It’s better in every possible way than the previous movie. A breath of fresh air in the franchise with a scent to the original film by Steven Spielberg, served with great elegance and know-how by our J.A. Bayona, a director who has managed to carve out a career within our cinema full of incontestable successes and that also had the scent of Hollywood cinema, but they were very much Spanish films, such as The Impossible or A Monster calls, and that also served to draw the attention of the American film industry, who first offered him the sequel to World War Z and he finally refused to do that one, and took the leadership on this sequel to Jurassic World that is already the fifth installment of the most famous dinosaur saga of the history of cinema. To be honest, the change could not have been better. You all know the problems I had with Jurassic World, an entertaining movie, correctly shot, but without personality, leaning more on the pure and hard visual spectacle than on telling a good story, with characters often unbearable (those children…) and with a script that had too many mistakes to not tell anything new …
I do not know to what extent they have allowed Bayona to get into the script of Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connelly, the creators responsible for this return to Jurassic world, especially Trevorrow who also directed Jurassic World … I repeat, I do not know to what extent they allowed Bayona retouch some things on the script, although surely it has not been easy if he has achieved it, but the script is better, without being amazing, and the failures, weaknesses and faults of the film, are almost all due to that very same script that sometimes tends to think that, by the fact of having dinosaurs, the public will accept absolutely everything that appears on the screen without protest. And it is not like that. The resolution of some plot points are not very credible at best, some characters are still unbearable, and logic is not always present in the story… But it improves a lot compared to the previous movie. The plot is more elaborate, the protagonists are more defined and have evolved, the character of the girl is better developed than the children in Jurassic World… And incorporates elements of, for example, horror movies, which in the hands of the director, become key elements to the film.
Elements that appeared for example in the first movie, but that were lost piece by piece in time and with the sequels. But it seems that Bayona is willing to recover them, with a first part of the film with a more adventurous tone and close to The Lost World, which also pays tribute, and a second part of The Lost World, but also, and about everything, from the moments of Jurassic Park terror, the use of shadows, darkness, scares and even a pinch of violence that here appears in a very direct way , and that leads me to wonder how they will have avoided the R rate and achieved the PG13, in addition to avoiding explicit bleeding (because we have some amputation and quite graphic deaths, with a tribute to Jurassic Park included). And in those elements of terror, Bayona moves like a fish in the water, with signs of author but also elements that remind of Frankenstein (even with Doctor Frankenstein included), Little Red Riding Hood (including the encounter with the Big Bad Wolf) or Nosferatu, which gives a cinephile flavor of first category, of real talent.
The film, in addition to having these references to horror films, does not shirk the visual spectacle, especially in its walk around the island, with scenes that are memorable (the aquatic scene, the lava moments, the «farewell on the dock» … ) and that then lead us to a far more intimate world, if that can happen in the universe of Jurassic Park, with a couple of more than interesting twists. That space where darkness is greater and where those moments arrive that are going to be the most remembered ones of the movie, even though they do not have so many visual effects. They have them, of course, but not so many or so big as in the island. And also throughout the film the director puts a lot of tributes to the Jurassic saga but much less evident than in the previous installment, whether in a shot, in a death, in a scene … he does not point continuously on the homage, he places it subtly and let the viewer discover if is known or not. It is more effective in that way, because it requires, first of all, the attention of the spectator, it allows it to be like a game in search of Easter eggs that the director has hidden, which are not few.
The film runs for over two hours and entertains a lot. It makes us forget those little script failures, which are less than in the previous movie, and we also have the two leads from Jurassic World, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, displaying charisma and improving their characters, which evolve and grow, without as much nonsense as they had before (notice how they laugh subtly at the topic of the high heels of the first film, and notice how they resolve romantic relationships …) accompanied by names like James Cromwell, Toby Jones (a villain as topical as adorable … because the real villains are the dinosaurs), Ted Levine (another tribute to previous films …) or Rafe Spall. Not forgetting the return of Jeff Goldblum, the always interesting presence of BD Wong as usual, and Isabella Sermon, the great debutante that makes us forget the mediocre children of Jurassic World. The presence of Daniella Pineda and, above all, Justice Smith, does not contribute much … not because of the actors, but because of how the script deals with the characters … Minor problems. It is a fun, entertaining film and, finally, a worthy heir to the original, with its mixture of horror and adventure genres for the whole family, with its great narrative pulse and with those details that give it the personality that the others did not have …
Jesús Usero
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