I should thank Jurassic World because if nothing else it kept me from watching my beloved Cleveland Cavaliers get absolutely decimated last night in Game 4 of the Finals. Well, the series isn’t over and there will always be next year, he says all the while feeling his soul dying and all his hopes and dreams vanishing forever. But alas! That’s not what you came here to read about. We’re talking about movies, and Jurassic World is just that!
The film begins twenty years after the events of the original Jurassic Park and more or less completely ignores everything that happened in The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3. From here you should all be able to guess the plot. The park is now open and attendance is up, but somehow people are getting bored of dinosaurs and they powers that be at InGen decide to build a new gene-spliced creature to be sponsored by Verizon that will surely put butts in seats. Sure enough, the super dino, Indominus Rex, gets loose, fucks shit up, and it’s up to raptor trainer Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Jurassic World manager Bryce Dallas Howard (Spider-Man 3) to stop it before it eats everyone on Isla Nublar.
From a purely technical standpoint, Jurassic World delivers. Director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) has a good visual eye and give us what will surely become iconic images, such as the aquatic dinosaur eating the shark that we all saw in the trailer. The script has good pacing except for some minor blips, mostly involving the two child characters (what is it with Jurassic Park movies and their obsession with always having annoying fucking kids running around?), although it does have some MASSIVE logical holes with regards to the military’s interest in raptors. The acting is spot-on, especially Pratt who turns in a dramatic role that proves he has the chops to match his comedic prowess. Vincent D’Onofrio (Marvel’s Daredevil) as the movie’s human villain is a bit too mustache-twirly for my tastes which only was only compounded by the madness of his and the military’s plot (but that’s a relatively minor complaint in a cast that absolutely sells it).
Perhaps the most startling thing about Jurassic World then is that it’s almost devoid of originality and wonder. The later point isn’t really its fault; when you’re going up against an original by Steven Spielberg, the Master of Awe, you’re never going to be able to achieve that sensation quite the way that he can. But with regards to originality I just wish that there was something more there. The plot is so similar to that of the previous films (they even visit the Welcome Center from the first movie), the characters continually reference “the old park”, and hell, even that great dino-eats-shark shot gets re-used in the very same movie!
Maybe I just got my hopes up a little too high. Maybe I was blinded by my love of Jurassic Park and brought too much of that baggage into this movie. Still, this is a franchise built on instilling in us all that sense of child-like wonder (huh, maybe that’s why all the kids? Eh, that’s beyond the purview of this article) and while Jurassic World is quality in almost every measurable way, its the lack of this one crucial element that leads to its downfall and makes it so disappointing. Maybe it’s too much for me to ask a movie to make me feel the way I did when I was 6 years old and saw a dinosaur on screen for the first time, but goddamn it I need to keep hoping! After all, the Cavaliers aren’t going to help me much in that area.
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