All 6 Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, ranked

5. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

There’s no weirder movie in the entire Jurassic franchise than 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Picking up a year after the destruction of the Jurassic World theme park, Fallen Kingdom sees Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) return to Isla Nublar when it’s discovered that an imminent volcanic eruption is about to wipe out all the dinosaurs on the island. They go in order to save Blue, Owen’s Velociraptor that he trained from birth. That part of the movie is pretty cool.

But after the rescue mission goes awry, things get real weird real fast. The bulk of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feels much more like a haunted house movie as Owen, Claire, and Blue are swept off to the mysterious Lockwood mansion, where the newly rescued dinosaurs are being auctioned off on the black market. The Lockwood estate has secrets aplenty, from the introduction of a new hybrid dinosaur named the Indoraptor to Maisie (Isabella Sermon), a young girl who is actually a clone.

In many ways, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom doesn’t even feel like a Jurassic film at all. The whole cloning plotline is weird, as is the major retcon of the Jurassic Park canon required to introduce Benjamin Lockwell (James Cromwell), a former partner of John Hammond who we’re supposed to believe was pivotal to the creation of the original Jurassic Park despite never being mentioned in the previous four movies. The Indoraptor feels more like a horror movie monster than a dinosaur, though it is certainly fun to watch.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is also the only movie in the entire franchise that has an action hero fight scene, where Chris Pratt beats up a bunch of mercenaries wielding machine guns, as well as a murder scene. Despite being films about dinosaurs run amok, the actual human elements in the Jurassic franchise have always been very grounded and realistic. You might not notice how tonally out of place the fight and murder scenes are until you realize that the next closest thing we had seen up until that point was someone or other getting punched in the face during a heated debate.

The only reason Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not at the bottom of the list is because despite its many flaws, it’s at the very least bold, unpredictable, and ambitious. Fallen Kingdom has some of the most unique scenes in the franchise, such as Claire and Owen taking blood from a sedated T-Rex and the haunting volcanic eruption on Isla Nublar. The development for Claire in particular was excellent; this was the movie where she truly became an Ellen Ripley-level badass. And it did set the stage for the much better Jurassic World: Dominion by ending with dinosaurs being released out into the wider world.