Jurassic World

Jurassic Park didn’t just introduce revolutionary new visual effects, but used them superbly. Besides the awe-inspiring introductory scene and a few heartwarming Steven Spielberg moments, the director expertly staged high-tension sequences around the scarier creatures created for the film. The enclosed encounters with the velociraptors and the slow terror and sheer size of the T. rex were terrifying on screens big and small. It’s for that reason the movie still holds up as a classic, even though the effects it pioneered are now practically a given in major Hollywood productions. Its sequels never really captured that same sense of terror, and increasingly devolved into simplistic “dinosaurs chase people” B movies.

A few moments in Jurassic World come close to recapturing the original’s sense of dread, though don't sustain it for as long or as effectively. For the most part, despite apparently ignoring any previous entries in the series besides the first film, the picture goes in the same simplistic, cheap thrills direction of the earlier sequels. Not quite as successfully, I might add.

In the movie, the Costa Rican island where Jurassic Park took place is now a successful dinosaur zoo theme park. For the newest attraction, the same scientists who brought the prehistoric creatures back to life have spliced the genes of various species to create a hybrid super-dinosaur, the Indominus Rex. As is to be expected, the monster escapes its under-construction pen to wreak havoc on the island, only this time with thousands of tourists instead of just a handful of people.

Despite that, though, there is (disappointingly, if you ask me) no tourist feeding frenzy, for all but one or two action sequences take place in more secluded jungle areas. They’re mostly still entertaining, if a little fleeting (I’ll get to that in a minute). However, the Indominus Rex doesn’t instill a sense of awe like a great digital creature could. This isn’t so much the fault of the film itself as the fact that too much was given away in the trailers. I hate to fault the movie for that, but the fact of the matter is there won’t be many surprises unless the viewer somehow managed to not see any of the picture’s marketing over the past many months (and given its extent, that would have required renunciation of most TV and the Internet).

The problem isn’t so much the dinosaur action, though, but the fact that there’s not a whole lot of it, and most of it is over quite quickly. Much of the runtime is instead allotted to the park itself and the human characters. In regards to the former, a theme park isn’t nearly as cool to look at when it’s obviously just a visual effect. As for the latter, the series has never exactly been a narrative triumph, but the original at least had a reasonable amount of intellectual content. The science might have been inaccurate, but the moral discussion of that science was interesting, yet never overshadowed the dinosaurs that the audience came to see. 

Jurassic World, however, consists mostly of plots and characters you’ve seen before: the workaholic who can’t find time for her family (Bryce Dallas Howard), the hunter with a camaraderie with animals that no one else understands (Chris Pratt), their inevitable romance, two more kids in peril (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins), and the mad military scientist who wants to turn the dinos into weapons (Vincent D'Onofrio). That last subplot in particular is overly complex, not to mention that the logic casting D’Onofrio as the villain shrivels and dies when he turns out to be correct, at least more so than the “heroes” in the picture. Pratt and Howard at least keep up the levity, but it’s not as fun as further dinosaur encounters would have been.

But, in spite of all the time that could have been devoted to more dino chases and destruction, the scenes that are never fail to entertain, if not wow the way Spielberg did 22 years ago. There’s even a highly satisfying dino battle toward the end that will thrill even the sourest, most cynical sequel-fatigued viewer. It’s an entirely watchable movie, not as good as Spielberg’s first sequel The Lost World, but ranking higher than the dopey Jurassic Park III.