JURASSIC WORLD : FALLEN KINGDOM - Wednesday 27th June 2018.

'JURASSIC WORLD : FALLEN KINGDOM' which I saw this week is another much hyped highly anticipated sequel coming to our big screens in the form of this follow up offering to 2015's hugely successful 'Jurassic World' and the fifth instalment in the 'Jurassic Park' series. This film is intended to be the second in a planned trilogy of films, with the third due for release in June 2021, with Colin Trevorrow set to return to Directing duty. 'Jurassic World' made US$1.67B at the Global Box Office off the back of a US$150M Budget and making it the fifth highest grossing film of all time and the most financially successful in the franchise so far. Colin Trevorrow Co-Wrote and Directed the 2015 film, and this time he returns as Co-Writer and Executive Producer alongside Steven Spielberg, giving away the Directorial duties to J.A. Bayona whose previous Directing credits include 'The Orphanage', 'The Impossible' and 'A Monster Calls'. The principle cast reprise their roles, and the film was released in the US last week too. Off the back of a US$170M Budget, the film has so far grossed US$809M, and has received mixed Critical Reviews although Chris Pratt's performance, the Direction, the visuals and some of the darker moments have been worthy of praise.

Set three years after the destruction of the Jurassic World theme park on Isla Nublar off Central America's Pacific Coast, the escaped dinosaur's have roamed freely, until now when their very existence is threatened by an impending volcanic eruption that is likely within the very near future to destroy their island sanctuary. As the film opens we see an underwater two man submarine manoeuvring in close proximity to the skeletal remains of the Indominus rex resting at the bottom of the former Jurassic World lagoon. They send out an circular saw on the end of an extended mechanical arm and remove a section of bone, and send it instantly to the surface to be retrieved by a helicopter crew, in the obligatory pouring rain.

Meanwhile in Washington, a Senate Committee debates with Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) whether the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar should be saved or allowed to perish in the pending volcanic eruption, which is likely to consume the whole island. Malcolm believes it should be the latter course of action to correct John Hammond's error of judgement in cloning the dinosaurs over twenty years ago. In the intervening period the former Operations Manager of Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has established the Dinosaur Protection Group in an attempt to save the dinosaurs from extinction. The Senate ultimately decides against the dinosaurs, which prompts John Hammond's former partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to contact Dearing. Shortly afterwards, Dearing meets with Lockwood and his business associate Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) at his upstate Californian country mansion.

Lockwood is an ill man, confined to a wheelchair, has 24/7 aid at home, care of Iris (Geraldine Chaplin), and has entrusted Mills with pushing Lockwood’s fortune into the future and making it survive after he dies. Mills and Lockwood announce to Dearing that they have plans to relocate as many dinosaurs off Isla Nublar to a new island sanctuary where they will be safe, can roam free and where no tourists will be allowed to tread. Mills however, raised a concern about locating 'Blue' the last surviving Velociraptor. However, Dearing knows exactly the man for the job - one Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) the former Velociraptor trainer and handler from Jurassic World, and with whom she shared an emotional bond back then, but which has since cooled off considerably.

The rescue team comprising Dearing, Grady, Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) - a paleoveterinarian, and Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) - an IT systems analyst and hacker, arrive on Isla Nublar and are greeted by Ken Wheatly (Ted Levine) a seasoned mercenary who heads up the dinosaur rescue mission on the island (for a significant fee!). Grady, Rodriguez, Wheatly and the merry band of gun totting mercenaries head off in search of Blue, using the parks tracking system which has been rebooted by Webb. Owen, alone, tracks down Blue, and as the two are about to become reacquainted, a mercenary fires and shoots Blue, leading Wheatley to shoot Grady with a tranquilliser dart. Blue is boxed up and Rodriguez is tasked with saving its life. Grady is left on the ground where he fell.

Grady comes around just as molten red glowing lava steadily creeps up on him devouring the forest where he lay. Grady, with half the island dinosaur population, burst out of the forest as the volcano erupts spewing out billowing smoke, ash, lava and molten boulders all around them. He reunites with Dearing and Webb who have narrowly escaped an attack by a Baryonyx, and end up falling over a steep cliff into the ocean below to escape the destructive eruption. The three survive and are washed up on the shoreline, to see helicopters flying over head carrying their precious cargo of captured dinosaurs to be loaded on a waiting freight ship. The three board an abandoned truck and drive it onto the departing ship, to witness behind them the volcano destroy the island in a ball of fire, gas and smoke.

At the Lockwood mansion, his young granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) overhears a conversation in which Mills is discussing with auctioneer Gunnar Eversol (Toby Jones) his plans to secretly host an auction at the estate to sell off the collected dinosaurs each to the highest bidder, irrespective of what the bidders intentions are. In addition, Mills also raises introducing the Indoraptor, a genetically-engineered new breed of dinosaur created by former geneticist of both Jurassic World and Jurassic Park, Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) by using the DNA of the Indominus rex and a Velociraptor to ultimately weaponise it. Maisie tells Lockwood of Mills' plans, and in turn Lockwood confronts Mills saying that he is none too pleased and that he should call the Police to alert them. At that Mills smothers Lockwood with a cushion and kills him.

The dinosaurs are moved into the mansion, in individual cages in readiness for displaying in the auction room and the gathered multimillionaires from around the world. Rodriguez is back at the mansion, under duress overseeing the recovery of Blue. She is freed by Webb, who also releases Blue from its cage. Grady and Dearing are held in a cage while the auction gets underway. They manage to escape with the help of a head butting dinosaur in the neighbouring cage.

The pair find Maisie who lead them to a window overlooking the auction room, just as bidding on the Indoraptor ramps up to US$28M. With the help of his new head butting dinosaur friend, Grady disrupts the auction proceedings sending it in to chaos with bodies flying asunder. After the fracas has died down Wheatly enters the auction room and fires two tranquillisers into the Indoraptor. He then gingerly enters the cage, with the aim of extracting a trophy tooth to add to his growing collection of dinosaur molars. However, the Indoraptor is no ordinary dinosaur - it has intelligence and wits and comes around from its mock unconscious state and promptly rips off Wheatly's arm, before tearing him to shreds. It then exits thorough the opened cage door having munched on Eversol, and promptly attacks and kills various others.

The Indoraptor goes on the rampage tearing up the inside of the mansion while seeking out Grady, Dearing and youngster Maisie. Maisie runs off trying to divert the Indoraptor's attention, and promptly retreats to the sanctity of her bedroom, and hides under the bed covers, hoping the killer dinosaur won't spot her ruse.

Needless to say she under estimates the intellect of this beast who comes after her. Blue meanwhile, having been released by Rodriguez, tracks down the Indoraptor inside Maisie's bedroom and a fight breaks out, during which time Maisie and Grady escape through the bedroom window out onto a ledge. The duelling dinosaurs crash out onto the roof of the mansion, in the pouring rain once again sending them flailing in opposite directions. The Indoraptor is more sure footed and is hot on the heels of Grady and Maisie who have no where left to run, until Dearing appears followed by Blue. On the glass roof directly above Lockhart's dinosaur museum Blue and the Indoraptor fight it out, until the roof gives way and in falls the Indoraptor, impaling itself on the skeletal remains of a Triceratops skull.

Back inside the mansion when the dust has settled, Rodriguez alerts Grady and Dearing that a hydrogen cyanide tank has been ruptured and is leaking toxic gas, as a result of an earlier explosion when the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan when the Indoraptor was running amok. Furthermore the extraction system was down, meaning that all the caged dinosaurs would soon perish. Dearing has her hand hovering over an emergency override button that will open the huge doors and allow the dinosaurs to escape to freedom, but upon Grady's advice she can't bring herself to press the door release button, for fear of what dinosaurs walking amongst us in America's back yard would do to civilisation as we know it. The alternative is to let all the dinosaurs perish, and return Earth to normalcy without letting it slip back to the Jurassic age.

So instead, not wishing to allow the dinosaurs to become extinct once again, Maisie hits that button, the doors open, and out into the cool night air escape the dinosaurs. Mills does a bolt with the remains of the Indominus rex bone sample and is promptly trampled underfoot by a stampede of dinosaurs and is then ripped in two and devoured by a passing T-Rex and Carnotaurus. Grady and Dearing leave the estate with Maisie, after bidding farewell to Blue, who runs off into the surrounding forest under cover of night time with the other dinosaurs to roam far and wide and turn up in the most unexpected places.

In a further US Senate hearing, Dr. Malcolm advises that humans and dinosaurs now have no alternative but to learn to co-exist. Watch out for the post-credits sequence, which really adds nothing that you hadn't already worked out, but adds a teaser of sorts to the next instalment.

I enjoyed 'Jurassic World : Fallen Kingdom' but not as much as the first instalment in this rebooted series of the franchise. For me, this offering really adds little new to the storyline that we haven't already seen before. Here Isla Nublar is destroyed in hails of fire and brimstone, and in 'Jurassic Park II and III' the action takes place largely on a neighbouring island of Isla Sorna after the annihilation of the original theme park. Also, we've seen T-Rex rampaging through downtown USA in San Diego towards the final set piece of 'Jurassic Park II', and here we are again, with the dino menace let loose in upstate California. That said, this is an enjoyable, fun, fairly mindless yet  well crafted enough follow up that demonstrates Bayona's skill at the visual art, eking enough of a coherent story to captivate the interest for two hours of run time and continuing the story arc even if a tad over zealously. At times suspenseful, at times humorous and even a little Gothic, and occasionally gory, but where else can this go now, other than seeing how dinosaurs interact with their human co-habitors, and I guess we know its going to end badly for one species. Well audiences have chipped in over US$800M so far making this film the third highest grossing film of 2018 to date, so it can't be all bad. Catch this dino creature feature on the big screen while you can.

'Jurassic World : Fallen Kingdom' merits three claps of the clapperboard from a possible five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

THE PROMISE : Tuesday 27th June 2017.

'THE PROMISE' which I saw last week is Directed and Co-Written by Terry George whose previous credits include 'Reservation Road' and 'Hotel Rwanda'. Here he turns his attention to the last days of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide, which occurred between 1915 and 1922, marking the beginning of one hundred years of modern genocide by launching the world into a cycle of violence and denial that has resulted in millions of lives lost, destroyed and displaced. The film Premiered at TIFF in early September last year, was released in the US in late April, and has been a Box Office bomb taking just US$9M of its US$90M budget outlay. The film has however, been praised for its historical accuracy and for not downplaying the enormity of the lesser known Armenian Genocide that took place.

This is the story of Mikael (Oscar Isaac), a small village dwelling apothecary and an aspiring gifted medical student who has designs on graduating from medical school in the big city and turning his chosen career path to good use back in his Armenian home village of Sirun, in the south-east of the Ottoman Empire. In order to fund his way through medical school and graduate as a fully fledged Doctor, he betroths himself to the daughter of a wealthy neighbour in the village for a dowry of 400 gold coins. This will give him the fees necessary to continue his training at the Imperial Medical Academy in Constantinople and fund his living expenses for the two years he is away. And so Michael leaves the comfort of Sirun and heads to the big city, Constantinople, fresh faced, energetic and fully of hope for his future.

Upon arriving in Constantinople, he meets Emre (Marwan Kenzari) on his first day at the Medical Academy. Emre is the son of a high ranking Turkish official, and also a medical student, although only because he wanted to dodge the draft into the Turkish Army, much to the chagrin of his father.

Through Mikael's wealthy Uncle, he is introduced to Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), an Armenian woman raised and educated in Paris and from a village not too far way from his own. Ana is romantically involved with American Reporter for the Associated Press Chris Myers (Christian Bale), and the two share a co-dependence upon each other - he for his reporting and she for her artistic sketches of his reported subject matter. With the threat of war looming, Myers is in Constantinople observing and reporting on the German influence in Turkey, and the mounting unrest amongst certain factions of the population. Myers has clout as a famous and highly regarded photo-journalist dedicated to exposing political truth.

Fairly quickly it becomes evident that there is a chemistry between Mikael and Ana, and soon their affections for each other become apparent to Chris. All of this starts to unfold as international tensions begin to boil over with the onset of WWI, and it becomes clear that Turkey intends to side with Germany. As compulsory conscription looms ever closer into the Ottoman Army, Mikael manages to avoid being signed up with Emre's help using the clout of his father's position to secure a medical student exemption.

However, Mikael's avoidance of the conscript is short-lived, as he soon discovers that his Uncle has been imprisoned during the dissident round-ups of April 1915. In his attempts to save his Uncle by bribing an official with his remaining stash of gold coins, Mikael is his himself detained, and sent off to a prison labour camp. We then fast forward six months to see the Nazi-like led camp and those prisoners doing the hard labour by laying train tracks across rocky mountain terrain for their captors, the Turks.

Eventually, Mikael manages to escape as a result of a fortunate occurrence involving weeping sticks of dynamite, a prisoner willing to give his life, and the close proximity to the ensuing explosion of many Turkish soldiers. Finally, Mikael makes his way back to his village, only to find it a shadow of its former self with the Turks having turned violently on their Armenian fellows. His parents are still alive, but are now poverty stricken having been robbed of all their wealth and valuables by the marauding Turkish Army. His mother persuades him to proceed with his promise to marry Maral (Angela Sarafyan) the girl he is betrothed to despite Mikael professing his love for Ana in Constantinople. But with the passing of time and their changed circumstances he doesn't even know if Ana still lives. And so he goes through with the marriage in a hurried ceremony in the mountains where they live in a log cabin built by his father as sleeping quarters for hired farm hands. Soon enough Maral falls pregnant, but suffering from sickness Mikael takes his wife back to the village to be tended for by his mother and father. There he learns that Ana and Chris are at a Red Cross station close by, and so he leaves to seek their help in securing an escape from the ever increasing threat to their lives at the hands of the Turks.

The Red Cross are managing escape missions for orphans across the mountains and to a nearby port where passage by ship is planned to take them to safe haven. They head back to Sirun to retrieve Mikael's family en route to the port, only to be greeted by a bloodbath of massacred bodies laid strewn across a riverbank on the outskirts of the village. Among them is the slain bodies of Mikael's father and Maral, with the unborn child ripped from her stomach. His mother is still alive.  Mikael's grieving is interrupted by passing Turkish soldiers who give chase.

The group split with Chris leading them off astray so enabling Mikael and Ana  to escape with the carriage load of young orphans. Chris is however, soon overcome and captured. He produces official papers but these are dismissed by the soldiers who take him back to Constantinople where he is imprisoned for spying - a crime punishable by death. Emre, now an officer in the Ottoman Army, visits Chris in his cell and pleads with him to sign a confession to save his life, but Chris has firm beliefs and staunch moral standards and rips up the document - sealing his fate.

At the eleventh hour, American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau (James Cromwell) gets involved with his Turkish counterpart and negotiates Chris's release, allowing for him to be deported to Malta. Emre however, was involved in contacting Morgenthau covertly, and is found out by more higher ranking officials, and consequently is shot by firing squad. Upon arriving in Malta, Chris boards the French Navy cruiser 'Guichen' under the captaincy of Admiral Fournet (Jean Reno) as it launches for the Ottoman coastline.

Meanwhile Ana and Mikael encounter a large group of Armenian refugees heading into the mountains to escape the advancing Turks. Armed with limited guns and makeshift weapons, the refugees are determined that they will fight to the death. The resistance fought off the advancing Turks for fifty-three days in all on mount Musa Dagh until Allied warships, most notably the French 3rd squadron in the Mediterranean sighted the survivors, just as ammunition and food provisions were running short. French and British ships, beginning with the Guichen, evacuated 4,200 men, women and children from Musa Dagh, amidst heavy artillery fire from the Ottoman Army, which Chris, Mikael, Ana and the orphans all come under attack from, and not without casualty. The warships then transported them to safety in Port Said in Egypt.

This film has a strong compelling story to tell and its an important one, that is still controversially denied by the Turkish people to this day. Therefore, all credit to Terry George for bringing this story to the big screen - it is just a shame that so many film goers have chosen to elect with their feet and their money to stay away from the cinemas, or watch something else. Maybe its because this tragic story of the Armenian Genocide which claimed one and a half million lives is wrapped up in candy floss and sugar coated in a melodramatic, elongated love triangle that detracts from the subject matter  of real historical and undeniable importance. The production values are strong and with the principle cast of Bale and Isaac and up & comer Le Bon, we could have expected a lot more, but here the sum of the parts is not greater than the whole. Twenty minutes less running time, an abbreviated love triangle and more about the atrocities (think 'Schindler's List' here) and we'd be talking about a different film altogether.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-