Dinosaurs aren’t interesting anymore. The sense of wonder that Steven Spielberg once instilled in audiences by using modern cinema technology to bring prehistoric predators back to life with 1993’s Jurassic Park has since lost its lustre. There’s something to be said about how much further CGI and practical effects have come since then (or, if we’re being honest, how much harder they’re being pushed for the bulk of mainstream blockbuster visuals), but there’s the impact of that film’s own sequels to consider as well. The cleverest thing to come out of the Jurassic World trilogy (and bear in mind that I’m a staunch defender of Fallen Kingdom) is its potentially-unintentional observation of how jaded modern audiences have become, to the point where what once was considered breathtaking is now just… there. It's the kind of statement that makes the presence of even one sequel, let alone all five, seem counterproductive.
On the surface, this film seems set up to bring things back to that initial feeling of awe. Its title is basically pulled directly from Jurassic Park’s original tagline, and even with the continuing advances made in our understanding of dinosaurs and what they actually looked like, the designs here are closer to the original JP than to the more feathered variety that has become more prominent in the interim. But beyond that, it’s a collision between Jurassic Park’s now-classic high concept with another, pitting Earth’s dinosaurs against an alien astronaut (Adam Driver’s Mills), who crash-lands on pre-historic Earth and needs to make it back home. By viewing these animals as something… well, alien, it feels like an attempt at a course correction for the idea that we should be in any comfortable with seeing them.
Of course, that’s the thing with high concept pitches like this: They don’t mean a whole lot without the film craft and storytelling to back them up. On the former, we have Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods as both writers and directors… which isn’t all that exciting, even as someone who pays a lot of attention to the names attached to film productions. While the Quiet Place films are technical marvels, and damn entertaining on top of that, I don’t personally attribute a lot of that entertainment value to their scripting. The sound design, acting, blocking, cinematography, sure, but not really the dialogue.
To their credit, though, this film looks decent enough. DP Salvatore Totino, who we last checked in with when he contributed to Peak Warner Bros. with Space Jam: A New Legacy, puts in work to bring out the survival thriller-esque trappings of Mills’ predicament, and the framing for the dinosaurs (which, most of the time, are wreathed in darkness to highlight them as something unknown) actually made them look threatening. The use of jump scares was a bit much (thankfully without stabs from the soundtrack), but I’ll admit it, it got me more often than not.
Hell, I’ll even say that the writing for this isn’t too bad. Like with Quiet Place, the genre specifics are couched in themes of parental stress and guilt, with Mills needing to serve as a surrogate father to Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), the only other passenger who survived the ship crash. Driver’s performance serves as the more pessimistic side of how Quiet Place portrayed that kind of pressure, where his want to do right by his kid is offset by how far he’s pushed himself to make that happen, and how futile that gesture turned out to be. Add to that the language barrier between him and Koa, and an especially heart-wrenching moment between them and a newborn dino out in the wild, and there’s palpable parental angst to get out of this.
However, the prominence of such a notion ends up being part of the problem with the larger film: It doesn’t really do a whole lot with the dinosaurs. The action and chase set pieces end up being few and far between, to the point where Mills tending to physical injury caused by the environment is more thrilling than any bipedal encounters, and even at around an hour and a half in running time, what’s here still doesn’t seem to be enough to fill up the space between credit rolls. When it gets to the finale, it admittedly gets quite enthralling as they try to beat the ticking clock that is the dinosaur-ending asteroid, but the scenes of Mills and Koa trying to escape a cave or trying and largely failing to communicate with each other didn’t exactly make the journey there easy to get through.
Between my feelings concerning survival cinema, Jurassic World: Dominion still being fresh in my memory almost a year later, and just how hard that baby dino scene hit me, I still find myself a bit torn on all this. There are definite flaws here, and it looks like dinosaur cinema (if it is even going to continue being a thing at all) still has a long way to go to reset the damage done by Jurassic World, but as a continuation of the familial ethos of Quiet Place, it has its moments of inspiration and even emotional impact. It definitely would’ve benefited from Quiet Place’s emphasis on context clues over exposition, which this has a bit too much of (why there is this much text on-screen, I’m still not sure), but it’s alright for what it is. It’s at about 65%.
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