J. A. Bayona shoots the eruption and the old house with a horror director’s patience, and in stretches this is the handsomest the series has looked. The script gives him cartoon villains and a plot that keeps stopping to sell things.
The fifth of these films hands the reins to J. A. Bayona, the Spanish director of The Orphanage (2007) and A Monster Calls (2016), and asks him to do two things in 129 minutes: get the dinosaurs off an erupting island, then shut them in a country house with a child. He does both about as well as they can be done. The script, by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, is the trouble, and it is trouble in nearly every scene where somebody speaks.
It opens well. A submarine crew lifts a bone from the flooded lagoon at night, in rain, while something large moves under them, and Bayona stages it as a straight creature feature. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) tells a Senate committee the animals should be left to their volcano. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), now lobbying for the other side, is fetched to the Lockwood estate, where the dying Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) and his manager Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) want her to save eleven species and one raptor in particular. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is building a cabin and has to be talked into it.
The island hour is the spectacle, and Óscar Faura, Bayona’s regular cinematographer, gives it weather: ash on the lens, lava lighting faces from below, a glass ball rolling through a stampede while the camera stays with the two people inside it. Then comes the pier. As the boat pulls out, a single brachiosaur stands at the end of it in the smoke and calls after them, and the film holds on her until the ash takes her. We were moved more than we expected to be and a little annoyed about it, because the film had done nothing to earn that feeling and got it anyway, on one long shot and Michael Giacchino holding his brass back until the last few seconds.
The second hour goes indoors, and Bayona is at home there. Andy Nicholson builds Lockwood’s mansion with a dinosaur museum in the cellar, a lift, a dumb waiter and a child’s bedroom with a roof outside it, and the film uses every one of them. The new animal, a black, long-fingered thing called the Indoraptor, is introduced by a tapping claw, and its slow approach across a moonlit bedroom to Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) is the scene people will talk about on the way home. We held our breath through it. Sermon is watchful and unfussy and the best of the human performers. Faura lights the house with lightning through tall windows and keeps the creature in silhouette for as long as he can get away with.
Then somebody speaks again. Mills wants to sell the animals to the highest bidder. Ted Levine plays a mercenary who pulls a tooth from every dinosaur he catches, for a necklace. Toby Jones plays the auctioneer in a bad wig. All three are greedy in the same way and say so out loud. The auction stops the picture dead so that men in suits can bid on a pachycephalosaurus, and it was here that we were bored, and then cross about being bored in a film with this much money on the screen. Pratt and Howard are handed a break-up and a reconciliation and play both as if catching up on a programme they missed. Justice Smith’s Franklin is there to scream and Daniella Pineda’s Zia to swear, and both do it well enough to deserve more. Geraldine Chaplin passes through as a housekeeper called Iris and is given nothing.
Bernat Vilaplana cuts the set pieces with more patience than these films usually allow, holding a shot while the claw comes round the door; between set pieces there is nothing to cut to and the film lurches from speech to speech. Giacchino’s score is quiet on the pier and loud nearly everywhere else. Sammy Sheldon puts Howard in boots this time, which the last film did not, and everyone has noticed.
Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film had one idea, that people would build this and it would go wrong, and it trusted the idea and the animals. Fallen Kingdom has four or five, animal rights, cloning, the arms trade, a dying founder, and raises each for a scene before throwing it another dinosaur. It is more interested in the film after this one than in the film it is. It is still the best-looking entry the series has had in years, and a ten-year-old will be frightened in the right places and no further under the 12A. Watch it for the second hour and do not listen too closely.
