Life, Uh...

Year: 2018

Director: J. A. Bayona

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall

Run Time: 2 hours 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies in the history of cinema, so I don't know whether that makes it shocking or completely understandable that I felt no interest in checking out Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The fifth entry in the long-running blockbuster franchise is about as far from that original film as you can get while still being about CGI dinosaurs. Jurassic Park has more in common with When Harry Met Sally than Fallen Kingdom.

Approach with caution.

So, Fallen Kingdom picks up several years after Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are living in peace on Isla Nublar following the destruction of the theme park, but a volcanic eruption threatens their survival. Dinosaur rights activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are sent to the island on a rescue mission by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), a proxy for John Hammond's former business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Because you can never trust the rich, in real life and especially the movies, this trip may not be as kosher as it seems.

Along for the ride are sharp-tongued paleobiologist Zia (Daniella Pineda) and wimpy tech dweeb Franklin (Justice Smith), as well as what the movie paints as years of emotional baggage and sexual tension between Owen and Claire, even though it's just thin air. Also there's a little girl (Isabella Sermon) running around, because what's a Jurassic Park movie without an unnecessary child character?

Better.

Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is a phenomenally dumb movie that takes the franchise in a phenomenally dumb direction that paints future Jurassic directors into a corner, forcing them to make a phenomenally dumb movie as well, whenever that should come down the pike. It's so dumb that its dumbness is literally infecting the future. Its dumbness has slipped out of the timestream, and not even Doctor Who can stop it.

Sometimes this dumbness is used to its advantage, like how every shot of Claire begins at her sensible shoes and pans up, throwing a hilariously overbearing number of winks at the "high heels in the jungle" controversy. Mostly it is used to its detriment, like the rapidly fluctuating number of guards around at any given time when our heroes need to sneak around the bad guy's lair that totally diminish any tension or stakes because they're never around when plot stuff needs to happen. 

Sometimes Fallen Kingdom hits the bad-good strides I was hoping for, including a sterling moment where Bryce Dallas Howard shrieks the word "Chair!" with a hurricane-blast of emotion like she was gunning for that clip to end up on her Oscar reel. In fact, she's frequently too good for the material, but in the completely wrong direction, turning random lines into scenery-obliterating grenades of diva drama that would make Gone with the Wind blush. 

"These raptors will never be hungry again!"

While Howard is busy either giving the best or the worst performance in the movie, the rest of the cast just flounders around, drowning in a sea of unmotivated decision-making, inscrutable dialogue, and CGI mayhem. Chris Pratt seems devoted to being as bland a male cypher as possible, and a heap of character actors dawdle around the edges with nothing in particular to do. And don't get me started on Jeff Goldblum, who I don't particularly like on a good day, and who is positively catatonic in his one-scene cameo.

The only person who seems to have actually showed up to work is J. A. Bayona, who directs the crap out of the movie. Not out of the actors, mind you. But as far as the imagery goes, Bayona is the second best director to ever touch one of these movies. His composition of light and shadow is frequently exquisite, especially in the bizarre turn the film takes toward gothic mansion horror in the third act. He directs the movie like a German expressionist masterpiece, only instead of using the implication to drive the horror, you also get to see a whole lot of CGI dino-monster.

If this were any other movie, I'd call that the best of both worlds. But Fallen Kingdom isn't the best of anything. Bayona really is working it (to the extent that I'd even recommend seeing this movie, just to bask in the way he captures the feeling of majesty and awe that Spielberg so capably honed in the original film), but it's still a dumb, milquetoast popcorn epic that doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of narrative, character, acting, fun, or much of anything a person would come to this movie for.

I mean, I came for the visual references to Nosferatu, but I ain't your average bear.

Oh, and the score isn't even good. John Williams' iconic themes are mostly shelved in favor of a bizarre choral piece that shrieks in your face how big and important every scene in the movie is. It's the movie in a nutshell: Fallen Kingdom tries very hard to be a lot of different things, and it fails in a lot of spectacular ways. The things that work really work, but if you made a list of those things, it would fit on a Post-It note.

TL;DR: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a bland nothing of a popcorn flick, although its director clearly has his head in the game.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 916
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Do You Believe In Magic?

Year: 2002

Director: Chris Columbus

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

Run Time: 2 hours 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a very tough movie to sort out. Between being slightly better than the source novel and slightly worse than The Sorcerer’s Stone, despite being a tad better in the exact places where that film was weak, we’ve got a bit of a mess on our hands, reviewing-wise. But never fear! I’m no stranger to messes. I did successfully (and handsomely) review Grizzly II: The Concert, after all.

There comes a point in the course of a horror blog career that simple challenges like murky inferiorities cease to scare you, as long as everything in the frame is visible 99% of the time. But I digress.

Handsomely.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in case you have just come back from the dead and missed the period between 1997 and 2011, tells the story of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), a polite twelve-year-old boy with the charming quirk of being a wizard with magical powers. Even though a mysterious house elf named Dobby (Toby Jones) arrives with a warning not to go back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he doesn’t listen because Hogwarts is the only place he feels like he belongs.

However, Dobby’s warning comes true when vicious attacks leave various students Petrified in the name of the Heir of Salazar Slytherin (a Hogwarts founder and owner of the most obviously wicked name ever written). Rumors abound that the mythical Chamber of Secrets has been opened by Harry, setting Slytherin’s monster loose on the grounds. Harry and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), however, suspect the culprit to be their rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton).

This relatively simple plot zips by with all the vigor of a speeding turtle, making you feel every last minute of its hideously distended 2.7 hours.

You could die while watching this movie, reincarnate, grow up, and learn to speak English again, all in time for the finale.

For once, let’s begin with the good, shall we? I mean, if you ignore that previous statement. Which you may well have done, because we all know you only skim these things. 

Chamber of Secrets improves upon its predecessor in this all-important way: It doesn’t let the book get the better of its narrative. This film takes much more license with the source material, streamlining, embellishing, and sometimes even improving it. Several key action sequences are expanded and rendered quite a bit more exciting, whether it be the off-road course of Harry’s fateful Quidditch match, an extended adventure through the titular Chamber, Harry and Ron’s cross-country trip in a flying Ford Anglia, or even Dobby smashing a pudding at the Dursleys’ house. I know, right?

It is hampered somewhat by the unenviable task of interpreting the single weakest ending of the series and its small army of deus ex machina, but compare to Stone, it is a stunning achievement in self-contained storytelling.

The other area where Chamber of Secrets is undeniably superior is its aesthetic, which finds in Chris Columbus a surer hand than he managed to provide before. Several shots even manage to evoke a theme, if you can beieeve that. The opening shot is a stunning evocation of the dull sameness of the Muggle world, and one moment finds Kenneth Branagh’s egotistical Professor Lockhart posing with a painting of himself posing with a painting of himself in a hilarious nesting doll of self-congratulation.

The production design is likewise deftly improved, with additions to the castle rendering it more tactile and earthy. It’s far more believable that humans might inhabit this location, no matter how magical they may be. And the new locations (especially the Weasley family home – The Burrow) are depicted with utmost care and grace.

Loose observation: Nobody at Hogwarts seems to care if students’ lives are endangered, as long as it’s in the scheduled curriculum.

Ah, but here’s where we slip inevitably into mediocrity. The child performances all slip down a peg save for Emma Watson – who alone of the young cast is a marked improvement – and Bonnie Wright (as Ginny Weasley), who imbues her role with a kind of stony determination that would come to define the character. But as for the boys, they're all over the place.

As their voices drop, their performances slip. Maybe they just noticed girls and found themselves far too distracted for anything as subtle as a major motion picture. At any rate, Radcliffe finds himself very taken with Stooge-like overreactions and Felton spits out his dialogue like sunflower seeds, spraying the whole place with fleshy shrapnel. Rupert Grint settles into a strong position when he is called upon to be the comic relief, but otherwise happily whiles away the hours by placing untoward emphasis on random, inappropriate vowels.

By far the best child performance of the entire film is Shirley Henderson who, as a matter of fact, isn’t a child at all, but a fully grown woman who must have access to a lifetime supply of Maybelline. Her performance as Moaning Myrtle is gloopily self-indulgent and fun, swinging over the top and right back around again. The rest of the adults once again fill out an astonishingly solid supporting cast, with new additions Kenneth Branagh (all inflated bravado and squirrely Britishisms) and Jason Isaacs (a picture of well-heeled malice as Lucius Malfoy) proving a perfect match for Harry Potter’s cheerfully epic universe.

Also, he's uncomfortably handsome.

And now, alas, for the truly, admirably bad. The film, insofar as it exists as its own distinct narrative entity, does drop a few conspicuous balls along the way. It completely neglects to set up several important plot points (most notably Lockhart’s self-aggrandizing book collection) and, in one peculiar instance, has two entire characters appear out of the blue as if they’d been there the whole time.

Likewsie, the special effects, while mostly satisfactory, have several uncomfortable rough patches. For every improved Quidditch green screen or fairly seamless flying car moment, there are the hideous Lego monstrosities masquerading as pixies or a set of hideously amateurish paintings that replace the magical moving ones when they think we’re not looking. And while nothing approaches the film-tearing inadequacy of the cabin in the sea scene from Stone, there is one prominently visible moment where the actors are dawdling at the edge of the frame, clearly waiting for their cue.

Toss in a horrific tone that’s waiting desperately in the wings but never called into action and a couple scenes so stiff they have toe tags, and you can’t help but feels the glamor and appeal begin to deflate dejectedly. It’s not a terrible film. In many instances, it is a totally fine, effective one. But it’s a film that goes on for song long that the negatives stretch on into infinity outweighing nearly all the positives at one point or another.

It’s always watchable, but for long stretches it is deathly dull, a descriptor that belongs nowhere near the hallowed grounds of Hogwarts. For better or for worse, I’m ready to move on to Cuarón.

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is both a slight improvement and a slight decline from its predecessor.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1222
Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)