Actually not THAT bad

Let’s get this out of the way - Jurassic Park ends with The Lost World, nothing after that is canon, they’re dumbed down popcorn trash with terrible scripts and none of the filmmaking genius of the Spielberg entries with their incredible John Williams scores.

All that said, the dinosaurs in the Jurassic World films look great most of the time, and here is no different. For the most part they were believable and even used puppets on occasion which was very welcome.

There are some action scenes here that really work, especially an insane motorbike raptor chase that feels like a Mission Impossible sequence with added dinosaurs. It’s frantic, thrilling, absurd, and surprisingly well realised. Nothing here matches the frightening realism of the T-Rex escape in the original film, it’s all crazy and daft but it does entertain on a basic visceral level.

Commendably this film does away with the awful ‘super-dinos’ of the previous two which make the mistake of trying to outdo the T-Rex and raptors with stupid shit like invisible dinos with big brains (indominous rex and super-raptor I’m looking at you). We get some new dinos but they’re… ‘normal’.

The other bonus we have here is reuniting Grant, Satler and Malcolm. Despite the terrible script the actors are so good they make it a welcome reunion and while ‘member berries are Hollywood’s latest cynical marketing ploy… these ones tasted pretty good.

So overall, once I’d already accepted that these are shit films, I actually had a fun time watching this on 4K disc in surround sound, it gave the home cinema a real workout and looked great.

Sadly, the film as a whole is the kind of vapid crap we’ve come to expect from modern Hollywood. The script is a mess, sidelining dinosaurs for some daft plot around giant mutant locusts, focusing on this teenaged clone-girl that nobody likes, still hammering this ‘good raptor’ nonsense, and cramming far too many characters together. Also, it’s looooong. This dragged on for 2.5 hours, and still left characters like the evil blonde women hanging.

It also lacked any real menace. The earlier films had some nasty kills that we all remember, this felt very toned down. The dinosaurs were menacing in themselves but we need to see someone get ripped into two or savagely ravaged by a raptor every now and then to really get the blood pumping. It also lacked the general realism that Spielberg brought, with his cynical adult characters and likeable people getting horribly killed off.

Finally, the woke. Minority characters who are evil later turn out to be good, a heroic black woman clearly signals she’s a lesbian for no good reason, the big bad is of course a white male, evil poachers are white and have Southern goober accents, and white male legacy heroes like Grant and Malcolm are cucked into mostly useless wimps with the stronk vomen handling most of the action. That alone is enough to ensure that you should not pay to see this film. Never. Fund. Woke. Chris Pratt isn’t completely cucked however, so it’s not the most egregious example of woke out there.

I was expecting an absolute travesty after the reviews but I have to say I quite enjoyed this as base-level popcorn entertainment, within the confines of a Hollywood that produces an endless shower of shit.