Jurassic World

Being at the perfect age for it when it came out, I loved Jurassic Park. When the home release came out I watched it over and over. I collected the merchandise, much of which I still have. I read the original novel and played the awful video games. I really, really wanted to be Tim.

The sequels were another matter. I saw them in cinemas and never wanted to see them again. The third was better than the second. I can’t get over the girl defeating the velociraptor with a gymnastics routine.

Jurassic World comes after a long enough gap to feel like a franchise reboot. It was nice to have a single original cast member, and some nods to the old locations and technology (even Mr. DNA), but Jurassic World was something different: less serious, less intense and much more cartoonish, but certainly compared with the original sequels, very enjoyable.

22 years after the original park closed, whatever Hammond wished, it became a functional theme park. Of course, the novelty faded, and the park creators had to resort to making bigger and scarier dinosaurs – splicing genes to create whole new species. Meanwhile, a project seeking to tame – or at least train – velociraptors has drawn the attention of military bodies, via the shady body inGen from the first film.

Disaster strikes when the genetically-created dinosaur Indominus Rex cleverly escapes its paddock and starts a rampage, exacerbated by the CEO trying to play the hero. Chris Pratt’s character Owen, who has been raising velociraptors in an attempt to train them, has to sort things out, and take the park’s operations manager into the park to rescue her young nephews. Pratt is able to play the meatheaded leading man character with an impressive level of likeability, and the kid from Insidious manages to be much cuter as the somewhat wimpy little kid Grey.

The film has quite a few misfires. There needed to be some peril to the public, but the scene with flying dinosaurs, many of which look really stupid in an attempt to push the ‘genetic engineering’ angle, is far too video-game. It’s also bizarre how the kids have almost no reaction to seeing their babysitter die horribly. Sure, she was annoying and uncaring, but they were completely indifferent to her losing her life? The main antagonist’s final scene was paced horribly, taking a sudden turn that rang extremely hollow. And while there’s an obvious attempt to show Claire, the operation manager, growing from workaholic, emotionless, sheltered white-collar stiff to badass feminist icon who can keep up with the boys in her heels, but the change mostly comes too slowly and only through the intervention or direct influence of a man, and a super duper manly one, so I can’t exactly say that was successful.

There’s a lot the original film does very well that this one doesn’t. Almost all the characters in that first one are very well-drawn. Here, not so much. Take the older brother – his character seems to be that he likes girls a lot, and other than that he’s got next to no personality. The first film also mixed action with suspense. In fact, with tight corridors and dark, rainy nights, suspense was the most important part. Here, there’s next to none, just all-out action, usually with weightless CG dinosaurs.

But on the plus side, there’s a lot of entertainment factor, the mysterious charm of Chris Pratt and a fun – if very contrived – showdown at the end. It was perhaps not what the hype claimed it would be, but I don’t regret going to see it.