Suspenseful Thriller or Hackneyed B-Movie? The Problem with the Jurassic Park Franchise

So we are now five movies into the Jurassic Park universe and it's gotten so bad with the latest one (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) that I'm starting to wonder what this franchise is supposed to "be". I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of the original Jurassic Park but I can at least say that it's an enjoyable and sometimes scary monster movie. It does a good job setting up this park of dinosaurs on an isolated island for the purposes of a theme park attraction. It also was a glorious showcase of CGI at the time. They go through and make a realistic answer to all the "how's" and "why's" of their existence and it makes for a solid experience. With the two sequels they expanded on the characters that survived and how dinosaurs being alive at the same time as humans is a bad idea however you cut it. So even then the premise was on shaky ground. How do humans just keep making the same mistakes over and over, believing that they can control the dinosaurs THIS time?

So the franchise was in the dumps creatively and financially after the third installment. Universal very wisely decided to put Jurassic Park on the backburner until a new, fresh idea could enter the fold. Well, it never did. But we got a soft reboot anyway. A reboot that reminded people how exciting this world can be, and how lucrative this nostalgic franchise can be. From a story perspective, however, there's nowhere to go. Jurassic World existed only to set up new characters to make the same mistakes as the old and tie in nods to the older movies. Hey, it worked well enough for $1.6 billion after all was said and done. Jurassic World aped a lot of its success from Jurassic Park. So where did a Jurassic World sequel have left to go? Well, it had to ape its sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2. It's almost as if the creators of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom said, "Okay, The Lost World brought the dinosaurs to the mainland to make an excitingly stupid third act. Can we do that but with a story that's even more stupid? A billion dollars says yes!"

Yes, the humans did it again, with a hybrid dinosaur that can be remotely controlled and sold the rest of the dinosaurs at auction. That happened in a Jurassic Park movie. And a little kid clone let out the dinosaurs at the end so we HAVE to co-habitate with dinosaurs now. I hated these outlandish decisions and many, many more so much in Fallen Kingdom that I wondered if this was a real movie or a bad idea for a low budget b-movie. Think about it, this is a world where people continue to try and save dinosaurs even after they've killed hundreds of people. Clone children, tampering with dino DNA to create bigger and more bloodthirsty dinosaurs, forced romantic entanglement with the main characters, cheesy one liners, big CGI set pieces that go nowhere, and (theoretically) the russian mafia buying a deadly raptor at auction. This sounds like a B-movie to me if I've ever heard one.

Jurassic Park has finally lost all credibility of anything other than a corny monster movie. I don't know why we see it as anything else.