We were too hard on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

When I left the theater after 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion, I was more disappointed than I’ve ever been with a movie in the franchise. While it isn’t the worst Jurassic film — that honor still goes to Jurassic Park III — Dominion failed to live up to its promise as the epic conclusion to the trilogy that began with Jurassic World.

Dominion’s trailers promised a movie about dinosaurs wreaking havoc in the real world. Instead, the film begins with a news report saying that most of the dinosaurs freed at the end of 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom have already been rounded up and put onto a preserve in the mountains of Italy. So rather than get an expansive story about Velociraptors raising hell in shopping malls and a Tyrannosaurus loose in Times Square, we get another confined, island-like adventure.

It infuriated me, but it also made me appreciate Fallen Kingdom (streaming now on Netflix) a bit more. Because while every other Jurassic Park sequel tries to replicate the jungle island excitement of the first film, Fallen Kingdom remains the only movie in the seven-film franchise that tried to do something different.

After 2015’s Jurassic World revived the franchise with a satisfying story about an operational island-based dino park going haywire, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom introduces the idea that Isla Nublar — the island where both Jurassic World and the original Jurassic Park take place — is volcanic, and that all of the dinosaurs there will die once it erupts. So Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are recruited by the former partner of Jurassic Park founder John Hammond, Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), to save the dinosaurs and move them to a new island.

Following an exciting sequence of dinosaurs and humans outrunning an exploding volcano on Isla Nublar, it’s discovered that the dinosaurs aren’t moving to another island. Instead, they’re being brought to Lockwood’s California estate by his associate Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who will auction off each dinosaur to the highest bidder. When Lockwood finds out and objects, Mills kills the elderly man and proceeds with the auction, which sends several dinosaurs off with various bidders from around the world. Things go wrong when the Indoraptor (another hybrid like Jurassic World’s Indominus rex) escapes and begins stalking and killing people on the Lockwood estate. Owen employs his loyal Velociraptor Blue to take the Indoraptor down. The movie then ends with Lockwood’s granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) setting the remaining dinosaurs free into the wild.

Image: Universal Pictures

Now, I’m not saying Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a great movie, or even a good one. I probably would rank it fourth or fifth in the seven-movie franchise. The first half of the movie, with the volcano on Isla Nublar, is vastly more exciting than the second half on the Lockwood estate. It also goes back to the same, stupid well of dinosaur hybrids, which dino-nerds like me hate as there are plenty of exciting dinosaurs who have yet to receive memorable sequences in any of the films. The film also introduces a bizarre human cloning plotline through Maisie, who is actually a clone of Lockwood’s dead daughter

Lockwood, who was never mentioned before Fallen Kingdom, doesn’t feel like a believable addition to the franchise, either. If the filmmakers needed to give Hammond a partner, it should have been Norman Atherton, Hammond’s deceased ex-partner from the original Michael Crichton novel who worked as a geneticist before he died and Hammond hired Henry Wu (BD Wong in the films) as a replacement.

Image: Universal Pictures

But Fallen Kingdom should be praised for at least attempting to do something a bit different. Whereas every other movie takes place on an island (or in Dominion’s case, a very island-like preserve), Fallen Kingdom spends less than a half hour on Isla Nublar, and the time spent there is vastly different from other films. Instead of sequences where dinosaurs hunt and attack people, the people here are trying to rescue the dinosaurs from a volcano. There’s even a very poignant death of a Brachiosaurus that was left behind.

While some fans felt the scene was gratuitously sad, it addresses a very pragmatic reality: dinosaurs would be tough to transport. And creatively, it was a smart choice to use the dinosaur that instilled that initial sense of wonder in the first film to bring about a bit of tragedy in this one. Previous Jurassic films portray dinosaurs as monsters or almost mythical beings, but seeing such a massive one die was a reminder that they’re just animals with the same vulnerabilities as any other creature.

Image: Universal Pictures

A little while after Isla Nublar is destroyed, the dinosaurs are auctioned off at the Lockwood estate and honestly in a scene that comes across as cartoonishly evil. But in the years since, it’s become obvious that if dinosaurs did get brought back in real life, we absolutely would see the uber-rich, who currently spend their money shooting pop stars into space, bidding on them.

The movie also takes on an entirely new vibe when the Indoraptor escapes. While there’s a bit of Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor kitchen sequence to it, the dark lighting and stormy weather, plus a couple of good jump scares, almost gives Fallen Kingdom a horror movie vibe (something future Jurassic sequels should really consider).

Finally there’s the ending, which is kind of wonderful even if what it alludes to was never paid off. After the dinosaurs are all released, we see the auctioned creatures being transported by truck and plane to undisclosed locations, plus a briefcase full of DNA samples really to create a bunch more dinos. Then we see a montage of a Mosasaur stalking some surfers, a Tyrannosaur breaking into a zoo to roar at a lion, and Blue the Velociraptor overlooking a California suburb.

Image: Universal Pictures

It’s almost similar to the ending of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where the Tyrannosaurus rex is loose in San Diego. Ever since then, all I’ve wanted in a Jurassic Park sequel is to see dinosaurs tearing into the general population. The ending of Fallen Kingdom promised exactly that.

Sadly, Jurassic World: Dominion squandered the opportunity and opted for a movie that felt incredibly familiar, as did 2025’s Jurassic World: Rebirth. In hindsight, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom deserves some praise for introducing a little bit of variety in its storytelling, something any future Jurassic films would be wise to consider.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is streaming on Netflix.