An extremely petty breakdown of everything dumb in the Jurassic World 2 trailer
There are two truths that must be acknowledged before we begin this exercise in pointlessly trivial sniping. First, it’s never fair to judge a film solely on the merits of its trailer. Especially these days—especially for would-be blockbusters—when previews exist largely as viral “events” jostling for attention among the 10,000 other snackable videos screaming content at you, there’s simply no room for nuance. Every explosion and explosion-related quip is served up at maximum volume; its only goal is to provide the kind of bludgeoning thrills that provoke retweets with reaction GIFs. To exact some sort of analysis or draw a sweeping conclusion based on two minutes of footage from a two-hour film is extremely ungenerous, and it suggests a cynical eagerness to shit on something that has not yet proven itself worthy of being shat upon.
Secondly, Jurassic Park is dumb. It is the extremely entertaining kind of dumb that the movies were made for, yet it is dumb nonetheless. Even in a pop culture landscape littered with high-concept claptrap based on bad science or a total disregard for its existence, the idea of an amusement park filled with dinosaurs genetically cloned from old mosquitoes just chilling in amber is a preposterous premise that any 11-year-old could “wait, what?” into oblivion. It’s to both author Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s enormous credit that they were able to spin it into something where you’re having too much fun to even think about it—that you’re actively annoyed when people try to make you, because it’s a dinosaur theme park, you joyless asshole. Just let us have this.
With all that said, the trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is exceptionally dumb. Like its predecessor, it fulfills the base-level expectations for any Jurassic Park film: There are dinosaurs, and people who don’t want to be eaten by dinosaurs. In some respects, this is all we need. The $1.52 billion gross for the first Jurassic World would confirm that this is true. Jurassic World is now the third-most successful movie of all time, even though no one remembers a damn thing about it other than there were dinosaurs and people running from those dinosaurs, and that one of them was Bryce Dallas Howard in high heels. You may also recall some sort of scene where Chris Pratt leads a velociraptor motorcycle gang that you possibly hallucinated. More than likely, you remember the flood of articles—like this one!—nitpicking its myriad disappointments more than the movie itself.
And yet, it made a shit-ton of money, so here we are. So let’s look at what Jurassic World 2 is volleying to counter all those ultimately irrelevant criticisms, then filter it through yet more futile nitpicking.
“Who are you dating now… a ventriloquist? You love a dummy.”
Ah, there’s more of that old Tracy/Hepburn/algorithm banter that we dimly recollect from Jurassic World’s central relationship. Remember how Howard’s icy career woman Claire and Pratt’s muscly vest-man Owen kind of hated each other, but then, after numerous scenes where everyone else almost got eaten by dinosaurs, they realized they were both the only viable sexual partners left in the film? Surprisingly, the bond they forged when they both finally opened up about how much they love not dying doesn’t seem to have carried over to the sequel, so we get to relive their strained will-they-or-will-they all over again. Subplot satisfactorily established! Let’s get back to the island where we sexily almost died!
“A rescue op? Save the dinosaurs from an island that’s about to explode?”
Every Jurassic Park sequel must grapple with making this justification: Why would anyone fuck with these dinosaurs again after they have proven demonstrably that they are dinosaurs? The original sequels worked around this by setting up the need to go back for people, whose folly is that they chose to ignore this basic fact. Jurassic World made that ludicrous, illogical hubris the whole point, and not without a little meta self-loathing.
Jurassic World 2 gives us… a volcano.
It’s an active volcano that John Hammond, apparently sparing at least some expense, just kinda shrugged off when he decided to make it the prime real estate for his massive theme park pivoting around a delicate science experiment. And now that volcano is erupting, threatening the lives of every dinosaur left on the island by the many people who have fled it.
Here is the proper response to that: “Good! I vaguely remember almost being eaten by those dinosaurs—who, again, are dinosaurs—and there is a long, documented history of them doing that sort of thing to other people. I think we’ve seen repeatedly that any control we think we exert over them is a delusion, and if I may be pedantic for a moment, it was a mistake to make them in the first place. We went against nature, and now nature is volunteering to sort that out for us. We should totally let it. Now, back to our sexy-funny bickering. Are you dating a house? Because I know you like a doormat.”