Colin Trevorrow reunites two casts and lets a planet’s worth of dinosaurs loose, then hands the plot to a swarm of locusts. Neill, Dern and Goldblum have the only fun on offer; the rest is 147 minutes of running down corridors.
Colin Trevorrow, who restarted the series in 2015 with Jurassic World, returns to close it, and he arrives holding the best premise the franchise has had since 1993. The last film let the dinosaurs out. This one opens on a world where they have stayed out: a Mosasaurus upending a fishing boat, pterosaurs nesting on a skyscraper, a raptor loose in a suburb. It is a news montage, it lasts about ten minutes, and it is the film most people bought a ticket for. Then the plot turns up and it is about insects.
Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael’s script, from a story by Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, has Biosyn breeding locusts the size of a shoe that eat every crop except the company’s own, and it sends Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to prove it. Meanwhile Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) chase a kidnapped girl and a kidnapped baby raptor through a smugglers’ market in Malta. It is a corporate spy film and a kidnap thriller stapled together, and for long stretches the dinosaurs are what the characters run past.
Neill, Dern and Jeff Goldblum are the reason to sit through it, and we say that having come in braced for a tribute act. The first time Dern walks into Grant’s tent at a dig and the two start talking over each other, we grinned, and the reason is not the memory of 1993. They are the only actors in the film who listen to one another. Dern plays Sattler as a woman who has spent thirty years being right and is tired of it; Neill lets Grant be a little shy about seeing her again. Goldblum does the lecture, each word tasted before it is released, and it still works because the film gives him room. He gets three of these; the others get scenes with him.
The newer cast fare less well. Pratt has one gesture, the raised palm, and uses it on raptors, poachers and his partner alike. Howard is handed a plot about motherhood and asked to run in it. DeWanda Wise, as a cargo pilot called Kayla Watts, arrives with a personality already fitted, dry and quick and plainly enjoying the nonsense, and she deserves a better film. Mamoudou Athie’s Ramsay Cole is a Biosyn executive with a conscience and nothing to play. Campbell Scott’s Lewis Dodgson is the villain, dressed by Joanna Johnston in a zipped fleece and round spectacles like a founder who has never been told no, and Scott plays him small and fussy rather than grand, which is the one surprising choice in the film.
John Schwartzman shoots the opening in the snow of the Sierra Nevada, Owen on horseback roping a Parasaurolophus through the pines, and it is the single image here that looks like a new idea. Malta is the best stretch of action. Kevin Jenkins builds an underground market lit red and hung with cages, and the raptor chase through the streets above is fast and easy to follow. Then everyone arrives at Biosyn’s valley in the Dolomites, a campus of glass, pale timber and service tunnels, and the last hour is spent in the tunnels.
We were bored in that hour, and it took us a while to notice, because Michael Giacchino’s score never stops and Mark Sanger cuts between the two groups every couple of minutes so that no scene is allowed to build. The film has a valley full of dinosaurs and keeps going back indoors. Where Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film made us wait the better part of an hour for a Tyrannosaurus and then held on a glass of water, this one produces a new creature on a timer, has it roar, and moves on. The animatronic animals, when they appear, look heavier and better than the digital ones, and the film gives them the quiet moments and the computer everything else.
Most critics have landed near where we have, and a few well below. We would not go that far. The Malta chase and the three old hands are worth something, and when Giacchino lets John Williams’s original theme through over the valley, sparingly, it did get to us for a moment before we remembered what it was attached to. But this is a 147-minute film with a 12A certificate and one idea, and the idea is locusts.
See it if you have children who will forgive a great deal for a raptor. Otherwise the news montage at the start is the film everyone wanted, and it is over before the titles.
