TAKE ONE Presents... - The Dinopod 5: JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (2018)

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Simon and Jim return to Isla Nublar one last time before its destruction to discuss JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM and the lofty ambitions of a film that doesn't quite work. They discuss how the film approaches ecological management issues in the Anthropocene and humans' relationship with non-humans, the characters' inconsistent approach to conservationism, the film's Gothic horror / B-movie influences in a second half which feels like a separate film grafted on to the first half, and how this film is attempting to be the THE LAST JEDI of the Jurassic Park franchise. Apologies for the choppy audio: Simon had a problem with his recording and pieced his audio back together from backup. Content warnings: death and mutilation, animal abuse and speciesism, climate change and ecological destruction. Our theme song is Jurassic Park Remix by Gabriel Filósofo available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/gfilosofo/jurassic-park-remix Full references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/4VGAP65H

Hello, and welcome to Take One Presents the Dynapod, a podcast where we watch all the Jurassic franchise films in order, contextualising them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie. I'm joined by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hi, Jim. Hello. Happy New Year. We're coming to 2025, discussing Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom from 2018, directed by J.A. Bayona, the second film in the Jurassic World trilogy. What was your previous experience with this film, Jim, if any. Did it leave an impression on you? Um, so I saw, it was another day, we're well into the Edo now where basically all these films I caught during the original theatrical run. I think Fallen Kingdom is, with the exception of Dominion, which is the most recent one, right? So it's a bit more understandable there. This is the only one that I've not revisited since I saw it in the cinema. Um, and I remember coming out of it thinking, you know, it was all right. But I had a lot of silly stuff. I wasn't that taken with it. I think going into the, um, and I remember coming out of it thinking, you know, it was all right. But I had a lot of silly stuff. I wasn't that taken with it. I think going into the. I think going into the, I think going the series, I probably thought it was

the weakest of the films that we were speaking about in this podcast series. I think that might be kind of critical consensus. It's not well regarded. I think a lot of people would say it's the worst of all six films. Really? I wonder, I don't know,

Dominion seems to get a bit of a kicking online these days. But the point is, it's really not considered one of the stronger ones, I don't think. Yeah, so I didn't see this in the cinema. I just dropped off the Jurassic after Jurassic World, but I did see this on streaming, on a TV in the background at some point in my life, so I have seen it once before, but I've returned to it for this.

And yeah, not as bad as I remembered, you know, we'll discuss it as we go through, but I think generally my thoughts will be not as bad as remembered. It doesn't work particularly well, but it tries to do some interesting things has some interesting ideas behind it that unfortunately just don't get developed properly. Yeah I think I think it's kind of

going to end up broadly my thoughts as well actually and just in terms of you know the whole goal of looking at this thing is a you know an entire body of work and what it says about the kind of the cinematic world into which it emerged

yes it's it's an interesting one to look at now I have a few comments and comparisons that I'm going to make to a few other films. I think, broadly speaking, I don't think it's as bad as I remember. I remember it as being quite mad, so I wouldn't take that to mean that I think it's particularly great. I think a lot of it just slipped off my brain. But yeah, it has its virtues, some of which we'll talk about, and it's, again, it continues

to be interesting how it relates to films of a similar ilk and its predecessors and this sort thing. So yeah. Yeah. In a way, I think we'll have more to discuss than Jurassic Park 3, for example, which just felt a bit flat in all respects. This doesn't work, but I think it doesn't work interestingly, and what it attempts to do is interesting. And that is absolutely why I'm here, because when I have the discussion, I see things like that. People rolled their eyes at me typically, but that's it. It's like, you know, it's, it's, I think you could, and I said this during the Jurassic Park 3 episode, right? I think on its own terms of what it's trying to do,

maybe Jurassic Park 3 is better, air quotes. But I do think this is the more interesting film. I don't think it pulls off a lot of it, but it's exactly what you say. I think there's more to talk about it. It's trying to do more things, and it's up to you. It's in the eye of the individual, you know,

viewer as to whether it succeeds with any of that. But, yeah. Yeah, but this film comes about almost immediately after Jurassic World, which is a massive box office success, a massive financial success. So obviously Steven Spielberg tells his lackeys to go out and make

another one. You know, he's bringing me another Jurassic World. And Colin Trevor, the director of the previous one, is interested in developing a kind of episodic, a less episodic series. He wants

to make an arc over three films that he's going to produce, if not direct, and try to write if not direct. So he doesn't want, Trevoro suggests that the sequel doesn't involve dinosaur theme park because he feels like that's been done and that's repetitive. Instead, Trevor has an idea for what if the dinosaurs become open source? So he has this quote in an interview with Wired, where he talks about the dinosaurs being open sourced, the kind of dinosaur tech being open sourced.

he says it's almost like Ingeny's Mac but what if PC gets their hands on it what if there are 15 different entities around the world who can make a dinosaur I'm not a professional film critic I'm an amateur film critic it is in my spare time and in my full-time job

I am an open-source software developer so I was very interested in this quote I'm very interested in the incoherent Windows and Matt was famously open-source software providers yeah the incoherent sense that Colleen Trevor has of the open source movement

and what it means. The thing that I have devoted my professional career to, that he has tried to make a film about. I've not heard that quote before. I'm not, I don't even work in the same age. That's it's a big, you know, same thing. Yeah, what if PC gets

their hands on it? Do you mean Linux? That's a charitable reading of PC. That's a very charitable reading of it. All this aside. And I think this quote is a useful one. It's also another one in the long list of Colin Trevroquotes, which are, I don't know. See what you want about his films.

The man says some stupid things in interviews. He really does. He really does. So one of the things we'll get into as we discuss the film's themes is that I almost feel like they're entirely accidental. because nothing that Trevor O says in these kinds of production interviews aligns with what I find interesting about this film. So he doesn't want to make a dinosaur island one. He brings on J.A. Bayona to discuss the film,

who is a Spanish filmmaker, kind of a student of Guillermo del Toro, who I believe has directed some horror films at this point. So he brings him Bayona, and they're working off a similar kind of structure in terms of script to the unmade Jurassic Park Four. John Sayles, unmade Jurassic Park Four, where half of the film is set on an island, and half is set on the mainland, where there are dinosaurs being bioengineered for weapons, as bioweapons, as weapons for the military. This film kind of mirrors that structure, with different reasons for being on the island, and a slightly different feel to the kind of mansion bits later on. But Trevor O and his writing partner, Derek Connolly, devise ideas, they go on a road trip together to flesh out. the story, and a lot of it is inspired by a quote from the first film, where Alan Grant

says, dinosaurs and man, a two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, has suddenly been thrown back into the mix together. And how can we have possibly the slightest idea of what to expect? So Trevor is working with this idea that this mistake cannot be undone. You can't get this back in the box. But yeah, so they have a lot of ideas. They definitely want to bring back Chris Pratt and Price Dallas Howard. And then when Bayonneau is brought on board, he does some uncredited revisions to the script where he's thinking about how he wants to direct it and the tone he wants to bring. Specifically, as we'll discuss, the kind of gothic influences that he brings to the sequence

in the mansion towards the end of the film. And then the film gets released in 2018, specifically coming out in May, in kind of May, June, summer 2018. As I said at the end of the last episode, it's the second most expensive film ever made behind Star Wars The Force Awakens, and it makes a lot of money at the box office. Highest grossing films of 2018, here it comes out, are Avengers Infinity War, Black Panther, both Marvel movies, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom at number three, Incredibles 2, Aquaman, Bohemian Rhapsody, which kind of stands out as the non-superior and non-franchise film here. Venom, Mission Impossible Fallout, Deadpool 2, and Fantastic Beasts, The Crimes of Grindlewald.

So entirely dominated by franchise films, the box offices at this point. And even then, if you go a little bit beyond that top ten, it's even things that are kind of in, you know, caught in the gaze of them. I'm seeing at number 12. I didn't actually realize it would be that high up, ready player one in terms of global box office. Oh yes, so Steven Spielberg is busy directing. Ready Player 1. Yeah, interesting. We were talking in the Lost World episode

about Spielberg's inability to direct family fun adventure films after Chinle's list. Yeah, exactly. And I'm also pretty sure Ready Player 1 in amongst its kind of ridiculous catalogue of pop culture references it throws up on the screen, I'm pretty sure the Jurassic Park T-Rex is one of them, actually. In the world of the film, it's obviously meant to be a virtual

but I'm pretty sure it shows up in Ready Player 1. I don't know because I saw Ready Player 1 and said I've not barred to look at it ever again since then. I barely remember anything about it. I haven't seen it. It's a Spielberg that I feel no need to watch. Yeah, I don't think you're going to have any major gaps in your knowledge or appreciation of the world at large

without seeing it, to be perfectly honest. Well, we live in the shadows. We live in the ruins of the world that Ready Player 1 built. So perhaps I am missing something. But yes, they're all franchise films. Not the best films of 2018. For my money, that would be maybe Leave No Trace, maybe Transit, maybe Under the Silver Lake,

maybe Sorry to Bother You. I think I'd agree with all of them, apart from Under the Silver Lake. I did not take it to that film. Oh, yeah, a lot of people didn't. Yeah, but I think in particular, I think Leave No Trace, actually. I think that would be right up there for me there.

I think, sorry to bother you 2018, I did, like that's It's on 2018 under Letterboxed. Yeah, okay, I wonder if it was, I wonder if it maybe came out like, anyway, the point is those two films of the ones you've mentioned. Off the top of it, yeah, they're both superb films.

I would hardly recommend them. But they're not the franchise films that dominate the box office. No. Including Jurassic World's Fallen Kingdom. I think we should crack on, run through the film, see what we like and didn't like about it. The film opens underwater. as a submersible enters the lagoon

of Isla Nubla scavenging the remains of the Indominus rex Ultimately the submersible is consumed by the Mosasaurus and the ground team is attacked by a T-Rex and then also the Mosasaurus But they get away with the Endonymous Rex tooth I think this is a good scene You know we immediately start with quite a different tone

From the previous movies in some ways A lot more horror inflected With kind of horror-type lighting, threatening shadows We'll get more of that kind of German expression in a shadow later on. But it's an opening scene for me, an effective opening scene. Yeah, I'd agree with that.

I think I mean, there's actually an interesting parallel with another film in the franchise, not in Luke, but you know, we'll probably go into some of the parallels this film will have to, or maybe the first part of the film, we'll go on to

have with the Lost World, the second film in the CDs. A few parallels, I've been a good. Yeah, because there's quite few, but I think one it shares with this scene, maybe not on an aesthetic level in any way, but I genuinely think the opening scene is one of the best

scenes in the film. And I had a lot of time for this, I think, the way the lightning is used to give the silhouette of the Mosaun, because you know what's there, but it's kind of presenting it in this kind of like slightly more dread-filled way.

Yeah, the T-Rex is kind of drenched in shadows in a way that makes them look, makes it look scarier than she's been in several films. Yeah, exactly. I think it's probably the best to me I think it's probably the best T-Rex scene

since maybe the original film actually. I think you can make a case for the trailer going over the cliff in the lost world with the dual T-Rex stuff before that, but I think genuinely it really is. I think it's

it captures that sense of danger again, I think. Really well. After a lava-filled title sequence, we get a voiceover from BBC News telling us that Isla Nublaz volcano has become active and that there's an active debate raging about the ecological management

and animal rights responsibilities of humanity when these dinosaurs are facing extinction from a volcano. There's a US Senate hearing to discuss this and to decide if the US government wants to act on this where Dr Malcolm appears and he's representing the position of leaving the dinosaurs to die

I'm not sure why the US Senate is debating this but it seems like these these films have completely forgotten or ignoring by this point that the island is Costa Rican soil and that it has nothing to do with the US government

yeah like I could maybe excuse this if they had to like either seem like the Costa Rican ambassador or something yeah just like you know just some sort of I'm sort of acknowledgement that this is

not US soil. What are you all talking about? The US Senate ultimately decides not to act because what would they do? There's this idea that the US, it just is the world's policeman. It's funny. It's a minor point, but it is pretty amusing watching this

as somebody who, you know, I don't know, isn't American, doesn't take, like, American global hegemony at base value? It's just quite funny. It's like, what should we do with these Costa Rican Islands? I don't know. Maybe I ask Costa Rica would they want to do. Yeah.

And this stuff I like, this kind of, the ecological management stuff is exactly the kind of discussions that I wanted that I said at the end of our Lost World episode, I wanted the film to address. It's been accelerated

through the kind of script contrivance of a volcano going off, but ultimately this is the same question of whether you let the dinosaurs die off naturally in what I argued was an ecosystem that was too small to contain them, or whether you intervene to save them and to manage the population through, I don't know, feeding, breeding programs.

So that's an interesting question to me, and there's a lot of articles that deal with this idea of ecological management and human responsibility in the Anthropocene. So the volcano is kind of positioned as an avatar for human-made climate change and what are our responsibilities when this thing that we have done this cataclysmic climate disaster that we have wrought on the world

what is our responsibility to animals under that paradigm? So there's a good article by Toby Nielsen called Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom and the Ethics of Extinction where it says that the paradigm of Hunter versus hunted that the other Jurassic Park films have toyed with is not just shifted as it was in The Lost World and Jurassic World but eradicated entirely. There is no ecology when the world is on fire,

and Fallen Kingdom makes this immediately and viscerally clear in its opening half when humanity and de-extinct dinosaurs are placed on a plateau of ecological significance in the face of the volcano's fury. I think there's more that we can say about this throughout the film, and particularly its approach to these kinds of ecological management questions. We'll discuss it as we go through, but I think the main problem with them, I'm happy that they're being discussed, but the main problem with them is that they are inconsistent throughout

and inconsistently thematized and inconsistently portrayed through character. But speaking of these themes being fematized through character, we are introduced again to Claire in a shot that parallels to introduction into the Jurassic World. She's now a conservationist, working for some kind

of dinosaurs rights charity. The dinosaur protection group, we're introduced to some of the young people here. Speaking of the Anthropocene and climate change, Claire immediately starts talking about kids and the responsibility of saving dinosaurs, i.e. the planet, four kids, rather than, say, for the animal's own sake. Claire gets invited to the Lockwood Estate,

where she looks at a picture of John Hammond, and she meets Eli Mills, who is played by Rafe Spall. Now, to my knowledge, Rafe Spall is the only actor who has been in the two franchises that we have covered, the Alien franchise, because he's in Prometheus, and the Jurassic Park franchise. I can't think of anyone else. Certainly the only one I could think of all.

I mean, you don't know. You don't actually even occurred to me until you mentioned it, but I don't, I can't think of anybody else. Dominion, who's in Dominion? Nobody that showed up in any the late Reulian films. Yeah, unless there's some actor in a smaller role that I've missed, I think he's the only one.

I think that's it. But here you go, there's a question for folk out there. If they want to play sort of like a slightly different version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, six degrees of, you know, six degrees of acid blood or something. I don't know. So we meet previously unmentioned business partner,

Ben Lockwood. who was Hammond's business partner who has never been mentioned before he's played by the excellent James Cromwell actual animal rights activist and actual political activist James Cromwell and he offers an island sanctuary to save the dinosaurs

he says it was John Hammond's dream to let these creatures live in peace was it not in Jurassic world it wasn't the immediately preceding film because Simon Mersrani said it was Hammond's dream to build a dinosaur park One strand I'm going to start to introduce us

we start to go through the film, it's right? When we went into the series, I didn't think of these films as having that same quality of the alien series did about kind of like, you know, having a bit of an identity crisis. As we've gone through them, I think I have started to see that here also. And this is just kind of like a little micro example of it. It was like, it was John Hammond's dream to let these creatures live in peace. Was it?

Because it wasn't in Jurassic Park. it might have been in the lost world, but it's left a little bit unclear, and it certainly wasn't again by the time we got to Jurassic World. So, which is it? Hammond's character depends on the whims of the film as to how he is portrayed, because he can be both ruthless capitalist now and loving conservationist, and which Hammond you get depends on which film you're watching. Yeah, and that's even leaving room for the idea that he was, and then he was kind of like a newborn, you know, newborn animal rights activists or something, because, like, that's kind of the shift that they try to make him go with the little appearance

in the lost world, but that's completely out the window by Jurassic World, right? Posthumously, sure, but, like, you know, it was Hammond's dying wish or something, I think, is something that Maserani actually says. It's, it's, it's wildly inconsistent. It's, it's, it's quite amusing. Anyway, Ben Lockwood wants to, wants to save the dinosaurs, and again, they emphasize that they want to save them for children, for the children. Again, this idea that we should save the dinosaurs, read the planet for the children for the next generation. They need Claire's expertise to rescue the dinosaurs, including Blue. And that's why they need Owen Grady. Clay goes to find Owen, who is building his own house, because he's a man's man. The two litigate their

relationship, and Claire kind of gilts him into coming by opinion to his affection for Blue. What I'll say is, across this film, Owen is a lot better than in the pretextual. previous film. I no longer hate this character. This version of Owen is fine. They seem to have softened down his edges. He's not hectoring anymore. Chris Pratt seems to be bringing more humor into it. He gets into scrapes and he takes fault for his mistakes. He's a lot more likable. Yeah. It's a bit more rounded out, I think, really. It's just a thing. Like, you see it's slightly different edges to the character. It feels a little bit less like a sort of like, you know, it just meant to be a sort of like, um, infallible badass, basically, and I think that's

better. I think what's interesting about, you're saying, it's something that I noted, because I did like, that this really stood out to me, especially during his first few scenes in this film. And I went and had a look, and they filmed Jurassic World, they started filming it in April 2014, and Guardians of the Galaxy, which I would say is probably the thing that kind of established Chris Pratt's kind of, I don't want any persona, but the kind of like, you know, what audiences expect of him, I would say, where that came out in July 2014. So I think it's probably notable that this film is the first of the Jurassic World films that would have been filmed after Guardians of the Galaxy came out.

And I do wonder if that's probably, I wonder if there's kind of like something about the response to the own Grady character and quite how sort of patronising he was, really. in the other film and how well received that film wasn't the slightly more goofbally persona which wouldn't fit Owen Grady but like the kind of the goofball persona he's put there

whether they've kind of informed that in the writing of the character this time to be honest you have to assume or in the portrayal that Chris Pratt is bringing because he does get some goofbally moments I'm thinking of him rolling away from the lava once he's been sedated later in the film it is very

is very Peter Quill And so I think he brings some of that softness and some of that humor that he didn't bring in the first film to the character's detriment. A brief scene between Lockwood and his granddaughter Maisie, who is a nine-year-old girl, this seems solely here to set up the twist later on. Claire Owen and the young people from the charity Fly to Isla Nubler. They meet Tid Levine, most known from Silence of the Lambs, as Buffalo Bill. though he also does a good role in Shutter Island. Ted Levine is facilitating the dinosaur rescue mission.

They head to the ruins of Jurassic World, and we get yet another Brachiosaurus moment. This time with an actual Brachiosaurus. You know, we're looking at these dinosaurs for the first time. Zia, one of the young people, says she's beautiful, she never expected to see a dinosaur in real life. It's another retread of the Brekeosaurus moment

that we've seen in a lot of the other films. This kind of worked for me. Yeah, it's an example I think of also like you. The references isn't this film, we're a little bit more, they're a bit subtler, generally. Like, I don't think it's trying to hammer you on the head too hard with a lot of the callbacks it makes. Like, this is one, it kind of makes sense in context. It's like, there are things this film does well, and I think I went into this series

expecting kind of like the, you know, look at me, I get that reference type of film making to ramp up across this film. I actually think this has less of it than Jurassic World, actually and I think that's it's film's credit I think the door the tables will turn on that again I think when we get to the next film although I'll be interested to revisit it with this in mind but yeah it's actually it's less so

here it's more kind of like old school nods and references rather than kind of like you know using it as a narrative crotch no agreed so the gang accessed the systems for tracking the dinosaurs RFID tags and they proceed to track blue

Owen finds her near what appears to be, speaking of references, the tour car that fell from the tree in Jurassic Park. It goes bad, Ted Levine sedates Blue and Owen, and Blue also gets shot by one of the soldiers. The rescue team lock Claire and Franklin in the control room for some reason and make no escape as the volcano starts to erupt. Owen struggles to overcome his sedation next to a lava flow that would absolutely kill him. We get more horror film visuals in the control room, so there's a barionics who emerges from the shadows, of the tunnel in a very kind of gothic horror way. Claren Franklin Escape, they actively sealed the dinosaur into the room filling with lava, and then they flee the lava along with a stampede of dinosaurs.

So there's a lot more of this later on, but this is what I mean about the film's inconsistency with its conservation, in that it feels like we're conserving big-ticket carnivores, like the T-Ex, and all the herbivores, but actually there's a whole bunch of carnivores that we don't care about because they're frets. We don't want to conserve the bad dinosaurs, quote-unquote. There's more of that later on that. I'll talk. Yeah, I have a lot of comments on...

I have a lot of comments on this with regards to Blue, right? And I think that, like, Blue comes into the film a lot more strongly from this point. I'm going to make some similar points as we get to that. But, yeah, I haven't even really considered it with that. And, you know, I think you can kind of, you can kind of explain that away with the whole kind of, like, it's trying to eat them thing. But it's kind of, you know, the choice... The choices about how certain creatures die or don't die

and what they are doing at the time, right? Those are choices, right? You know, the plotting is a choice, right? And so, yeah, that's another example of it, but I think there's other ones later on, which are less easily explained away, I think. So they're fleeing the lava along with the stampede of dinosaurs. They're escaping an old gyrosphere,

and they get rescued from a carnatusaurus, I think, by our old friend T-Rex is a T-Rex. And these scenes of dinosaurs fleeing natural destruction are pretty good. There's also a long, continuous shot of escaping the gyrosphere when it's immersed in water. It's not a continuous shot, it's put together in a computer, but it looks like a long shot. That feels claustrophobic, and I think works well as a kind of example of filmmaking, reflecting how the characters are feeling. At the port, Ted Levine loads these dinosaurs onto a ship. He pulls out a stegosaurus tooth to make sure we know he's a villain.

Everyone escapes onto the ship, the volcano erupts. Our heroes also get onto the boat. It pulls away from the island, and there's a final mournful shot of a brachiosaurus consumed in smoke and flame, a final testament, a final sacrifice to the hubris that Isla Nubla represents. It's kind of effective.

It's also kind of clearly, like, emotionally manipulative, especially when you take into account quote from J.A. Bayona in an empire article, that this is, canonically the same Brachiosaurus as Grants saw in the first

Jurassic Park film. Yeah, which in the... I don't know. Something in your market's coming. I mean, that's just harsh shit. There's nothing... There's not anything to indicate that, right? You know, that's the first time I've heard that. That's just... My owner can say it all he wants, right?

But this is where kind of like you maybe get to death of the author stuff, because I'm sorry, there's no evidence of that whatsoever. The one thing I will say about this is... I think it's reasonably effective. There's something about it. It's held too long or the music's just that little bit melancholic or we cut to too many kind of like teedy-eyed protagonists that it just tips over into being right okay come on you know um

this is why i call it manipulative so there's an article a book chapter rather by jerica sanderson called listening to non-human animals in science fiction film establishing empathy through dinosaur voices in Jurassic park a Jurassic World Fallen kingdom where it talks about the lack of substance and integrity in this film's incorporation of this sentimental trope. The highly constricted nature of the emotionally charged scene indicates that there's perhaps a lack of authenticity behind

the emotions being elicited. And it talks about the kind of anthropomorphization of the brachiosaurus in this moment. We're supposed to think it's kind of screaming, don't leave me behind, why have you done this? But it's, it's, that's anthropomorphizing and it feels sentimental in a cynical way. Yeah, the only other thought I

heard about this shot is because I think I'm like why do they hold on it for so long and I do wonder if there's kind of an extra textual element here in that this is actually the first point we've got to where they have essentially destroyed the

setting of the two most successful films in this series right and that feels especially when you think about where this film goes from here right because this kind of like signals the end of the island part of the script here

and then we go back to the Lockwood estate. The good part of the script. Right, but yes, actually, to be frank, right? But it kind of signals the end of that bit. And then when you even think about where it goes with Dominion in the film after this, it... For all the thing about kind of like whether it's the... you know, that specific brachy sort and how manipulative it,

it does feel symbolically important, you know? Like, it really is kind of a signal, like, you know, certainly within this continuity, we're not going back here, you know? It's done. We're killing island, killing Isla Nubla, killing the original island. Still no mention of Ysla-Sorna,

but, you know, that's just an amusing side note. But Trevor seems to recognize this. So in the same Empire article, Trevor talks about treating Isla Nubla and its death with great reverence. So he talks about it as if our characters are witnessing the burning down of a church or a temple. And he talks about killing it off as killing off a character in a way. and giving the proper respect and acknowledgement

to the permanence of what they're doing and I assume he had to run this by Spielberg to get him to sign off on it. But yeah, it does feel like they're treating the death of his Lenublar seriously in a way even if I do think it's tinged with this cynical sentimentality. So back at the Lockwood estate, Spall meets Toby Jones who looks a bit like Donald Trump.

He has kind of floppy, wiggle-like hair, and Toby Jones is playing American for some reason. There's some back and forth about their villainous capitalist scheme, you know, selling off the Nublar dinosaurs in order to seed their genetic research for bioweapons. So they've made a new dinosaur from the remains of the Indominus Rex called the Indiraptor. This is all the same as the last film. I'm not terribly interested in it, and it does feel like the script has immediately shifted into a mode that I don't care about personally. I was interested in the ecological management questions and escaping easily a new blur. I'm a lot less engaged from this point on, I'll be frank.

And I think, like, from this point on, I think that the film does have some, what I would say is I think from here on in, the film has some well-executed scenes, right? I can point to, like, individual examples, and I will as we go through it, where I think kind of the imagery is good, right? I like the way it looks, I like the way an individual thing is executed. It does feel like a bit of a cheap retread of the themes that we've covered in other films, but just less intelligent. You know, it's, it loses, and I think the important thing is that until we get maybe towards, like, literally the closing scene, the closing lines of dialogue, a lot of the ideas it's been dealing with up to this point, which lets be clear, are set up as the kind of the, you know, the nucleation point of this film's story, right?

Because we open with, you know, Clear Deering is now an animal, you know, an animal rights activist. Owen Grady is brought back into the fold because of his affection for these animals, right? It's not, we've not pulled this out of nowhere. They're dropped pretty much completely. Pretty much completely until the very end of the film. They're not resolved. They're not developed. They are dropped like hot potatoes. Yeah, the ecological management questions, the Anthropocene parallels, just go out the window while we deal with this smaller short-fell. This, like, hammer-horror type thing.

Yeah, and I find it about bioweapons, dinosaurs as bio-weapons, which we already did. We just had the Endonymous Reacts in the last film. We've done this. Yeah, and I find it interesting that it does this because, again, it's the whole sea starts to feel like a kind of like a bunch of rejected concepts from previous scripts again, which is something that I said the previous film, Jurassic World, had kind of got away from, right? And I don't really, I don't really understand why it does this. And I think the important thing about it is, is that one thing I'm very wary of when I'm critiquing a film that I've not liked, right? Is, again, I don't

think you can criticise a film for not being what you want it to be, right? You kind of need to take a film on its own terms, right? I don't go into the Fast and Furies films like criticizing kind of like, you know, we don't get into the interior lives of the characters or so, because that's not what Fast and Furious is for, right? But it doesn't apply here. The film puts these themes front and centre from its very opening scenes, right? It puts it there. It sets the characters up as avatars of those themes, and those themes are driving some of their motivations. And then it just drops them. They're gone, right? Until I say maybe towards a conclusion and then they, you know, we'll get into it there. I think they're then kind of resolved, if they are resolved, in a very weak manner. So I think it's important to be clear about this. This is not something that the film is not concerned with. This is not we wanted this film to be this and it's not. The film sets itself up as this and then does absolutely nothing to develop and resolve it.

yeah clearly like reading the the kind of Anthropocene parallels and the global warming parallels into the film to some extent but it's not a stretch like there's lots of people who have had the same interpretation that I'm reading from in terms of articles and it's it's clearly set up that way the first voiceover from BBC news lays out this conflict between various animal rights activists and people that who say, like Dr Malcolm, we should just leave them to die. No, no, no, it's not a stretch at all. And even if you just take it as a surface level thing, I mean, again, it's an animal-slash-dinosaur conservationist tale, and that is driving the motivations of the characters. That's why they find themselves on this island and then, you know, end up kind of, you know, in danger at that point.

It's driving the film to that point, it just gets absolutely dropped. Yeah, plus, and we don't often talk about the film's marketing, but this film was very much marketed as escaping from lava on an island like the poster is on his lanube law escaping on the volcano all the trailers portrayed escaping from the volcano so our heroes are on the ship they sneak around and they find zeera and blue they get blue a blood transfusion from the t-rex an entirely different species it's a bit of a nonsense

there's some good armatronics work with the wrecks but it's all a little flat like it this should work on paper but it doesn't. Macy, meanwhile, sneaks into the secret facility below Lockwood's Mansion, and she watches Owen's Video Diary with Blue. So this is kind of Owen training Blue as a juvenile. It's cross-cut with surgery on Blue, establishes how much Owen loves Blue and how much Blue loves Owen. Macy sees the villainous Dr. Wu, B.D. Wong again. Arguing with Rafe Spall. Wu needs Blue to act as the mother of the next Indo-Raptor iteration, because currently it is not compliant. There's some echo of the previous fellow.

films focus on motherhood and kind of the nuclear family, but it's not as pronounced as certainly in the previous film. Spall catches Maisie and villainously locks her in a room. The ship docks and the dinosaurs are herded into the secret facility below Lockwood's mansion, which in the next scene, Lockwood is furious to discover below his own house, the house he lives in. And Rafe Spall just murder sims him, smooze him with a pillow. this is yeah this is this is the point where the film really starts

to kind of go off the rails of it I think and I don't know if this is the right place to brought up but I think there was a point that you made when we were talking about Jurassic World which stuck with me and it's about kind of like

and maybe this plays into your thing about kind of this film's approach to death but it was the idea that it starts to present in the previous film that this animal is worth saving because it's our friend

right and we kind of like poked fun at it with blue and kind of like oh dinosaur wind you know this sort of thing it's really gone into hyperdrive at this point right i think one thing that i think skirted past me when i watch this in the cinema is when they're operating on balloon they're doing this cross cutting back and forth between the training videos when she's a juvenile and they've done their best to make a velociraptor seem cute in those scenes because it's a juvenile right and she sheds a tear you know right right So first of all, this is, you know, I don't really want to get into the biology of whether a velociraptor can cry, because this is a ridiculous conversation to have, right? As a cinematic choice, it's ridiculous, right? And the thing that I find interesting about it is, if you think back to the previous film, right, so blue, of course, was part of a pack of raptors that Owen raised, right? And there was Blue, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. And I can't remember which one is seen in the first video. It's either Delta or Echo. and basically when Owen pretends to show weakness it attacks him right and it bites his arm which he's got a protective thing on you know the sort of thing that he used to like you know train police dogs or whatever right so it doesn't hurt him but like it's but then it's contrasted with the same thing with Blue and Blue kind of like comes up and nuzzles him and shows affection and concern all the rest of it and I think the problem I have with this is it in it seems to imply that because Blue does that the other Velocirator is inherently lesser, right? It's inherently less worthy of protection or

any sort of kind of like animal based rights compared to blue. And I realize I'm reading very deeply into a throwaway scene here, but when you put it into the context that that very velociraptor that is shown to be less intelligent and kind of less deserving in a way, I'm pretty sure that's probably

that's one of the ones that was blown up by a goddamn rocket launcher in the previous film. You know, and that was seen as kind of like, you know, saving one the main character. So it's just part of this whole thing where it's like, unless there's this anthropomorphised quality, right, of some sort, they're not worth saving it. And that, to me, is just, and again, there's more of it later on, which I'm sure you'll get into, but this is kind of this first hint of how this film not only ditches those kind of, you know,

conservationist themes it has in the first part of it, it actively ends up undermining them. because it's like oh this raptor's my friend therefore we should save this raptor and it's just like there's something about it where I'm like I don't want to say I find it distasteful because I feel that but I think that sounds a bit sounds wrong when we're talking about kind of like theoretical creatures here but it does undermine its own ideas yes so this is what I mean when I talk about the inconsistency in its approach to ecological management this idea that the idea that it clearly presents that some animals deserve saving and others do not so you've just mentioned blue deserve saving because blue is to some extent affectionate towards humans the herbivores deserve saving because they're harmless the carnivores

don't really deserve saving unless they have saved yeah unless yeah in the tears unless they have saved our protagonists at some point and so the film sets up this dichotomy between good and bad dinosaurs

and which we should save based on that. So there's an article I've got here by Matilda Navo, Jurassic Will's Fallen Kingdom, linking transhumanism and post-humanist anti-speciesism in a science fiction blockbuster. And it makes the case that Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is actually pretty good at anti-speciesism and a kind of post-human perspective on living with animals, which I'll talk more about later. But it also says the film does set up this dichotimate between the good animals and the bad animals. There's particularly a scene later of Owen and Claire are overlooking the auction of the

animals and they see the Indiraptor for the first time. Toby Jones describes it and Owen immediately is like that thing needs to be destroyed. We need to kill that thing. Like what is the difference for you between these two things? They've all been manufactured. Blue was manufactured in a lab just like the Indooraptor was manufactured in a lab. just like the Indiraptor was manufactured in a lab

they're both living creatures they're both animals but immediately you want to be destroyed and you wouldn't want to live free your conservation is inconsistent and it feels like a

just a silly failure of the script just a silly half-bakedness that could have been overcome with maybe another draft or just some more serious thought about animal conservation Yeah, and I was going to bring it up there, but it's interesting the thing you say about the Indo-Raptor here, which is battling towards its presence in this film by the time we get to this point. But I also find it interesting the way that that's set up in a villainous sense.

And obviously, I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not trying to pretend that the dinosaur inverted commas that can be triggered to attack anything with a laser point or right is in any way kind of like a heroic presence. Of course it isn't. but again it sits totally odds with the ideas that the film presents up to its appearance right because if you go back to the the alan grant comment in Jurassic Park 3 right you know what I'm creating aren't dinosaurs right this genuinely isn't right you know I mean like this is not something that ever existed in any you know previous area there's nothing that really bears even necessarily much resemblance to it and it has been genuinely weaponized in a way that some of these other ones aren't

but what's interesting is nothing that happens in this film sets up its existence like you have the opening scene where they get the indomis rex bone it quickly becomes apparent that they've used that DNA to create this thing but that is set shortly after the last film everything else in this film takes place years after nothing in this film has resulted in the existence of that creature right it's not some misstep by the characters they need to correct it's not something that you know they've allowed to fall into the hands of the antagonists and, you know, this is its manifestation. No, this is just something that was created in a lab, like a few years ago. Nothing in this film has resulted in its existence. It is not the job of the characters

in this film to kind of correct this mistake, right? And I realize I'm on tenuous ground here, but it's more just again, it's another example of how I really think it's undermining its own themes, right? This thing has no knowledge of why it's here. And it's just this, it's

it's exactly what you've said. It's in its mind, right? You know, not to be capable of this kind of level of thought, but it's in exactly the same situation as every other dinosaur in this film. Yes, and yet the film portrays it, as you've said, as a

monster. So it's shot as a monster, it pursues people as a monster, it is explicitly called weaponry, and yet it's still a living thing. So, you know, you mentioned it's not a real dinosaur, it's never existed in the world before, I want to be clear, that doesn't mean it's not deserving

of life. Because it is now a living being, that deserves life like anything else. And the film seems to know this to some extent, because as I'll discuss a bit later, it's taking a lot of gothic parallels from Frankenstein. And the point of Frankenstein is Frankenstein's creature is artificial, should not exist in nature, but now has life and deserves to exist. Well, that's my woke karate interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yeah, but also, I mean, frankly,

I don't know, anybody who doesn't have that interpretation, I don't think have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like, I mean, like, it's all pretty much there, right? You know, I think people confuse the, you know, the classic cliched cinematic depiction of the monster with what was actually written in

Shelley's novel, right? One particular daily mail article, which says, you know, woke kids these days, think that Frankenstein's monster deserves to exist. Yeah, no, yeah. What kids need Mary Shelley, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But no, but it's interesting.

So it's like you say, I think that that's all true. But it's also kind of like even even within the kind of like the plotting and logic of the film, I don't think it really works, right? Because, like, if this thing had been created within the runtime of the film, in response to a mistake or some villain, act that comes about through

the plotting of this particular set of events, then it would at least sit better thematically, but it doesn't at all. Yeah, exactly. Dr. Wu just pops up and he's made another monster, which adds to the feel of this mansion bit, feeling like a second film grafted

onto the first film, the first half of the film, that feels a bit slapdash. So Lockwood is now dead. What a pointless character, didn't do anything important. throughout the film, and just served as a retcon of salmon. Retconed into the film, never mentioned any of the previous ones,

and he's never mentioned after this again. Completely pointless. One absolute waste of James Cromwell, an absolute waste. Every time you employ James Cromwell, you're taking him away from his important activism work and getting arrested for throwing stuff at cops. How dare you for such a waste of screen time? Owen and Claire get captured, and Rafe Spall points out the contradictions of their characters that we mentioned in the last film.

So he correctly identifies them as the parents of the new world. He says, you were exploiting dinosaurs as well. What's the difference between you and me? Yeah, fair point. Yeah, this is actually this little mini speech he gives is to me actually the strongest part of this segment of the film. I genuinely think it's good. A clear acknowledgement of what was obvious in the last film. but they didn't acknowledge.

Yeah, no, it's good. He calls them out, I think also, even the scene where he kills Lockwood, like Lockwood kind of castigates him, but it's kind of the, what's like, complacency and lack of oversight from this rich, powerful guy that's allowed him to pursue this agenda, right?

So I think it's interesting, and it makes kind of the hypocrisies and the contradictions and Owen and Clear's kind of role clear, and I think that's an interesting thing for the film to do. I think I had two reactions to the scene. The first one was, it also kind of continues to this, like, this undermining that I've spoken about.

Like, you know, undermining the kind of, you know, because again, we're dealing with things from the first film here rather than the second one. Therefore, the role of kind of the Indoor Raptor is a bit odd in my view. But the other thing was actually, I don't think Ray Swoll got enough credit for his performances film. He's actually a much more, like, I think as a result of this speech, he's a more interesting antagonist. and I think I maybe give credit for at the time. You know, it's still not amazingly well written, but this does make him more interesting than I think I'd given him credit for at the time.

I know. I think he's kind of blandly generic in this, you know? No, I would agree with that, but I think this is the one part that makes him not totally genetic in my view, right? Whereas in my head, I think, basically, he just disappeared into the background. But no, this is actually a genuinely interesting kind of, you know, not motivation but justification to give that character I'd completely forgotten about the character until I re-watched it I wouldn't have been able to tell you that Rave Spall was in this film

so a load of businessmen pull up for an auction in the mansion which Spall had presumably originally planned to keep secret from the owner of the house who would have been on the second floor while the auction took place on the floor below Hmm Macy escapes her room She discovers her dead grandfather It's pretty dark

Macy sees a photo of her mum For the first time in her life Question mark And realizes that she's a clone We're gonna come back to this This subplot by the way Because yeah It gets more important later

But not much more Clare and I know in a prison They talk about the first time They eat so a dinosaur And then they use I've put Pachycephalosaurus In my notes, I actually think it's a different kind of dinosaur that I can't remember the name of, but a dinosaur with a domed school in the next cell to break down the cell walls and then beat

Mesa. I want to do some surrogate parenting, you know, they immediately offer to take this little girl away from her home, knowing virtually nothing about her situation. And then there's more auction stuff, which is very on the nose, reflections of dollar counts ticking up in spalled glasses, Toby Jones is not respecting the dinosaurs, while they auctions them off. It's all a bit blatant and a bit silly. Domby Jones introduces the Indiraptor, which is framed as a universal horror monster, like Frankenstein's monster or the Wolfman. At this point, we're really into a kind of

genre mash-up. So there's a lot of articles that talk about this film melding the kind of science fiction sensibilities of the Jurassic Park franchise with B-movies or Gothic horror. You know, there's kind of shadows on the wall, German expression is shadows, claws reaching out of shadows. Yeah, it's been called a B movie on an A picture budget. Ryan Lamy at Den of Geek. So it's fascinating to see

how this film uses the same tactics as Roger Corman, William Castle, or Lowy Cohen, these kind of famous B movie directors. And there's a lot of gothic iconography in this later scene in the mansion. So Catherine Pugh identifies, you know, the mansion itself,

this kind of gothic edifice in the middle of Northern California. with kind of crenellations and turrets and whatnot, and talks about how the Jurassic films themselves have been rife with Gothic iconography and themes, some monstrous embodiments of the violent past, dark and dangerous wilderness, a deep distrust of those in authority or power

for it's of loss and corruption, anxiety is about reproduction, and this notion of de-extinction, of reanimation has its roots in the Gothic in Frankenstein's creature, as I alluded to earlier. But it's all lightning storms, rooftops, isolated mansions, monsters in the basement.

It's all very, very Gothic. Yeah, and I think it's kind of ashamed that the set up into this particular section of the film feels so absurd, really, because there are kind of like some individual pieces of shot making here that I think are

really, really good. Like, I really like the imagery, that there's a scene with a camera sort of like, you know, it pivots around one of the skeletons in the museum sort of section as the Indo-Raptor is like trying to, you know, chase the, kind of our three main characters, and it's just a really well, kind of, like, you know, a well-realized shot that's kind of presented as a, I don't want to say

continuous take, because everybody always thinks that means like a five-minute shot or something, but the point is it's like one fluid camera movement, kind of like illicit, like where folk have gone, you know, the kind of like the cat and mouse game that's kind of going on. There's another one where it peers into a bedroom when it's on the roof. This is the Indiraptor and kind of like twists around. and it's upside down. Like, there's a lot of stuff here, which is, it looks great. It looks really good. I think it's just the story and ideas that have got us to this point are ridiculous. It's just, you know. It feels like I found an interview where Trevor said he'd pitched it to

Bayona as a haunted house film, but with dinosaurs. And he feels like that's what Jay Bayona wanted to direct and wanted to bring his horror sensibilities to. And sure, it looks great, but I'm not invested in any of the goings on at this point, because I don't care about the Indiraptor. I've seen that militaryized stuff before, and I'm not interested in it. I don't particularly care about Masey

for reasons we'll discuss as we go on. Yeah. I know in the player are just running away from the Indrapt. Yeah, this is the thing. It's like any of these individual shots, I kind of look and go, oh, why, that's really neat, but I've kind of forgotten what's going on. Like, what are they running to

something? Are they running from something? like it's, you know, it's just, it's a bit, it's a bit kind of ridiculous at this point, to be honest with, which I'd say, I think it's a shame, because I think there is an indication that with a slightly better level of thought behind kind of the, the story plot and ideas that got us to this point, this could have looked visually really pretty, pretty good, but it's just, it is so ridiculous to the things that we've got to this point. I've kind of tuned out of like, why things are happening at this point, you know? I like how they're happening visually, but I don't give, I don't really care. Nor has the film really justified why I should care about why it's happening. Yes. So Owen releases the dinosaur, which is not a pacicephalosaurus, it's a stingy molloc, it's similar to apachecephalosar, into the auction room, creating confusion and chaos. Ted Levine lets the Indiraptor trick him into releasing her and gets eaten. Toby Jones's Donald Trump character also gets eaten.

Another example of the bad dinosaur must be killed, by the way, right? Because it feigns unconsciousness in order to eat Ted Levine. It's like, ah, this one's devious. This one's devious. It engages in deception. It's an evil dinosaur. Blue would never. Yeah, but actually, you're exactly right.

Yes, Blue would never is basically kind of the thesis there. There's kind of some discussion about this point, and the kind of themes of you can't put it back in the box so this theme of what Hammond has unleashed can't be undone that the world is changed forever because of his original sin for lack of a better term

so Trevor has said that the story was heavily influenced by this idea that a mistake made a long time ago just can't be undone and we get a bit of that kind of in dialogue here where this idea that you can't just put it back in the box everything has changed forever I think it's Spall talking about that

to Owen and Claire. Yeah, so Spol's talking about how you can't put it back in the box. You can't undo this change. You know, it parallels with climate change. You know, we can't undo the damage we have done to the climate. All we can do is mitigate it and hope to reduce the level of increase in global temperatures. But we're not getting rid of that.

What is it? It's gone up by now one degree. We're not getting rid of that one degree of global heating any time soon. It's also a slightly ridiculous thing. for the film put forward, given at this point all the dinosaurs that they've brought back to the mainland are actually literally in a box. Yeah. Like,

you know, they're out of the metaphorical box, but right now, Eli, they are in a literal box. You've got them in several boxes. It's fine. Spall also reveals that Macy is a clone. Macy is the clone of Benjamin Lockwood's

daughter, who he couldn't bear to lose. so he cloned her into Macy. Now, we said we're going to come back to this point, and part of the reason I want to do so is this is so hilariously, in my view, glossed over, I didn't fully pick up on this when I first watched this in the cinema. Now did I.

I was second screening during it, but I came to the end of the film, I think, and went to Wikipedia and was like, oh, he was a clone. was, oh, didn't. I knew that the film would try to reveal something about her, but I'm genuinely, I think I was probably also being a little bit thick

as well, because, like, you know, it has the moment where she lingers on the photo of her mother, and it's, you know, it's quite obviously like, she looks exactly the same. But, I don't know, there was something about it where it's like, they don't, it needed just an additional little line of dialogue

or something. I don't know. It needed something. So I've thought about this since I watched it a couple of days ago And I think what it needed is for us to have more investment in the character of Macy So here's my pitch for what should or could have been Instead of Lockwood, this business partner of Hammond's who we've never seen before Let's say it's Hammond's son or daughter One of his children we know he has children because he has grandchildren

So it's one of Hammond's children And then I think instead of Macy we have a little boy it could be a little girl but I'm calling it a little boy for the moment and we later reveal that little boy

is a clone of John Hammond so now we have some kind of investment in the Hammond character from before that we're transferring onto this boy you know he sees a photograph of John Hammond as a boy

and he looks exactly the same or whatever could also be a girl that has you know had different genetic components given to it in the womb or the embryo but that's a little more tricky to

convey on screen if you're looking at photos of John Hammond. I think you have that as the Hammond character. I think that makes the choice that Macy makes later in the film more meaningful because it's Hammond in some sense making the choice, you know,

releasing the dinosaurs. I also think this gives us, yeah, more investment in the character because it's kind of the character that we already knew, kind of. Does this work or is this nonsense? It works on some level.

I think the one thing I would say is the film is very obviously preoccupied with the idea of, or it wasn't the start anyway. I don't think it, about kind of like, you know, what are we leaving for children the future? You know, these things need to be preserved for children, you know, climate parallel, blah, blah, blah. And I think that is represented by Macy. I think if you were to make it a clone of John Hammond, it does have some more thematic residence with the other films, but I think it's maybe more...

And this is not a defence of the way it's executed in the film. I don't think it's executed well, but I think if you do what you said, it's maybe a little too backward-looking when the film wanted at the start to be forward-looking. Yes, I think that's probably true. And I have more to say about that later when Macy makes her choice.

Yeah. But Franklin, one of the young people, knocks out Henry Wu and Zia releases Blue to murder someone they accidentally release hydrogen cyanide that would kill all the dinosaurs unless they do something so when Zia opened Blue's cage

specifically so that Blue could murder one of the unnamed guards I had some thoughts about this film's approach to death and that death has become a lot less significant in these films So I talked in Jurassic World about how you know everyone who dies in Jurassic Park. There's five of them and you know their names, apart from the Costa Rican construction. But in this film, people just die.

So Trevor said in an interview with Empire, the same interview I've talked about, Trevor says that he's responded to criticism of Zara dying in Jurassic World by saying that we make sure that every death was earned, says Trevor. Everybody deserves their death in this movie, a lesson learned. In 2018, everyone earns it horrible people. And I think it's a horrible way to think about anyone that they deserve to die in a screenwriting context. I don't think that works. So in the original Jurassic Park, people died tragically

as a result of terrible mistakes. And every death was a tragedy. But here, our young heroes just straight up murder people, just will murder background people. and I think it's indicative of the approach to death in modern blockbusters where background people will just die and be killed and there is no significance to their death because they weren't important or as Trevor says they deserve to die

which I just think is gross and and at odds with the film's conservationist principles it's just again half-baked not thought out stuff so Owen and Claire and Macy Lee the Indiraptor And there's this long action scene in Lockwood's Mansion, where the Indiraptor's chasing them. This is all the gothic horror stuff that Catherine Pugh mentions in her article and is inflected through this whole bit.

Ultimately, it ends up with blue fighting the Indiraptor on the roof of the mansion, the glass of the atrium cracks, and blue and the Indiraptor fall onto the horns of a fossilized triceratops. You know, the Indiraptor's dispatch now. He was just a monster. We didn't have to care about him, is what the film was. is telling us. With the gas threatened the dinosaurs, our heroes, who just killed a dinosaur, opt to free the remaining dinosaurs into California

in order to save them. But Claire can't bring herself to do it. She hovers over the button but she decides ultimately to let the animals die to stop the ecological disaster of letting the dinosaurs out. But Macy behind their backs releases the dinosaurs and reasons that

they deserve to live. They're alive like me. And I quite, I like this is like the film I like the first half of that line where Macy says they're alive they deserve to live because they are living creatures

but then she says like me and ties it to her being a clone which for me undermined a lot of the film's kind of post-humanist approach and approach to conservation it would have been more resonant for me if she wasn't a clone

if she was just speaking as another living being on earth but the movie positions it as her making the decision because of where she came from. Yeah, I think it's, again, it's another example of why I think it undermines a lot of its ideas from the first part of the film. I think just from a practical plotting sense, that being her entire motivation for doing so, when they completely gloss over what then underpins that motivation earlier in the film and how little time is devoted to it is baffling. Like, it is hilariously half-baked, right?

You know, I mean, making that, if you choose to include that subplot of her being a clone, right, and then you kind of gloss over that and it's not really kind of, you know, it's not really lingered on or done much with, okay, I mean, that's one thing. But to then hinge the entire climactic act of your film on that, having chosen to not put any greater emphasis on it is kind of remarkable. It's like, what's the inverse of Chekhov's gun? You know, like, it's, it's bizarre. It's, you know, it's putting a huge amount of significance on something

that the film has not put any huge amount of significance on prior to that point. It's really weird. I really like this moment when Macy releases the dinosaurs into the northern California wilderness, when Macy releases the dinosaurs into the world, essentially. I like it, and I think it's symbolically significant for lots of reasons, but I don't like it being tied to her being a clone, because, as you say, it feels half-baked, and it doesn't feel like it works as a justification.

From what I've read, from what I'm about to read, it works better if she's just a young person releasing them. So, Jericho Sanderson, in this book chapter I mentioned earlier, says, for Clara knowing the dinosaur's lives are secondary to maintaining the security of human society. Should the dinosaurs be freed, humanity's hierarchical status could be called into question. This uncertainty about the future of human society is enough to overpower any sympathetic feelings. Macy's decision to free the dinosaurs, meanwhile, stems from a position of empathy. She sees the dinosaurs as equal to herself, and thus the question to free them is not about the effect that the decision will have on human society,

but rather about the dinosaurs themselves. So I think there's a really powerful message here about viewing animals in the world with the same status as humans. This kind of post-human perspective, anti-speciesist perspective, where humans aren't better than anything else, we are just equal with them. They deserve to live because they are alive.

And this acts as a kind of repudiation to Dr Malcolm's perspective in the first part of the film where Dr Malcolm says they had their chance and now they're extinct Macy represents the younger generation saying no you're wrong that's a conservative viewpoint

these animals deserve to live and shouldn't be punished because of our mistakes because of our Jurassic World disasters or more broadly climate change there's also if she's not a clone I think there's actually a better thematic link, there would have been a better thematic link back to the kind of the opening of the film, right? Because there's the very obvious climate change parallel that you've spoken about.

And there is an element of, you know, it doesn't matter if you, speaking to her elders who in some way perpetrated this situation in Owen and Claire and others, right? it doesn't matter if you want to put it back in the box or you want to ignore it and not, you know, deal with it, I, being a younger generation represented by Maisie, must deal with it, right? And I should listen to what, like, I must deal with it nevertheless, right? And there'd be a better link there, you know? Exactly. Maybe it's a coincidence, but given that Toby Jones looked exactly like Donald Trump, I'm not sure it is, but I think Maisie looks like Greta Toomburg. So there's this power. between Greta Toonberg as a young woman who wants to deal with climate change, deal with human-made climate change, and deal with the problems that have been laid before her by past generations with Macy, who wants to do the same, but with dinosaurs. So Dina Kappaver says in another article on this kind of thing, another book chapter rather, The idea that humanity should be removed for the benefit of other living creatures such as dinosaurs evokes the guiding principles of the deep ecology movement and those of voluntary human extinction movement,

which proclaims that phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. The views of the old-fashioned Malcolm that the safety and security of people should be the top priority and that dinosaurs should be left to die in order to correct the course of natural history are renounced as. conservative and outdated by Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. And I find that quite interesting. Matilda Nafro in this article I mentioned earlier says Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is surprisingly quite complex and adds depth to the question of antispeciesism

through the ethical character of Maisie. I think this is a really interesting kind of symbolic point for the film to end on. You know, in terms of repudiating the previous films, repudiating Malcolm, in a kind of way that I think parallels how the Last Jedi repudiated some of the Star Wars, Mephose, that had been built up, and kind of this unproblematized view of the Jedi as, you know, good and great and whatnot, and bloodlines as all important.

The Last Jedi undoes a lot of that, and I think this is trying to do the same with Jurassic World, Jurassic Park, to some extent. You know, it's repudiating the older Malcolm and saying, no, we need to live with these animals. We need to accept them as part of us. There's an interesting kind of post-humanist anti-speciesist

theme here that doesn't come through in the film particularly well, because the film is kind of half-baked and doesn't really mess those. So I'm meeting it more than halfway in insaneness. I think it's an interesting thing it tries to do.

it's worth also bearing in mind again when this film came out because one of the things that we try to do here and we try to do in the last one is to also think about kind of like the landscape of cinema that these films came out into and what he represents

and says about that and how it relates to it and this came out three years after The Last Jedi, right? Which and it's interesting re-watching this film and thinking a little bit about how it relates the previous films, I maybe to an extent start to understand some of the negative reactions

to The Last Jedi, which is a film that I liked a lot, right? I maybe start to understand some of the negative, not some of the sort of like, you know, ridiculous man-child anti-woke shite, none of that, but like, you know, I can understand why maybe somebody wouldn't jive with the film, but it's interesting and it's also doing a similar thing to that film, and it's worth kind of remembering that the predecessors kind of came out at a sort of, you know, similar sort of time as well, and that it's rejecting the existing paradigm of the franchise, right? It's destroyed these Lenuplar. These are on the mainland, I mean, like, it really, like, in regards of what it said within the text of the film and how well it

says it, by the time you get to the end of this film, you can't put it back in the box, right? It would appear absurd, right? And the last year, I was trying to do something like that, and it kind of got rejected a little bit like that. And you can even see kind of like some parallels between, you know, the following film, Dominion and the Rise of Skywalker, which we'll get into maybe when we talk about it in the next episode. But there's all sorts of weird, interesting, extra textual elements going on here when you bear in mind that at this point, I think,

Trevor was still attached to direct the next... Yeah, he was still attached to direct the next Star Wars sequel, right? And there was a quote that actually stood out to me. me. It was like, um, he said, I think this is one of those franchises like mission possible and like what they're currently doing with Star Wars that is really going to benefit from new voices and new points of view, right? And it's interesting because that's clearly what it's trying to do. I don't think this does it particularly well. And I think it does kind of, it does, when you get to the next one, I think I'll need to rewatch it to just kind of like see if this actually falls.

So I think it starts to pull back on it in exactly the same. way that the Star Wars series did and it's kind of like this weird relationship that these legacy sequels have with the original ones where it's like let's take it and do something new with it no not like that you know right and that's kind of what's happened here even within the film you know yeah you know we've talked about how impenetrable Colin Trevor is to me but I think he he sort of wants to do this he wants to kill these sacred cows to some extent so he's trying to do so here and I think he wanted to continue

Ryan Johnson's work doing this in what would have been called Star Wars duel of the fates before he departed and JJ Abrams took over to bring it to Rise of Skywalker yeah I think he wants to do something transgressive and

interesting disruptive with this franchise and maybe these franchises if we include his plans for Star Wars but there's also an interesting article by Ziana Vasquez Bowser Jurassic Will Fallen Kingdom as a 21st century Gothic tale which ties

this Gothic representation in the last act to the kind of post-humanist points that I've brought up so they talk about bearing in mind the disruption of anthropocentrism in Bayona's film as well as the specific addressing of animal rights issues I would suggest the development of the subgenregen Gothic so they talk about this film as

vegan gothic because it shatters genre traditions in the gothic style and provides this this kind of transgressive approach to conservation where it's a post-humanist and we're saying we need to live with these we can't just let them die as part of this old-fashioned paradigm of ecological management so i think it does want to do something interesting and transgressive it's a shame that this comes about in the last five minutes of the film yeah and, to my memory, isn't built upon in Jurassic World, Dominion, but we'll discuss that when we come to it. Yeah, we'll discuss it more when we get to Dominion, because there's one kind of key aspect

to that film where I'm looking at going, well, it really does roll back on this, frankly, but, you know, there's other parts where it doesn't, so I'm not going to kind of jump the gun on that, but it's just, I do find it interesting, like, even the presence of Trevereaux in this, because the film will go after, in response to this film, right, and then what happens with the film after, it ends up even following the same kind of director trajectory as the new Star Wars films did, right? They come back out with a splash and an enormously financially successful legacy sequel directed by, you know, JJ Abrams was more well established like than Trevor was, but kind of like, you know, with this, this, the guy who's going to kind of like deliver

this new vision. Drive the new trilogy. Then, like, you know, we're going to have different directors come to it and have this new trilogy. It goes to a second film where a new director brings a different vision which rejects the previous paradigm of the franchise. And then the response to that is to go back to the original guy, right? Because Trevor O was originally meant to do Star Wars episode nine. It goes back to Abrams. And this one, I don't think they ever had a different director attached to it.

But ultimately, Dominion ends up being directed by Trevor. despite him making public statements previously that he wouldn't be directing future films in the franchise I think he only wanted to direct one yet somehow ends up directing another so all of which is to say that I like the symbolism of Macy

releasing the dinosaurs and I think that's powerful in this kind of thematic way where she is the Greta Toonberg the younger generation and yet it doesn't really work as a moment because the film makes some silly mistakes

mistakes and the film undermines itself. So when she pressed the button and she turns to them and she says, I have to let them out, they're alive, I teared up and then the tears got sucked back into my eyes when she said, like me as if she, because she did it

because she's a clone. It's just the film undermining itself and making a silly mistake they didn't have to. It's frustrating. Yeah. The dinosaur stampede to freedom. Rave's Ball is eaten by good old Rexey. and Owen says a kind of tearful goodbye to blue

he doesn't cry because he's a man's man but he's sad and then there's an ending montage of Dr Malcolm talking about genetic power being unleashed how it cannot be put in the box this ecological change has been built up over the years of Ingen's mistakes and we have some shots of dinosaurs coexisting with humans so a mosasaurus disrupting a surfer

a T-Rex roaring a lion blue standing over a suburban town and Dr Malcolm says welcome to Jurassic World credits. And it really feels like these last five minutes are really setting up the next film, where it'll all kick off and things will finally start to move and happen. Yeah, I think it's also, you feel like

that this is the point that, maybe not Bayona, but Trevor was producer and ultimately director of not only the next feature film, but also a short film that comes out in between. It feels like this is the point he's actually one wanted to get to. And I wonder if that's why some of the stuff before this ends up so half-baked, because the final few minutes of this film where we see, I don't know whether teradactyls or taranodons or what they are, but like, you know, flying d'isor down the, you know,

down the California coast, blue overlooking what is clearly a sort of like, you know, southern, southern, southwestern US-looking, suburb, basically, you know, standing, like, this is clearly the point that he's wanted to get to all along. Yeah, you know, and Malcolm's ominously saying, welcome to Jurassic World. Like, this is what Trevor had in mind for Jurassic World. It is dinosaurs loose on the mainland, which is interesting, as I've said, thematically interesting in terms of the Anthropocene and these other, you know, climate, man-made climate change, as I've discussed.

But it comes too late in the film to really, work, and doesn't really work within the context of the film itself. But yeah, it feels like it's setting up a sequel. And it made me think of the number one at the box office Avengers Infinity War, which exists solely to

get to Avengers Endgame. Solely to get to that point. I really didn't like Infinity War because it just felt like it was setting up stuff. It feels like the first half of a movie. Not even the first half, the first quarter. I can't even really read it. It sounds like, I

I do think, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, we're not here to talk about the Avengers, so that I actually think Infinity War is a better film in Endgame, but, you know, I mean, I get pet, but people, people shout, well, there's bits of Endgame that are better, there's bits of I like better, but yeah, I don't know.

I don't know, I wasn't, you know, I mean, I enjoyed those films fine, but, like, you know, it's I got, I get Peltors online if I say this sort of thing, so, right? How dare you, it's the best film ever. Like I said at the start, I like a lot of what Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is trying to do. The ecological management stuff is the kind of interesting questions that I think they should have been dealing with after The Lost World, but didn't.

And they've kind of accelerated it with the volcano, and, you know, Macy's decision is brought to a moment because of gas in a mansion. It's all a bit contrived. But ultimately, these are the questions that I wanted them to talk to. and to talk about the crisis of the Anthropocene, you know, our ecological management responsibilities under human-made climate change to think about the relationships humans have with non-humans and how we deal with those.

But it just does it in a half-baked way and doesn't really work. And it's so inconsistent, especially through the characters who have inconsistent approaches to conservation, that it just ends up feeling a little flat. you know yeah i mean i'd even modify a little bit more in terms of like when you were saying sort of like you know you like some of the things that's trying to deal with i agree but i mean i think

it's the things that it's trying to deal with in the first half two-thirds of the film in the first half yeah and then the last five minutes other than that yeah and it brings it brings it back very briefly yeah so a scary monster can chase people around a mansion uh which i'm not at all interested in yeah and just like i said like the chasing around but i I did quite like a... I quite liked a lot of the how's of that, how that happened, in terms of, like, some of the shots and camera moon,

like, some of the sort of, like, the visuals that Biona managed to cook up in, you know, shooting that. But I just, like, what is the why here? Why is this happening? That whole last half just reminds me of the bit in the lost world

where the T-Rex is running around San Diego. But it turns it into a monster move. and I just don't care for it. It doesn't work for me. Well, yeah, but I suppose the thing is, like, because I remember I defended that segment. I defended that segment also, and I stand by it. I had fun with that, but it's

that same idea. I think it stood what I will say about that is I think, like, it even within the plotting of the film, I think that sat better because of the whole kind of thing was to, you know, take the dinosaurs, bring back to the main line to commercialize them, and that kind of like jived

with the kind of the, you know, the themes of the original film. I don't think it does at all here. I think it has that same sort of like, it has that same quality of kind of like being a standalone thing, but it's even more of a non-secutor here in terms of like, it's a non-secutor thematically as well as kind of situationally. And I think that's why I didn't click with it or have as much fun with it as I did the, you know, the T-Rex San Diego incident in the Lost World. I think in retrospect this film, the thing that I find the most

interesting about it is the way kind of similar to The Last Jedi, the way it rejects the previous films. And it does it right up to the end, even. There's even like a pointed moment where when the T-Rex eats Eli Mills, right?

As it's, either as it does it or as it's running away from that camera, which it stompes on the Indominus Rex bone, which has been kind of like the MacGuffin that sets the kind of like the whole Indoraptor thing in plot. Like it stomps it into the ground. It's done. We're done with this, you know. I'm the only Rex. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

And I like that Last Jedi repudiation subtext. It just, it's in service of a film that doesn't work on a script level or a character level. So the characters don't change or grow or have a heart. Like, Owen is the same at the end as he is at the start. Blair is the same at the end of the year at the start. The two kids don't do anything. The only character who changes in any way is Macy. And I don't care about Macy because she's not built up enough.

And I don't understand the significance of her being a clone of some woman I've never met. Yeah, I agree. So, yeah, it just feels like it doesn't quite work in a frustrating way. So not entirely successful, but not as bad as I remembered, you know, in fairness. I like that first half. Yeah, I quite like the first half. There is still something about the scene of Chris Pratt running down a hill, you know, with a bunch of like, you know, whatever CGI models of dinosaurs they had on hand kind of running behind them, which looks vaguely comical in a way that I'm not. not 100%

convinced it's meant to be. But I got a lot. Indiana Jones. Running away from the tribes people. Yeah, right. Indigenous people. And I'm not convinced quite how well that works.

But, like, generally speaking, the ideas in that part of the film are more coherent. And I quite like some of the visuals in the latter part of the film, but it's kind of abdicated any reason for you to care about them.

and that's unfortunate so I got more out of it I think than I did when I first viewed it but yeah I'm still you know I'm still sucking my teeth like I did there when I think about it I think yeah I think it's a classic case of a film that's more interesting to think about afterwards

than it is to actually watch not particularly entertaining when you're watching it but there's some meaty stuff to think about later yeah it's actually a film where like not to not to kind of like you know make the case for our own podcast on our own podcast but it's one of these films where i do think it's i i think it benefits from looking at it and its relationship to the other films and where it goes from here makes it a more interesting film than it is in its own right i think yes it benefits from our patented method of going in release order which i stole from just kingfings on the range of the network where they're reading every stephen king not novel in order. This is a far bigger undertaking than anything

we're doing. But yeah, next time in release order, we're going to be discussing Jurassic World Dominion. 2022 film directed again by Colin Trevereaux returning to this

world where dinosaurs are free on the mainland. What are the challenges of that? What will come of that? And the return of our heroes, Lower Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neal. Jurassic World Dominion is spelt without a colon in title, much to my annoyance.

Yep. And we'll discuss that extensively in the next episode. I feel like we could also do another entire podcast season on punctuation in film titles. I have so many examples of this annoy the crap out of me. Oh, you know, you were just talking about,

we were talking about the Star Wars films throughout what's going on there, colon's, end ashes, hyphons. I can't be doing with it. No, I think the most egregious offender in these is the Mission Impossible films because it has like it technically has to

have a colon in every title because it's mission. Mission colon. Pause for punctuation, impossible and then something else and it's just like sometimes that's a colon. Sometimes it's dude why you do it? Yeah, I think the one, the one just one last final thing because we're not actually

going to do a podcast series on film title punctuation. The one which still annoys me to this day is the the Zach Enfron Ted Bundy film, extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile. And in different bits of the publicity for that film, it had an Oxford comma, and other bits it did not have an Oxford comma, and it annoyed the crap out of me, pick one, you know?

I don't want to get into kind of like whether Oxford commas are a good thing or not. Sometimes they're useful, sometimes or not. Stop caring about it so much, but it's more just like, be consistent. Choose one. This Ted Bundy film has made me remember. Darma Endash Monster

Polon the Jeffrey Dahmer story on Netflix to pronounce as Darma Monster the Jeffrey Dahmer story

dreadful dreadful but yes we'll be back next month we'll be back in February to discuss

Jurassic World Dominion the 2022 film and the end of the Jurassic World franchise and our look through these films for now. So, yeah, once again, thank you, Jim, for joining me on this journey. You can follow Take One at Blue Sky on Twitter,

and you can listen to all our old podcasts, older episodes on the Alien franchise series starring with Raph's Ball. Tell your friends, you know, let people know about the show, let us know what you thought about the show, and we'll see you next month for Jurassic World Dominion. Thanks, Jim. See you then. Bye.