Dallas Fisher

Coming off the stink that was Jurassic World: Dominion, I wasn’t excited about the 7th film in this franchise. Adding Scarlett Johannson, Mahershala Ali, and Johnathan Bailey to the mix did help drag me back into the theater for this one though.

There’s a lot of emotion behind the trio’s motivations which helped elevate the stakes to an enjoyable level, at least for the humans. Even if these three characters were the best part about the movie, I still wish they were given a little more to do. Scarlett plays a mercenary that barely gets to show off any of her skills, which I’m sure has nothing to do with this being PG-13. Mahershala is beyond likable with his persistent charm and wise words, and Jonathan Bailey continues to grow on me as a loveable weirdo.

Now, if they gave Scar-Jo, Ali, and Bailey a little more screen time instead of taking away their importance every fifteen minutes, we might have been in for a better ride. The “adding a family side story just for the sake of having kids in the movie” was a poor choice, and they ultimately felt like deadweight. Any time this family was on screen, I felt like I was watching a Spy Kids sequel (not a good thing). The things that happen to the family could have been transferred in a slightly different way to the A plot, and this movie would have moved along at the same pace.. Overall, it was congested to the point of being annoying.

Can we talk about dinosaurs yet?? Let’s do it. When this franchise takes the time to focus on the dinos, it does some things right. For this installment it does continue the trend of adding bigger and mutated ones- that I don’t love. When it utilizes the “real” dinosaurs and their already massive scale- that I do love! There are sequences of real fear that expand to all corners of the Earth’s elements, which brought me back to the original wonder of the past. Gareth Edwards’ (director) hands can really be felt in the mix here. He knows how to make realistic and made up monsters come to life on screen almost too well as he can’t help but make them feel a little too much like Godzilla foe.

Once again, we were shown that it’s almost impossible to recreate the magic of what Spielberg did for us in 1993. With laughable product placement, all the other comedy in this movie was out of touch and out of place. The music was more of an homage and at times threw me off balance from what was on screen. The Jurassic franchise loves to tease in many aspects, and here it wanted to tease us by making us feel like the bad people for not liking the most recent installments.

But hey, at least there weren’t any locusts!

5.2/10