You guys. Jurassic World. There's another one.

Last week Meg told me there was a new Jurassic World movie out, and then she threatened me to see it with her.

This is an activity that makes sense for us because our relationship is basically based off of the first Jurassic World movie. When that one came out I wrote a recap about it that was, how do I put this, somewhat critical. If you go to that post and look for Meg's contribution in the comments section, you'll find the birth of our friendship. Just three years ago we were commiserating over hating Jurassic World and now I'm 8th in line to get her children.

Mark my words: I will do what it takes to ascend that list.

Which is maybe why Saturday afternoon I showed up at Century 16 movie theater at 3:00 in the afternoon to meet Meg. What happened over the next two hours will be hard to explain. But I'll try.

You guys.

I really, truly, believed that the last movie was so bad that it was literally impossible for this one to be worse.

Remember the woman running faster than the T. Rex in high heels?

Remember the Disney channel kids who had perfectly blow-dried hair as they came out of the water after driving a 25-year-old vehicle they found in the jungle into a lake?

Remember how Chris Pratt taught the raptors how to love???

You guys.

This new edition of Jurassic World makes the the last one look like The Godfather.

II!!!

I'm not even sure how to recap this crap because it made NO FREAKING SENSE WHATSOEVER.

But I'll try.

So the movie starts with these guys in a weird bubble submarine thing and they are trying to find dinosaur bones under water and I don't totally know why but I think it has something to do with DNA. There are some people above ground too. Then a giant monster eats the submarine. Meanwhile these people in a helicopter are yelling at some man to come get into the helicopter because there is a T. Rex behind him but instead of running to them or turning around to see why they might be freaking out he just comically holds his hand up to his ear and repeatedly screams "WHAT? I CAN'T HEEEEAAAAR YOUUUUU."

Then a water monster eats him somehow.

Suddenly we are in a grass-rootsy hipster start-up space definitely in San Francisco. This is where woman Ron Howard who ran faster than the T. Rex in high heels works these days. Meg explained to me when woman Ron Howard came onto the screen that her hair is longer in this movie, which is how we know she's nice now.

This non-profit organization she started(?) exists because there's an active volcano that's about to blow on Dinosaur Island and Congress is currently all hands on deck debating whether or not they should go in and save the dinosaurs or just let them go extinct again.

Of course Jeff Goldblum is testifying before Congress on this topic WHY DOES HE KEEP DOING THESE MOVIES OMG HE WAS IN THE LAST INDEPENDENCE DAY TOO HE SHOULD BE TRIED AS A WAR CRIMINAL.

Jeff Goldblum vomits nonsense about how the dinosaurs are going to destroy mankind if we don't let the volcano kill them.

This is apparently convincing because Congress is like "THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD AND WE WILL DO NOTHING" and when that announcement happens, woman Ron Howard is like "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Then she whispers "no one cares" as a tear slowly rolls down her cheek like that native American who hates littering. Suddenly her two quirky sidekicks, who it is now apparent are going to be the lovable characters we will have to watch say horrific one-liners for the next two hours, are standing right behind her and they're like, "we care."

Suddenly woman Ron Howard gets a phone call and she is told she has to go up to Downton Abbey somewhere in northern California to meet with the farmer from Babe.

I'm not kidding you about this house. Meg has taken to calling it Pemberly Manor. When it first came onto the screen, she leaned over to me and said "where did they find a 17th century Victorian castle in northern California?" This is when it became clear to me that Meg still had expectations for this movie. And it made me sad for her. Kind of like watching a little boy sit on the front porch waiting for weekend dad to never show up and play catch with him.

There she finds out that the Babe farmer and that one old guy who started Jurassic Park were like super tight but then they had a falling out and then that other guy died and now farmer wants to save the dinosaurs. An evil man works for the farmer and his favorite thing to do is to lean down and put both hands on desks before delivering lines for dramatic effect.

Evil guy tells woman Ron Howard that he wants her to go to Dinosaur Island so she can use the system that she has access to to track down one of the raptors Chris Pratt had taught how to love so they can save it.

She's super excited about this and she agrees because she thinks evil guy just cares about the animals.

The Babe farmer guy has a granddaughter too and he apparently raised her after her mother died in a car accident BUT THIS IS A LITTLE MYSTERIOUS.

Woman Ron Howard goes to Chris Pratt, with whom she has apparently had some falling out after they found love through a mass genocide that they caused a few years ago. She talks Chris Pratt into going to Dinosaur Island with her by reminding him that he taught the raptors how to love.

I know you all love Chris Pratt and that this is a very unpopular opinion but OMG WHY DO THEY PUT CHRIS PRATT IN MOVIES HE IS SO TERRIBLE.

And you can't stop reading Stranger because you're offended that I said that because I came out just last week so everyone will think you left us because you're a homophobe.

YOU ARE STUCK HERE NOW.

So they all go to dinosaur island and even though they told us that it would be extremely hard to track down the one particular raptor they were supposed to look for, Chris Pratt finds it in like 4 minutes.

And THAT'S when they find out that the people who took them down there to "save" the animals are actually evil because they suddenly start shooting the animals and Chris Pratt with tranquilizers.

Then, out of nowhere, the volcano erupts cartoon lava, which slowly starts covering the island.

I'm not kidding about this lava and its properties. It was like a ten-year-old's concept of volcanoes.

It slowly oozes over the land, inch by inch, colorfully destroying everything our heroes hold dear.

So everyone is fighting against dinosaurs and fighting with dinosaurs and fighting each other and trying to stay on top of logs and rocks so they don't step in the lava and none of this makes ANY sense and the T. Rex keeps stepping in to help the nice humans because I guess we've all just accepted that the T. Rex is our friend now and he has the ability to recognize motives and distinguish human virtue from vice CALL ME OLD FASHIONED but back in MY day IN THE 90s the T. Rex ate people indiscriminately.

Some other crap happens and then eventually woman Ron Howard and one of her side-kicks is out by the water and they're watching the volcano eruption. The entire island is being engulfed in smoke and flames. It's dramatic.

But suddenly. In all of the flames that are totally consuming the island. Finally. Chris Pratt emerges from the smoke, running, and behind him also emerges, wait for it. Are you sitting down. You need to be sitting down for this.

ALL OF THE FREAKING DINOSAURS ON THE ENTIRE ISLAND.

They are all running together, in a giant pack, led by CHRIS FREAKING TERRIBLE PRATT, who apparently can run at least as fast as all of them.

A whole community of dinosaurs. Running together. To escape the volcano. As friends. All of them.

ALL of them.

It looked exactly like a scene from Braveheart.

I cannot overstate how ridiculous this image was.

No. It wasn't like Braveheart. I think it was stolen directly from Land Before Time.

I seriously started to think this movie was just a parody of itself at this point.

Meg and I were laughing so hard I thought we were going to get kicked out of the theater.

Woman Ron Howard and her sidekick get into this bubble car thing and they, Chris Pratt, and ALL of the dinosaurs, go running/driving off of a 500-foot cliff together.

They all land in the water and all of the dinosaurs are frantically trying to swim and magically no one is hurt at all.

Woman Ron Howard gets stuck in her bubble car and Chris Pratt has to dive down to expert scuba certification level (like, seriously, 200 feet under water) with nothing to help him breathe so he can cut the bubble car that is made of glass and metal open with a pocket knife. And he takes several seconds to show her the knife so she understands what he's going to do. And then after several minutes of being deeply submerged, they majestically swim to the surface somehow without immediately dying of dysbarism

Eventually they wash up on shore somewhere and that's where they see the giant ship finishing packing up all of the dinosaurs that the evil people captured. So woman Ron Howard and Chris Pratt sneak onto this ship by jumping a huge truck over a ramp and landing it where like 1200 crew people are working, but not a single person notices them.

They go into the ship where they find one of their allies who is trying to save the raptor that got shot earlier. She's a doctor, so she knows what she's doing. Specifically, she's a "paleo doctor," which does not mean she relentlessly tells all of her friends about her nonsensical diet that most definitely does not work, but it apparently means she's a doctor for dinosaurs. This, despite the fact that she has never seen a real dinosaur until this exact moment. 

Nonetheless, she tells the others that she needs to remove a bullet from the raptor's leg, but she can't save the raptor unless she can perform a blood transfusion.

Then woman Ron Howard stands up triumphantly and she's like "I USED TO VOLUNTEER AT THE BLOOD BANK."

The doctor gives her some completely nonsensical instruction about which dinosaurs are blood donors for raptors, and this leads them to their only option.

A T. REX!!!

So woman Ron Howard and Chris Pratt have to go searching for a T. Rex on the ship so they can draw a gallon of blood and I think they fall in love somewhere during this and Chris Pratt sniffs her hair and that could not possibly smell good because they just spent the day in the jungle fighting dinosaurs.

They get the blood and bring it back to the doctor who immediately pulls the bullet out of the raptor in one simple move before smiling and declaring "she's going to be ok!" And they all cheer.

Suddenly the ship docks in northern California.

It took them about one hour to get from Costa Rica to northern California.

On a cruise-liner.

That's over 4,000 miles.

Even if they were traveling at 170 miles per hour, it would take them more than a day.

The average cruise liner is capable of travelling around 23 miles per hour, max. That means that it should have taken this ship at least 7.2 days to get to its destination.

I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS MOVIE MADE ME DO MATH.

Once they get to northern California, they bring all of the dinosaurs to Downton Abbey.

The mysterious granddaughter who is like 10 years old somehow discovers that the guy who works for her grandfather is evil and that he is planning to sell the dinosaurs to highest bidders so they can be used to fight wars.

You know.

Instead of tanks and airplanes and missiles and nuclear bombs, countries would now like to start sending in completely untrainable dinosaurs to fight their battles.

She tells the grandpa and when he confronts the evil guy the evil guy suffocates the grandpa with a pillow.

So now the child is on the run in Downton Abbey.

That very night, people from ALL OVER THE FREAKING WORLD show up to Downton Abbey to participate in the dinosaur auction. They were able to gather surprisingly quickly for this surprise event.

They're all such extremely offensive stereotypes of the countries they represent that I'm pretty sure this movie is actually a hate crime.

Oh I forgot. The heroes all get captured at some point and they are put in jail cells under Downton Abbey with the rest of the dinosaurs.

The auction people make their purchases for a while until suddenly the auctioneer introduces a new dinosaur that was recently created and it is like part raptor/part T. Rex/part the alien from Signs and it can apparently hunt down anyone and kill them.

Just then Chris Pratt shows up with some of his dinosaur friends that he let lose and they free the mutant and chaos happens and some people get eaten and the next thing you know Chris Pratt and his raptor WHOM HE TAUGHT HOW TO LOVE fight an entire room of like 200 people with Chris Pratt's bare fists and he is successful even though all of the people he is fighting have weapons INCLUDING and I'm not kidding you about this FREAKING LIGHT SABERS.

So after Chris Pratt beats up all 200 people, he and woman Ron Howard find the child and try to escape with her and that's when they run into the evil guy.

Evil guy is like, "oh. Are you sure you want to take her with you? What if I told you . . . SHE'S A CLONE!"

This plot point makes absolutely. no. sense.

But apparently the reason why the Babe farmer and the guy who started Jurassic Park had their falling out was because the guy who started Jurassic Park didn't like that Babe farmer cloned his daughter after she died in the car accident.

Why this girl being a clone would have any bearing whatsoever on whether or not someone would want to raise her is beyond me.

OH AND I FORGOT TO MENTION that alien clone child sometimes and only sometimes has a British accent.

Then there's this whole to-do with the mutant dinosaur on the roof and the hero raptor ends up throwing the mutant through a ceiling so that it lands perfectly on the horns of a museum dinosaur, effectively killing it.

Then they all run underground again to dinosaur prison where they find out that poisonous gas is leaking and it's going to kill all of the dinosaurs unless they do something.

Woman Ron Howard holds her hand over a comically giant red button that will open all of the doors and let the dinosaurs out into the wild EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE FOUR LEVELS UNDERGROUND and she wants to do it but Chris Pratt is like "you can't let the dinosaurs out. They will kill everyone."

So she steps away from the button and hugs Chris Pratt.

Suddenly the doors open anyway and they all turn around and see clone girl with her hand on the button and then she says to them:

You need to brace yourself for this.

It's the best part of the whole movie.

Go pop some popcorn and come back.

I'll wait.

She looks them in the eyes, the camera moves in, the music swells, and she freaking says:

"I had to. [dramatic pause] They're alive. Like me."

You guys!

THE DINOSAURS ARE CLONES JUST LIKE HER AND THEY DESERVE TO LIVE AND SHE UNDERSTANDS THAT BECAUSE SHE JUST FOUND OUT THAT SHE'S A CLONE AND SO SHE CAN RELATE TO THE DINOSAURS.

WHAT THE FREAKING HELL.

YOU GUYS!

Meg let an uncontrollable laugh out the moment she said it. Her laugh was loud enough to draw stares from the couple sitting down the row from us.

She laughed so hard that I was worried it was going to induce labor.

IN ME.

We were both in the violent shakes for the next several minutes, trying to stifle our hysteria.

The dinosaurs run free and break into towns and villages and the zoo and there's this whole montage where a T. Rex and a lion are standing on opposing pride rocks taking turns roaring at each other and Jeff Goldblum's voice occasionally cuts in, saying things like "if the dinosaurs are not kept in check, there's no telling what they'll do" and the Jurassic Park music plays WHICH IS BLASPHEMY when held up against this putrid catastrophe of a cinematic misventure.

When the movie cut to the credits we both sat in silence for a moment.

Meg looked at me and simply said, "let's leave."

~It Just Gets Stranger