Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Year of Release:  2018
Director:  J. A. Bayona
Screenplay:  Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, based on characters created by Micheal Crichton
Starring:  Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pidella, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Isabella Sermon, B. D. Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeff Goldblum
Running Time:  128 minutes
Genre: Action, science-fiction

Three years after the events of Jurassic World (2015), the island of Isla Nubla has been more or less abandoned and left to the cloned dinosaurs.  However an imminent volcanic eruption threatens to destroy the island and the dinosaurs.  Despite strong opposition, a charity, headed by Jurassic World's former manager, Claire Deering (Howard), hope to save the dinosaurs.  Claire is contacted by a representative of millionaire Benjamin Lockwood (Cromwell), a partner of the founder of the original Jurassic Park.  He wants Claire to help find the dinosaurs and relocate them to a safe island, where they can live out their lives in peace.  Claire agrees and recruits the aid of former dinosaur trainer Owen Grady (Pratt) to help.  However, once on the island, Claire and Owen find that they are being used for a much more sinister purpose.

This is the fifth film in the Jurassic Park movie franchise, inspired by Micheal Crichton's 1990 novel.  It's an enjoyable action packed adventure, full of spectacular set-pieces and eye-popping special effects.  It starts out as a familiar Jurassic Park adventure, escaping marauding dinosaurs on the tropical island, and then makes a sharp turn becoming something very different, dealing with the franchise's constant moral quandary about the rights and wrongs of cloning extinct animals.  The performances are fine, Chris Pratt is perfect as the roguish but lovable hero, and he makes a great double act with Bryce Dallas Howard, who really carries the weight of the film and does it well.  The bad guys however tend to be one-note villains, and the other character tend to get lost amongst the dino-action, including Jeff Goldblum who, despite prominent billing has little more than a featured cameo.  It holds the attention throughout it's run-time and fans of the franchise won't be disappointed, there are also enough changes in the story to keep it intriguing and surprising enough, while setting the stage for more to come. 

     Jurassic World:  Fallen Kingdom

The Ritual

Year of Release:  2017
Director:  David Bruckner
Screenplay:  Joe Barton, based on the novel The Ritual by Adam Nevill
Starring:  Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Arsher Ali, Sam Troughton
Running Time:  94 minutes
Genre:  Horror

Five middle-aged friends, Luke (Spall), Hutch (James-Collier), Phil (Ali), Dom (Troughton) and Rob (Paul Reid), meet up in a London pub to plan a guy's holiday.  Immediately afterwards Rob is killed in a liquor store robbery.  Six months later, the other four friends are on a hiking holiday in Sweden, partly as a tribute to Rob.  However, the group are unprepared and inexperienced with wilderness survival.  As tempers fray, the weather takes a turn for the worse and one of the group suffers a twisted ankle.  The guys decide that, instead of continuing with their planned two day hike, they will take a shortcut through a thick, dark forest.  Now, anyone who has ever seen a horror film knows that this is a big mistake.  The men soon realise their mistake when they get hopelessly lost and discover a freshly killed animal carcass suspended in the trees, and strange runic markings carved into the tree trunks.  Spending the night in a run-down cabin in the forest makes the bad situation a whole lot worse.

Based on a successful novel from British horror author Adam Nevill, this film never really works, mainly because the four central characters are all pretty unlikeable.  There isn't much backstory given to them, and they spend most of their time bickering and trading apparently jokey insults at each other, but it is hard to see how they became friends in the first place, because most of the time they don't even seem to like each other.  It does have something to say about how men find it so difficult to open up about their problems and anxieties even among their closest friends, and also how male friendship often works, with an apparent superficial, light and sometimes almost cruel surface, but with a lot of deeper undercurrents hidden beneath it all.  It also deals with the very real but inevitable horror of simply getting older.  It's worth pointing out that this is almost an entirely male film, the only women on screen appear very briefly towards the end.  After a brutal pre-credits robbery sequence, the film moves into a quieter tone of a Blair Witch-style lost in the woods film, until kicking into high gear for the climax.  The thing that stalks the group is mostly hidden, you hear it's roars and see the trees shaking, alongside the occasional dismembered corpses of it's victims strung up in the trees, with occasional half-seen glimpses of a large creature, until it's revealed in all it's CGI glory towards the end.  The climax feels kind of rushed.  It's not a very scary film, and it is kind of frustrating because despite some good sequences and ideas, the whole just didn't really work for me, and it felt like it should have been so much better.

From left to right:  Robert James-Collier, Rafe Spall, Asher Ali and Sam Troughton