Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Review 🦖📽

“When Dinosaurs Met Mansions and Clones”

Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailer Time

Since this is a Universal film, Y’all know what that means? Cue Universal Logo!

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⚠️ Content Warning
This film goes heavier on darker imagery (dinos torn apart, mercenaries mauled, the Brachiosaurus death in smoke), but none of it feels earned. It wants to be both disaster movie and gothic horror flick but ends up silly more than scary.


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📖 Non-Spoiler Rundown
The plot sounds straightforward: save the dinosaurs from an erupting volcano. What could go wrong? Oh right — everything.

Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is now running a dinosaur protection group. She and Owen (Chris Pratt) head back to Isla Nublar when Benjamin Lockwood — Hammond’s “secret partner we’ve never heard of until now” — promises to relocate the animals to a sanctuary. Of course, this noble cause quickly turns out to be a scam by his slimy assistant Eli Mills, who plans to sell dinos on the black market.

The dinosaurs aren’t sent to freedom. They’re shipped to Lockwood’s giant gothic mansion… where they’re kept in cages like Pokémon cards until they’re auctioned off.


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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Character Rundown

Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) – Still the raptor guy. Reduced to repeating the “hand up = magic dino control” move so often it becomes a meme.

Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) – Rebranded as a dino-activist. Mostly bickers with Owen like they’re divorced sitcom parents.

Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) – The totally-not-retcon “original partner” of Hammond. Frail, useless, and exists only to die early and handwave in Maisie’s clone plot.

Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) – Cartoon villain extraordinaire. Tells Maisie to call the cops… while hosting dinosaur crimes under his own house. Brilliant.

Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) – The clone twist that nobody asked for. Pushes a button at the end that ruins the entire world.

Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine) – The mercenary caricature. He captures Blue, screams “I want my money!” a lot, and dies like a Looney Tunes gag.

Franklin & Zia (Justice Smith & Daniella Pineda) – New sidekicks. Franklin panics nonstop, Zia snarks nonstop. That’s their personalities.



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⏱️ Pacing & Tone

First half: actually kind of exciting with the volcano exploding and the island collapsing.

Second half: all momentum screeches to a halt as the film shrinks into a single mansion setting. Suddenly it’s not Jurassic Park, it’s Goosebumps: Dino Edition.



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✅ Pros

The volcano escape sequence is thrilling while it lasts.

The Brachiosaurus death on the dock is heartbreaking.

Michael Giacchino’s score is still great.



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❌ Cons (Everything Else)

Dinosaurs locked under a mansion = laughably stupid.

Eli Mills = dumbest villain in the franchise.

Lockwood retcon = pointless.

Maisie clone twist = confusing and unnecessary.

New characters = annoying.

Owen/Claire = reduced to bickering.

Hunter merc = cliché “I want my money!” caricature.

The Indoraptor = dime-store horror monster that stalks a child in her bedroom.

The tone = confused mess.



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🚨 Spoiler Breakdown (Full Rant Mode) 🚨

The film opens with a dramatic volcano countdown. Claire rallies support, Owen reluctantly agrees to come because “Blue” needs saving. For a few minutes, you think: okay, fine, maybe this will be decent.

Then the mercs show up. They’re secretly hired by Eli Mills (Lockwood’s assistant) to capture dinos, not save them. Blue gets tranquilized in a dumb firefight where Zia somehow keeps her alive. Wheatley the merc screams about his paycheck every five minutes, and you instantly know he’s cannon fodder.

Back at the Lockwood mansion, things unravel. Benjamin Lockwood — a supposed founder of Jurassic genetics we’ve literally never heard of in four previous movies — reveals he cloned his dead daughter. Surprise! Maisie is actually a clone of her “mother.” When he finds out Eli Mills is auctioning off dinos under his house, Mills smothers him with a pillow. Classy.

The middle act is basically a black-market dino auction in a ballroom. Yes, you read that right. Dinosaurs, these majestic prehistoric animals, reduced to being paraded in front of bored billionaires. They sell off an Ankylosaurus for $10 million like it’s eBay.

Enter the Indoraptor, a “prototype” hybrid meant to be the scariest thing ever. It’s got raptor DNA, Indominus Rex DNA, and just enough intelligence to be nightmare fuel. Except instead of being terrifying, it’s treated like a haunted house monster — creeping through hallways, scratching walls, and climbing onto Maisie’s bedroom roof. The supposed highlight is this dino stalking a little girl like Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, Owen and Claire spend most of this bickering like cranky parents. Are we supposed to care if they get back together? The movie thinks so. We don’t.

By the finale, chaos erupts. Wheatley tries to steal teeth from the Indoraptor (because… he’s a collector now?). He gets eaten in the dumbest way possible. The Indoraptor goes full horror-movie slasher until it dies impaled on a fossil display. Subtlety isn’t this film’s strong suit.

And then comes the infamous clone button ending. The surviving dinos are trapped in a locked facility, doomed to suffocate from poison gas. Claire hesitates to release them because it means unleashing dinos into the wild. Then Maisie — the clone child — slams the button herself.

Her justification? “They’re alive. Like me.”

And with that one push, humanity is screwed. Dinosaurs are now loose across the globe, not because of chaos, not because of nature — but because of a child’s random emotional whim.

Roll credits.


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🏁 Final Thoughts
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is the low point of the franchise. A film with no identity: half disaster flick, half haunted mansion schlock. The villains are morons, the new characters are unbearable, the clone subplot is insulting, and the dinosaurs are reduced to eBay items.

The only legacy it leaves is being so bad that Dominion had to course-correct.

⭐ Rating: 2/10