Jurassic World review

Director: Colin Trevorrow
Running time: 2 hours and 5 minutes
Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Irrfan Khan, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Jake Johnson.


I loved the first Jurassic Park, I still remember the craze around it. The sticker albums, the toys, the McDonald's tie in cups. It was big and loud, but It was a rare blockbuster movie which was more than the sum of its parts. The technology used was revolutionary, the characters were all interesting, and it had some genuine scares.

Neither of the sequels did much for me, although I don't dislike them as ferociously as some other 'Jurassic' fans do. I kind of like The Lost World, the first half is decent, and if you turn off half your brain, take it for what it is, Jurassic Park 3 is passable entertainment.

So going into Jurassic World, I had very little expectations, sure the trailers were good, and they brought back a bit of nostalgia. But I thought they gave far too much away, and the movie looked like it was just going to be a dumb, cgi 'Dinosaur on the loose' movie, (which it more or less turned out to be).

You'll know more about my final views if you read on, but the movie is decent and not much more, it's everything that you expected it to be.

Premise:

Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by John Hammond. After 10 years of operation and visitor rates declining, in order to fulfill a corporate mandate, a new attraction is created to re-spark visitors' interest, which backfires horribly (IMDB SOURCE).

So what's good?

The first 30-45 minutes of the movie is a little slow, it allows the movie to build up, and the audience to marvel at the Island of Isla Nublar. It's nice to see the park finally open, as a living, breathing environment. We see the many attractions through the eyes of the two teenagers, the gyrosphere scene is very cool, as well as the first scene in which we see the Mosasaurus. The control room scenes give a great sense of urgency to the story, and make Jurassic World a believable place that is alive.

The action, while predictable and little generic, is on the whole, a lot of fun. The finale is particularly special, as the I-Rex comes to her demise. Speaking of the I-Rex, I actually really liked the design, as well as its role as the movie's antagonist. Although its present is very contrived, I found the hybrid dinosaur menacing, and at times terrifying.

None of the characters have much dimension to them, all are reasonably one note, but I liked Jake Johnson's character, who brings some comic relief to the movie. And I also rather liked Bryce Dallas Howard as the corporate drone.

What's not good?

As I previously stated, the characters are forgettable, and all rather incidental to the story. Which is the opposite to any memorable movie, let alone Jurassic Park, where each of the characters were interesting, and had a purposeful motivation and story arc to the narrative of the movie. You'd be hard pressed to name more than one or two characters after seeing Jurassic World.

Some of The dinosaur cgi is noticeably bad, bad in the sense that it doesn't look or blend well with the actors on screen, a perfect example is the scene (featured prominently in the trailers) in which Chris Pratt's character is standing his ground in front of the three raptors.

While we finally see the park open in all its glory, it still feels like a passing background, the locations are there briefly and then gone. Aside from the control room, there are no moments in which the audience really get a feel for the environments. None of it is memorable like the visitor centre or the raptor cage in Jurassic Park.

The action is fun but nothing spectacular, nothing that really left me on the edge of my seat.

Verdict:

Jurassic World is a decent movie and nothing much more. To its credit it doesn't try to be, it's better than what you might have feared, but nowhere near as good as it could have been. Those who really love it seem to do so because it brings back memories of the first one, which has some truth in it, it does feel like a proper sequel to the first, and I'd rank it as a slightly better movie than The Lost World, and far superior to the third movie.



 6/10