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Jurassic World Review
Jurassic World is on track to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest movie of all time, which just goes to show that people still love dinosaurs, even more than they love superhero's. Will Marvel take note and finally give us the Reptil movie we've all been waiting for...
Jurassic World is the Jaws of the Jurassic Park movies. In the first three films the dinosaurs were just being dinosaurs, and any carnage that ensued was down to our own human arrogance and stupidity (I mean, if someone unlocked all the lion, tiger and venomous snake cages in a zoo, things would get pretty damn ugly too. You wouldn't blame the animals, you'd blame the incompetence of the zoo keepers). Jurassic World is different. Here, the main dino menace isn't just doing what dino's do, it's doing what a genetically engineered cross between Mike Myers and Predator would do. Jaws wasn't just any normal shark, it was a fucking serial killer, and so is the Indominus Rex (a product of, well, human arrogance and stupidity).
The concept behind Jurassic World is that the park has been open and thriving for 10 years, but is seeing a slow decline in visitors. People are already sick of miracles it seems, so the clever girls decide to genetically engineer a bigger, badder, toothier dinosaur, the Indominus Rex. Needless to say this freak of nature escapes, and it's up to Chris Pratt's Raptor wrangler Owen Grady to stop it.
There are a lot of great ideas in Jurassic World that just aren't realized to their full potential. The idea of a fully functioning Jurassic Park that's been open for business for years is a brilliant one. Imagine Raptor's attacking a roller-coaster, a T-Rex chewing on a Ferris wheel, and keep imagining it because nothing that cool happens. Aside from establishing the admittedly beautifully realized Jurassic World in the first 40 minutes, we never really get to see the giant reptiles let loose in this futuristic Logan's Run-esque setting (not until the very end anyway). Instead, most of the film focuses on dinosaur shenanigans in the jungle, just like all the previous Jurassic Parks. It's an odd choice, but understandable. You can't have a murderous dino-monstrosity rampaging through a park populated with thousands of visitors and not have untold carnage and bloody death, and it's hard to get away with that and still earn yourself a PG-13 certificate.
The cleverest part of the movie is the meta aspect. People are less impressed with living dinosaurs than they were in 1992 so they have to come up with something bigger and badder to thrill the masses. Seeing the herd of Brachiosaurus in the original Jurassic Park was as breathtaking for us as it was for Dr Alan Grant, but special digital effects have come a long way since then. How do you recapture that magic when we now take photo realistic CGI for granted? Jurassic World doesn't answer that question, but tells us what En-Gen/the movie studios misguidedly believe the answer to be; give the people something bigger, louder, dumber. This is the smartest aspect of Jurassic World, and also it's downfall. It seems to be criticizing the bigger is better approach to movie sequels, and yet that's exactly the kind of movie sequel this is. Aside from Grady's Raptor minion's the real dinosaurs we know and love get very little screen time. This feels more like a Jurassic Park spin off than a true sequel (it should have been called Jurassic Park Anthology: Indominous Rex).
But fuck all that. What you really want to know is, how does the dino action hold up. Well, I have to say for all it's flaws I had a blast. It's dumb (why hire an ex-Navy SEAL to train Raptors? Wouldn't you hire a lion tamer or something?), it somewhat squanders a magnificent set up, none of the characters are likeable except for Pratt (not Owen Grady mind you, I mean Chris Pratt.) But this is a Jurassic Park movie, and at the end of the day it's all about the action, and in that respect, Jurassic World has the most exciting set pieces we've seen since the first movie. At times it seems like they took all the stand out scenes from the previous entries in the series and dialled them up to 11. Giant Carnivorous dinosaur chewing on vehicle to get at the yummy kids inside? Check. Raptor attack in long grass from The Lost World? Check. Pteranodon (flying dino's) attack from Jurassic Park III? Check. There's also the fact that the bigger badder T-Rex thing was already done in JPIII with the Spinosaurus Rex (although it didn't have ridiculous infra-red cloaking abilities I suppose).
There's nothing really new here (which is such a shame because I thought this was going to be West World with Dinosaurs, which would have been amazing) but it delivers as an incredibly entertaining dinosaurs run amok movie and that's really all that counts. It's just a pity it's not a little less prehistoric in the brains department.
Written by Richard O Connell |
(Picture: Marvel congratulates Jurassic World on becoming the new box office king)
Written by Richard O Connell |