Twenty-two years later and dinosaurs are still cool. We didn’t need another Jurassic Park movie to tell us that, but it’s here anyway. The park is finally open and now, known as Jurassic World, it is playing host to tens of thousands of visitors a day who come to marvel at the prehistoric creatures brought back to life by godless science.
However, when dinosaurs just aren’t enough to meet the profit projections, the scientists at Jurassic World created a genetically modified hybrid called the Indominus Rex that is bigger, meaner, scarier and smarter.
Yeah, there’s no way anything can go wrong this time.
Although I enjoyed this romp, full of nostalgia and action, it does have a problem with its first half in that it doesn’t exactly explode out of the gate which is weird considering that we’re actually on the island before the ten minute mark.
It’s laden with a couple of irritating child actors playing irritating children with irritating problems. Gray, the younger child, is super duper excited to be at the park and practically bouncing off the walls and being very obnoxious about it. His brother, Zack, is basically just a big d-bag who needs his butt kicked. For a while, I thought that Jurassic World was doing some sort of commentary on complacency but it just turned out that Zack was d-bag.
Also, their parents might be getting a divorce which is, I suppose, supposed to inject some sort of real world drama but all it really does is burn five minutes of screen time. Seriously, that’s it.
I was sort of rooting for the dinosaurs.
I was also praying for the big chop from Dallas Bryce Howard’s character, Beth, who plays an weirdly awkward aunt for the two boys who invites them to the park in the first place, but then doesn’t make time for them because of reasons and the script needed them to be separated.
You’ve also got Chris Pratt playing Chris Pratt as a dinosaur trainer working to domesticate the velociraptors which is just as insanely awesome as it sounds and looks.
So, yeah… the human characters and their boring human problems are the major anchor on this movie. The park itself, though, is a pretty awesome place. I loved the world and appreciated the real life digs and playful pokes at places like Disneyland and Universal Studios. The Jimmy Fallon cameo is pretty doggone inspired.
Thankfully, most of these problems are rooted in the front half of the movie. The back half is a very well done action movie with an incredibly impressive third act that is sure to have fans of the first movie smiling in approval.
Heck, though… you can’t sit there and not smile when a pack of raptors are loosed onto an island to hunt down a killer dino. You just can’t. It’s just so cool.
Jurassic World has its problems, but given time it overcomes them. True, a more skillfully made movie would have avoided them all together or at least hid them a little better, but as a sequel to Jurassic Park, this movie does some clever things with the toys that Steven Spielberg left for them and I really think that’s something that, in an internet quick to criticize without actually putting any thought into things, people have overlooked.
Jurassic World is a clever little sequel and, honestly, the first of the Jurassic sequels to actually feel like a worthy sequel at all. Nostalgia, action, and humor are all around once you get past the dull human characters and the movie cleverly sets up a new direction for future movies that won’t retread what’s already happened.
It’s more fun than a T-Rex loose on a goat farm.
Jason Gaston 