The first "Jurassic World" was a dumb, nostalgia-ridden mess which managed to make a lot of money by rehashing the basic plot of "Jurassic Park". This sequel its the same deal, only it uses the already inferior "The Lost World" as its main source of inspiration. There's not a single plot element that makes sense, everything is jammed down the viewer's throat and the character's are a bunch of one-dimensional stereotypes. It's easier to list its few virtues than dwell in all its shortcomings:
1) Visually speaking, its 100 times more appealing than its predecessor. Kudos to the director, the cinematographer, art department and all the other people involved. The lighting, especially, is more interesting. Despite the fact it is shot with digital cameras (the Alexa 65, which currently is the state-of-the-art, along with a few other machines, when it comes to digital imagery), it feels more like an old-fashion, Technicolor epic than its captured-on-film predecessor.
2) Despite the script's lack of truly suspenseful set-pieces (we're talking about the JP franchise here: who can forget the kitchen sequence in the original? Or the caravan hanging on the edge of the cliff in Lost World?), Bayona does a good job in instilling a quasi-gothic, horror-movie vibe in the last act. Nothing that will prevent you from sleep at night, but you can tell the guy knows what suspense is. I wonder what he could've done with a better screenplay at hand.
3) The opening scene does work: it's a nice way to kickstart the flick. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.
The rest is highly forgettable. The pseudo-science is one of the things that kills me every time I watch current sci-fi blockbusters: these things, of course, have never been actual textbooks you could take seriously, but nowadays it really seems that the writers don't even bother to check wikipedia and just rely on stuff they have seen in other movies. As such, not only we have to swallow a ton of silly technobabble fro Dr. Wu (who, since the last movie, has become a diabolical villain), but we are also supposed to believe you can actually do an on-the-spot, interspecies blood transfusion between animals that originally lived millions of years apart. And that's just the first example that came to mind, but there are many more. Hollywood definitely lost the mold for this kind of movie a long time ago. And the people there probably don't even care.
1) Visually speaking, its 100 times more appealing than its predecessor. Kudos to the director, the cinematographer, art department and all the other people involved. The lighting, especially, is more interesting. Despite the fact it is shot with digital cameras (the Alexa 65, which currently is the state-of-the-art, along with a few other machines, when it comes to digital imagery), it feels more like an old-fashion, Technicolor epic than its captured-on-film predecessor.
2) Despite the script's lack of truly suspenseful set-pieces (we're talking about the JP franchise here: who can forget the kitchen sequence in the original? Or the caravan hanging on the edge of the cliff in Lost World?), Bayona does a good job in instilling a quasi-gothic, horror-movie vibe in the last act. Nothing that will prevent you from sleep at night, but you can tell the guy knows what suspense is. I wonder what he could've done with a better screenplay at hand.
3) The opening scene does work: it's a nice way to kickstart the flick. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.
The rest is highly forgettable. The pseudo-science is one of the things that kills me every time I watch current sci-fi blockbusters: these things, of course, have never been actual textbooks you could take seriously, but nowadays it really seems that the writers don't even bother to check wikipedia and just rely on stuff they have seen in other movies. As such, not only we have to swallow a ton of silly technobabble fro Dr. Wu (who, since the last movie, has become a diabolical villain), but we are also supposed to believe you can actually do an on-the-spot, interspecies blood transfusion between animals that originally lived millions of years apart. And that's just the first example that came to mind, but there are many more. Hollywood definitely lost the mold for this kind of movie a long time ago. And the people there probably don't even care.
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