Rough going

Rating: 4/10 (22 June 2018)

There's another island. Isla Sorna is where the dinosaurs were raised and also where a rich little girl wanders into a compsognathus attack. From this opening, you know that you're in for a much darker ride. It's one of those movies where kindly Spielberg decides that he should have made Night Skies instead of E.T. and indulges all the meanness he has festering inside upon his characters.
John Hammond's nephew, Peter Ludlow is trying to use the island to fix the losses that Jurassic Park incurred. The old man has taken a dramatic change of heart, realizing that he should have never tried to open a theme park all those years ago and that these dinosaurs need to be protected. If you're kind of taken aback by all of the character flip-flops here, buckle up. You know - because guys in their seventies suddenly stop being capitalists and suddenly start caring for the common man, like Peter on the road to Damascus. It can happen.
Ian Malcolm is the only one that comes back, save for cameos from his grandchildren. Turns out that Julianne Moore is in this, playing Ian's girlfriend Dr. Sarah Harding, and that she's already on the island. For the last four years, Ian has been discredited and disbarred for speaking out on Jurassic Park. The last thing he wants to do is go back, but to save the girl he loves, he has to.
Ian joins the team of equipment guy Eddie Carr and documentarian Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn), as well as his daughter Kelly who has stowed away. Just as they catch up with Dr. Sarah, a whole new InGen squad shows up, made up of mercs and hunters. Chief amongst them are Pete Postlethwaite as Roland Tembo, a big game hunter who dreams of bagging a T. Rex, Fargo's Peter Stormare as Dieter Stark and Dr. Robert Burke, a dinosaur expert played by Thomas F. Duffy (the demeted Charles Wilson from Death Wish 2!).
Tembo's plan is to tie up a baby T. Rex and use it to lure in the mother or father. And InGen wants to get as many dinosaurs as possible so they can open a new Jurassic Park in San Diego. None of these ideas are good and they blow up in everyone's face.
There's a great moment in here where all of Malcolm's team's vehicles plunge off a cliff and some nifty action pieces, but it all feels rather disjointed. By the time everyone teams up and gets off the island, I was kind of hoping the film was over, only to learn there was so much more movie left. It's a very late 90's style of blockbuster - give it more running time and more story versus more thinking.
At the end, the dinosaurs are placed in an animal preserve free from human interference. Hammond steals Malcolm's line, saying that "Life will find a way."
Spielberg eventually said that he didn't enjoy making this film. It kind of shows. He stated, "I beat myself up... growing more and more impatient with myself... It made me wistful about doing a talking picture because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie... I found myself saying, 'Is that all there is? It's not enough for me.'"