Jurassic World
(2015 review)

4 outta 5

As the fourth instalment in the series, Jurassic World does a different thematic take on Jurassic Park: the first is a classic horror movie, Lost World is a riff on King Kong, and Jurassic Park III is B-movie cheese.  With World, there’s a subversive theme of commercialization creeping into the dinosaur world which is a fun comment on branding synergy obsessed mega-corporations. Sometimes World is a nifty expansion of the concept and other times it copy and pastes beats from the original but it’s all executed with flair.  As there should be in a Jurassic movie there’s the iconic theme music, some philosophical musing, and various dinosaurs eating screaming people.

Over two decades after the original Jurassic Park ended in disaster, the island of dinosaurs is now Jurassic World, a functional amusement park open to the public.   Kids Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) are visiting Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) who runs the park.   She pawns them off on her assistant because Claire is busy with the owner, Masrani (Irrfan Khan), who wants to see the park’s latest creation, the giant sized, scary, cool, gene-spliced monster Indominus Rex.   Meanwhile, park employee Owen (Chris Pratt) is training the vicious cunning Velociraptors, which gets the attention of Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) who wants to use trained Raptors for military applications.   Things go haywire when the Indominus Rex breaks out and the park is overrun with hungry dinosaurs. Now Claire has to save her nephews and get Owen to dispatch the Indominus Rex before everyone at the park ends up dinosaur lunch. 

Jurassic World balances precariously between loving homage and outright theft.  The opening scenes of the fully operational Jurassic World are pretty amazing with a ton of references for fans (check out the quick cameo of Mr. DNA!).  It’s set up like a bona-fide modern amusement park, complete with corporate sponsorships, baby dinosaur rides and a giant underwater dinosaur water show with a front row “splash zone”.  There’s a gyroscope driving ride (video-hosted by Jimmy Fallon) where people can be amongst the beasts.  The two kids end up trapped in the gyroscope and attacked which is pretty much a shameless lift of the T.Rex attack from the original.  Some of World isn’t even stolen from Park; the Raptors as bioweapons subplot is straight from Aliens, complete with a bit where a group of mercs are killed while people in operations helplessly watch as the mercs life signs flat-line. 

In Jurassic Park III the characters were menaced by a dinosaur bigger than the T.Rex and the same basic thing happens here with the gene-spliced hybrid monster, the Indominus Rex.   The Indominus (sponsored by Verizon Wireless, one of the movie’s better jabs.) has a really menacing introduction but after a while it is basically just a bigger, meaner, uglier T-Rex.  Even at one point the classic T.Rex is stuck in a losing battle to show how awesome Indomnius is.  

Pratt quips throughout capably and he has a really cool “working relationship” with the Velociraptors.  The fact that a human has trained Raptors like circus lions is an interesting development, especially in the third act when the Indominus Rex and Raptors interact.  Howard plays a stuffy exec that learns to care for her young charges which is unoriginal because it’s the exact same character arc Alan Grant had in the first film.  Her interplay with Pratt’s Owen is spirited yet cliché ridden because she’s the stuck-up one and he’s fun guy.  But both Pratt and Howard elevate the rote materiel through sheer movie star charisma.  

Simpkins and Robinson as the two perpetually in jeopardy kids are kind of annoying but there has yet to be a Jurassic instalment where the kids aren’t annoying so it’s par for the course.  They do have one of the most fan-service-y moments where they find the wreckage of the original Jurassic Park visitor centre which is fun even though not a lot interesting stuff happens there.  The only returning series veteran is B.D. Wong’s Dr. Wu, who had a small part as a doctor in the original and has a slightly bigger part here as a holdover who may have taken dino gene-splicing too far.  As the company man who wants to exploit the Raptors, D’Onofrio delivers a few evil monologues and his final rant is awesomely abbreviated.

Jurassic World doesn’t have quite the slow burn the first had, the dinosaur chaos starts pretty early here, but all of the action scenes in World are really well done.  A standout is when flying dinosaurs descend upon a packed group of park guests is incredibly kinetic and messy and the finale multi-dinosaur fracas is intense and epic.  Directed by Colin Trevorrow (his second film after the small indie Safety Not Guaranteed) this movie has a lush look and a dark sense of humour that makes a good companion to Steven Spielberg’s film. 

There’s no way Jurassic World was going to be as good as Jurassic Park, however that’s almost unfair because that’s one of Spielberg’s best.  But this is a pretty great sequel and provides the requisite dinosaurs chasing after humans that one would expect.  It may crib a bit liberally from the series history but it’s still a really entertaining ride.