Reviews

There's a line, late in Jurassic World: Dominion, delivered by Jeff Goldblum. Caught between two ridiculous CGI dino titans, Ian Malcolm says, "This isn't about us." Our heroes realize they can just slink away unnoticed, and they do. The dinos keep stomping and snapping without them.

This line is more about the audience than the film. What Spielberg and Crichton created as a contemporary Frankenstein fable about HUMAN BEINGS and the dangers HUMAN BEINGS face when HUMAN BEINGS attempt to play God. Jurassic Park was about HUMAN reactions to dinosaurs: awe, wonder, dread, fear, terror.

And now, here we are, a film as close to Artificial Intelligence as anything you'll see. There's no warmth of humanity here. Humans don't act like human beings, not even characters we loved in 1993 - they all act like automatons, thrust forward from one meaningless action set piece to another. And the audience doesn't get to think like human beings (why are dinosaurs thriving globally, why can an insect fly after its wings have burned off, how can characters find other characters in seconds, despite miles of tunnels).

I hated JW and despised JW:FK. So why did I come to this one? I'm a human being. I loved JP, I liked JP:TLW, aI chuckled through JP3. I loved Malcolm, Sattler and Grant as characters. I love dinosaurs. As human being, I love the thought of seeing these majestic creatures alive. Times are hard for human beings, and I had hope for a good story to ease my mind and give me a thrill.

But Malcolm is right at the end of JW:D. This movie isn't about us. It's about grabbing cash, pulling nostalgia strings and throwing nonsense on the screen until it sticks. We can all slink away now - this monstrous trash will continue with or without us. Human beings with human hearts and human minds are no longer necessary.

There's a moment in the Tim Burton film Ed Wood, when Sarah Jessica Parker interrupts Wood's wrap party celebration by screaming "You're wasting your lives making s***. Nobody cares! These movies ... ARE TERRIBLE!"

Oh, if only nobody cared. JW:FK is going to make it's money. It's going to draw in huge summer crowds internationally. But we, the audience, should raise our collective voices, and have the courage to do what Parker's character did. This film ... really IS terrible.

Personally, I don't fault director J.A. Bayona. I've seen his other work, and I think that the film's only mildly positive qualities (gothic tension and color palette) are probably his doing. But I've seen Colin Trevorrow's work too, and this disaster of a story has his footprints all over it.

It's stupid to think that Hammond and his team of scientific geniuses built the park on the site of an active volcano. It is idiotic to send a team through some huge underwater, remotely controlled gate to recover a piece of the Indominus Rex skeleton. Time and time again, from US Senate hearings to black market auctions in the CLUE mansion to lava that behaves more like warm JELL-O than molten rock, this film chooses the path of brain-dead absurdity. If you had the bad luck to watch The Last Jedi, the feeling you have watching this film will be ... well, familiar.

Not even the dinosaurs, which should be at the heart of a JP/JW film, feel at all real. In Jurassic World, they were clumsy action figures; here they're little more than an afterthought. Gone are the brilliant colors and slow, lumbering entrances of the first three films. Now they are all muddy, pixelated and hard to tell apart. The new Indoraptor is a sleek exception, but apparently is so well-engineered by Henry Wu that it understands comedic timing. Wink, wink.

If there is any real horror in the film, it is unintentional. For a film supposedly so progressive, smart and liberal (yes, the presidency of Donald Trump deserves all kinds of thoughtful critiques and pointed commentary; two stupid joke-jabs about "nasty women" and science denial don't cut it), it has an unsettling weak sense of morality. We're supposed to weep when a dinosaur is left on the shore, when even a fang is poached by an unscrupulous contractor. But the "bad-guy" humans? They get sliced and diced in the third act without even so much as a moment of cinematic empathy. Even at the end, our five leads decide to just let the dinosaurs roam, despite that they've all seen first-hand the carnage that these animals wreak. Incredulously, they are willing parties to the suffering of the surviving dinosaurs (what will they eat? where will they go?) and every living thing that crosses their path.

And the music swells, and classic Jurassic image beats are repeated, as though we've got ourselves a happy ending and a billion dollars at the box office.

Ed Wood didn't deserve much of the criticism he got. His films were the right kind of dumb: small affairs of the heart, built around a loyal team of misfits, trying to restore a sense of humanity in whatever goofy way they could do it. His films were terrible, but the best kind of terrible.

JW:FK? This is the worst kind of terrible.

What a slog. Opening night, and not many in the audience. The Alien franchise is getting a little long in the tooth. If you thought Prometheus was oversold and underdeveloped, well ... it gets quite a bit worse.

The once-visionary Ridley Scott tries to mash every high concept from both his Alien and Blade Runner universes, and yet nothing congeals. So concerned with promoting his "new" xenomorph, he overexposes it with poorly-filmed sequences and truly regrettable computer graphics. We never get to know a fraction of the too-large cast, and their viciously gruesome deaths leave us feeling numb and hollow. James Cameron created characters out of entire squadron of space marines; Scott can barely get us to cheer for a pair of ill-fated colonists.

Bludgeoned is really the right word here. The audience gets battered by the gore and goo, yes, but also by the uninventive idea that an android would seek vengeance on its creator. And the logic of the plan is shaky at best. David (the android from Prometheus) unleashes the black goo on the Engineers, and rather than spread their DNA as it did in Prometheus, now it burns them like volcanic ash. David clearly could have used the ship and the remaining weaponized sludge to destroy humanity on Earth, but instead he stays and tinkers with the substance, miraculously landing on the facehugger egg form (yet with no creature permutation to lay it).

In short, it's a film that asks a lot of the viewer, yet gives so little in return.