Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (Season 2) Review

 Alright! Today I am reviewing the second season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, an animated TV show set in the world of Jurassic Park that takes place during and right after the Jurassic World movie. 

This is, by far, my most well-timed post. My review of season one came out on Dec. 29th, and then the second season dropped on the 22nd, and here I am, reviewing it, and publishing it on February 9th. That's like, four weeks of completely serendipitous content! Very nice! 

The first season of Camp Cretaceous coasted by on a shocking amount of brutal dinosaur violence, entertaining set pieces, and Bumpy the baby Ankylosaurus. The detractors were the characters, character designs, and basically anything that wasn't the three things I listed as pros. 

I regret to inform you that the second season of Camp Cretaceous only has one of those redeeming factors: Bumpy. The violence and brutal dinosaurs are kept to a minimum, and more focus was placed on the human characters. The human characters who are just the broadest corporate-driven Gen-Z stereotypes you can imagine: Influencer, body-positive, rich jerk, athlete try hard, and frail nerd. They are painful to watch, and even harder to listen to. Not much effort went into characters, dialogue, or character designs. 

The first four episodes take some of the biggest leaps that the Jurassic Park franchise has ever done: Five characters, all of these 13/14-year-olds are somehow able to survive on an island filled with dinosaurs who want to eat them while making some of the most absolutely stupid decisions of all time.

 

Minor spoilers for the entire plot of this season, but I can promise there's nothing here that will shock you, and no story you'll get invested in enough to care about spoilers. The series begins with the group leaving a place filled with tall buildings, lockable doors, a huge amount of leftover food, and that would most likely be the first place rescuers would check, and go hang out in the woods (Where the dinosaurs roam freely and can easily sneak up on you). 

Once these children leave the shelter of concrete buildings, they go and build a treehouse! Except... all of them suck at building. Between the five of them, one has a sprained ankle, one is recklessly incompetent and spends an entire episode getting out of building the treehouse, one is a short, fat girl, one is a skinny nerd who plays video games, and one of them is an influencer. These... are not the best people to build a treehouse. And the idea that they were able to create such an impressive, multi-story, structurally sound treehouse is laughable. 

I wouldn't even trust them to make the ladder.

Also, how is that one kid still overweight? I'm pretty sure this season takes place over a month and they abandoned their food source to go live in the woods. They should not be eating well enough to hit the 2000+ calories needed to maintain weight. In fact, many of them should have gone through dehydration and severe physical changes. 

But these are just things that are minor plot holes to get a cool location and kid-friendly designs packed in. The actual, illogical, hilariously stupid, laugh out loud moment comes in episode two when the kids decide to free dinosaurs that were left stuck in cages. It's not terrible when they're freeing triceratops and stegosauruses, but then they get to the Baryonyx - a vicious carnivore beast - and the kids decide that since they freed the herbivores, they should also.... free the dinosaur that wants to eat them. Why? Because it... it... has a family...

My stomach hurt from laughing at this episode. It genuinely hurt me. 

Pro Tip: 
If you are trying to survive on an island full of dinosaurs that want to eat you, do not release them from cages that keep you and your loved ones safe.

But, after these craptastic bores of episodes, we get to episode five: Brave. Brave was a flashback episode centered entirely around Ben and his transformation from a petite nerd into a hunky loner. This was a fantastic episode. I don't even care that it disrupted the flow of the season, or that it is skippable in the overall arc of the season, but let's consider this: The entire season is skippable and Brave is the only episode worth watching. 

This is surprisingly well-written television. Ben, after "dying," spends his time trying not to go insane with the mundaneness of survival, figuring out how to eat food, make weapons, and even singlehandedly takes down a Carnotaurus. And it has little dialogue! It's almost entirely visual storytelling! And its status as above-average television in a below-average season makes it all the better! Utterly fantastic episode. 

This was far better than Camp Cretaceous has any right to be.

After the brief high of episode five, we get the rest of the season (3 episodes). Even with Ben as part of the regular roster now, the show still sucks hard. It introduces more stereotypes that go by the names of Tiff, Hap, and Mitch, which I had to look up because I am not remembering anyone's names. These were just more of the "twist" villains that want to use the dinosaurs for personal gain from the Jurassic Park franchise because we've never seen that before... definitely not Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park, Peter Ludlow from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Vic Hoskins from Jurassic World, Eli Mills from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, or last season's birthday cake guy. So I was glad they were bringing something new to the table. 

And once those bad guys are defeated, the season just ends. No payoffs, no resolutions, just nothing.

Wow... an adult in Jurassic Park is secretly evil? Who'd a thunk it.

The second season of Camp Cretaceous was a huge letdown from the first. Instead of tossing in shockingly brutal dinosaur killings, this one chooses to focus on characters - terrible, terrible characters. And the season has only one good episode. That's just embarrassing. 

The entire season should have been like Brave - All the characters wisening up. They were left for dead on an island full of carnivores that want to eat them and almost have several times. They needed to mature, they needed to all become cool outcasts like Ben. But if anything, they got more childish. They begin shirking basic chores that would help them survive. They let dinosaurs out of cages. They abandon tall, lockable concrete buildings to go live with the dinosaurs. They're all stupid, and by the end I really, really wanted the dinosaurs to eat them, even more so than I did last season.

Overall, I give Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (Season 2) a 2/10. "Camp Cretaceous' second season is filled with incomprehensible logic, terrible characters that it focuses far too much time on, and a lack of genuine interest. But Brave was a really good episode, I'll give it that."

As much as I love this, a singular episode cannot carry an entire season.