highlight, a sequence of considerable physical scale and emotional force. Michael Giacchino's score is the trilogy's most tonally varied, finding a darker and more unsettled register for the Lockwood estate material that suits Bayona's approach throughout.
Fallen Kingdom received mixed reviews on release but performed strongly at the box office. Critics acknowledged Bayona's visual ambition and the eerie quality of the interior sequences while noting the screenplay's structural problems. It is now regarded as the trilogy's most visually distinctive entry and its most narratively compromised, a film whose individual achievements outstrip its overall execution and whose ending set up a more interesting third film than Dominion chose to deliver.
Final Verdict: Fallen Kingdom is the most interesting failure the Jurassic franchise has produced. Bayona pushes the material into stranger, darker territory than any previous entry attempted, and the results are sporadically arresting. But the screenplay does not deserve the direction, and the direction cannot compensate for the screenplay. A film of real ambition and persistent structural disorder.