Jurassic World Review

UPDATE: Having watched the film again and it being a couple of years, I no longer like this film and think it is very mediocre. I still find the last 3rd with the T-Rex kind of enjoyable, but the rest of the film is both boring and stupid. Never bothered with Fallen Kingdom and don't care to see it. From what I heard it was even worse, so I dodged a bullet. 

Jurassic World is set 22 years after the first one, and the film seems to ignore the events of Lost World and III, so in the new timeline they don’t exist, and Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning theme park that was original envision by John Hammond, but as we know from the first that plan went pair shaped. The theme park is called Jurassic World, because it’s much much bigger than the first one, and features more in it. They also decided to rename because they thought it might be in poor taste to name it Jurassic Park since that was the park that many people working on it got killed in. Visitor rates are declining, as people aren’t as impressed with dinosaurs anymore, so new species of dinosaurs are created to re-spark interest for the park. One in particular is a hybrid dinosaur called the Indominus rex. Things go horrible, as he gets out, so the people working at the park have to try getting every visitor in the park to safety, and then trying to find a way to stop the rampaging dinosaur.

I’m going to be honest I wasn’t looking forward to this film, as I believed that you can’t do a sequel to Jurassic Park without it being almost exactly like original, and with this film it is kinda, but with more people. However, once I got past the 40 minutes of set up and exposition, which I found fairly boring and uninteresting for the most part, I got into the this film. This movie delivers on the spectacle, and is entertaining for the most part. The park looks awesome. The amount of detail that goes into the park is outstanding. I was really interested in seeing the park operate. They do do something different with the film, which I liked very much, unlike Lost World and III, which basically do what the first did, but less interesting and more stupid.

The action set pieces are filmed really well, and it has good special effects for the most part (the beginning of the film has some poor CG). It’s not as impressive as the first, as the first film had so little CGI, as most of it was animatronics or puppets, so that gave the first a more real feeling, as the T-Rex from the first you were actually seeing a real life animatronic, with CGI added to it in some of the more wider scenes, or more difficult scenes, as in a scene you couldn’t do practical even if you tried. The first Jurassic Park is still a landmark in dinosaur special effects, and they still hold up, and it's maybe sad to say that the effects in the first look better than the effects in this film. The effects in this are clearly CG, and that’s fine, because the CG looked good in my opinion for the most part, although obvious, but I’m a big fan of practical effects, as I think it makes a film look more authentic, and I would have loved if they built dinosaur animatronics.

The tension I thought was lacking, as the first one is one of the great examples of building up tension in a film, as when the power gets cut, you see our main characters sitting in the car, and then all of a sudden you hear a thud, and it gets louder and louder, and the camera slowly reveals the T-Rex, and it’s a gripping moment, and what follows is equally gripping. You feel the danger and tension in the first film, and you are gripping your seat worried that the characters might not make it out alive.

On to the characters. Our 2 main characters are Claire [played by Bryce Dallas Howard] and Owen [played by Chris Pratt], and they are likable [well Claire has some poor characterization, but I’ll touch on that when I’m discussing Claire’s character], especially Owen, and what’s interesting about him is that he’s an expert in training Velociraptors, and you see the bond that he has developed with the Velociraptors, and it’s the best part of the film in my opinion. He’s a lot more toned down than Chris Pratt's characters generally are, but he still has some funny quips in the film, and you totally believe Chris Pratt as an action star. Guardians of the Galaxy was not a fluke, Chris Pratt is the real deal.

Claire is the operations manager and her nephews [played by Ty Simpskin and Nick Robinson] are supposed to be spending the weekend with her, but she is rather busy and her personal assistant looks after them, and then they are on one of the rides when the Indominus rex is loose, so her and Owen have to get to them before the Indominus rex eats them. She is interesting, but there are also parts where she’s a very stereotypical female character. She does have an actual arc though, so I’ll give her that, as she starts off very business focused, and then she becomes more concerned when her nephews might be in danger. It’s just some of the writing for her character bugged me.

The rest of the characters aren’t that well written, and are just there to spout exposition. Vincent D’Onofrio is a fantastic actor, and I love him as Kingpin on Netflix’s Daredevil series, as he does a great job of fleshing out and humanizing Kingpin, but here he is the head of security, and he wants to use the Velociraptors Owen is training as weapons, and the whole movie he is just a one note bad guy, and not an interesting one. A waste of a very capable actor in my opinion.

None of the characters are as interesting as Alan [Sam Neill], Malcolm [Jeff Goldblum], Elle [Laura Dern] and Hammond [Richard Attenborough] in the first film. The interaction with them is great to watch in the first film. Here you don’t really care about the overall interaction between characters. You also aren’t as worried if something happens to them. Maybe Claire and Owen, but that’s it. The kids in this are also not as likeable as Tim and Lex in the first film. The kids are boring. They get way too much screentime, and the scenes just don’t work for me.

Colin Trevorrow does a fantastic job with directing the spectacle and action set pieces for his first time directing a big budget summer blockbuster. John Williams score is used sparingly, and I got goosebumps when I heard the familiar score. It’s such a beautiful score. The score by Michael Giacchino is great, and fits the film’s scope really well.

The ending to this film is one of the best things about the film, as it’s really well handled and very entertaining. There's a lot of things I think they could have improved about the film, like making characters more likeable, improving some of the writing and logical issues, but the ending was one of the best things about any Jurassic Park film, as it was awesome.

The film is certainly bigger in scope and scale than the first film, but it’s not as intimate or as impactful, and the writing is certainly not as strong, but it’s ok, as just shove popcorn [or whatever you like eating when you go cinema] into your mouth and have fun with it. Overall Jurassic World is fun and entertaining, and the sequel to the first that we never got. It’s a popcorn film that is best seen on the big screen, and if you are a fan of Jurassic Park you should be satisfied, unless you think about the plot too much.