Over twenty years
since Steven Spielberg wowed audiences with the first Jurassic Park, where the
world thought, for just a brief second, that Sam Neil was going o be the world’s
biggest star, we get treated to a fourth installment. A film that is desperate
to rid our memories of the lackluster Lost World (a.k.a. The T-Rex Takes
Manhattan) and abysmal third film (which admittedly I’ve only ever
half-watched). Does it succeed? Well.... yes and no.
Yes in the sense
that it is better than Jurassic Park III and most of The Lost World, but no
because the film is so reliant on reminding people of the previous films with
constant callbacks and references to the first film.
Set twenty-two
years after the first film we see the world’s worst parents send their two
young children off to visit their Auntie who runs Jurassic World, a place
that’s just one Black Fish documentary away from being shut down. The Aunt is
played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to be trapped in some other movie
where she’s a busy business chick who’s too busy doing business things to find
love or look after family; throw in Chris Pratt for a good measure of contrived
and forced romantic tension (and to fulfill his Indiana Jones quota on his way
to becoming the next Harrison Ford) and you’ve got your leads. The kids are
played by some forgettable teenager and the young one is played by Ty Simpkins,
the annoying brainy kid from Iron Man 3 who is now playing the annoying brainy
kid in Jurassic Park IV.
When a new
dinosaur is let loose on the park, it is up to Pratt and Howard along with a
whole bunch of red shirts to save the 20,000 plus dino-treats I mean
*cough-cough* paying customers. The film is filled with the standard
film-tropes of the modern-era which are handled better than most blockbusters,
but only providing you don’t think too hard. The film really starts to fall
apart once you start thinking about things like: Why with all this technology
can people not detect something has happened until a secondary character asks a
question that sets up the next scene? Why would you think that a damaged fence
leading to a place filled with dangerous dinosaurs is a perfectly acceptable
place to enter? Why would you not put in a safety device into your vehicles
preventing people from having free-roam of the park? Why would you put two kids
in the back of a van when you clearly have enough room in the front of the
vehicle? How the hell can she run in those heels? And so on and so forth.
There are some
funny moments, mostly coming from that guy from Let’s Be Cops but the rest is
very derivative because the characters are all one dimensional archetypes
including the ‘I’m bad because I’m a greedy business guy’, ‘I’m bad because I’m
an army general guy’ and the ‘I’m good because I’m the charming, rugged
good-looking one.’ Jurassic World has some big action set pieces that are
creative in a fun popcorn-moments kind of way, but mostly feel hollow due to
the reliance of CGI that just seems to be devoid of any weight or gravity. The
final climax just looks like a pixels vs pixels battle meanwhile the movie
itself pretty much summarises its whole purpose for existing in one of the
opening scenes, with a very meta-speech about convincing people to buy tickets
to a park by rehashing the same old ideas but with a bigger, more expensive,
non-sensical twist on the original.
The film aims for
the brilliance of Spielberg’s original but unfortunately, the best they could
achieve was Spielberg’s cheaper Mexican counterpart Señor Spielbergo.
Jurassic World gets Two out of Five Stars (one for each time my
Chris Pratt man-crush fluttered during the film)
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