JURASSIC WORLD
DIRECTOR: Colin Trevorrow
CAST: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Irrfan Khan, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, BD Wong, Omar Sy
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG V
RUNNING TIME: 125 minutes
RATING: ***
THIS WILD adrenaline-fuelled romp through scary dinoland is great fun. Coming off one lowkey indie offering (Safety Not Guaranteed), director Colin Trevorrow has proved able to the task of a huge CGI-driven blockbuster meant for the big screen.
He keeps it moving along, giving us characters to empathise with to take us on a scary adventure and enough science technobabble for context to make the story seem a bit deeper than just ‘”ooooh, aaaah, scream, run”.
Despatched by their doting parents to visit aunty Claire (Howard), who runs the new Jurassic World dinosaur theme park, brothers Gray (Simkins) and Zach (Robinson) get the holiday of a lifetime. It starts with the ooooh and the aaaah, but then when the dinosaurs escape comes the running and screaming we have learnt to expect.
First, though, they have to make a connection with very busy, corporate-minded Aunty Claire who palms the boys off on an assistant more interested in her cellphone.
The brothers give us the two versions of the audience – the younger, curious brother who loves dinosaurs and wants to see something new and the pretend-jaded, nose glued to his cellphone older teen.
As the strains of John Williams’s now iconic theme are referenced, young Gray worms his way to the front of a train to see those iconic gates (from Jurassic Park) open to the huge holiday resort. Keen-eyed Jurassic fans will pick up all sorts of loving references to the trilogy, in addition to some glaring continuity faults which prove to be part of the fun.
Jurassic World fulfils on the epic theme park ride effect promised, but not delivered, by Tomorrowland. Granted, you also see all the spectacular bits in the trailer (as you did in Tomorrowland), but once you are in this park it is jaw-droppingly cool, evocative of that wow feeling you got 22 years ago when the gates first opened and you saw realistic, living, breathing dinosaurs for the first time. The park wasn’t open in the first trilogy, but now these kids get to ride around in a free-roaming gyrosphere and explore on our behalf.
“Face it, no one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore,” says Claire though as she talks about the marketability of forthcoming attractions. She represents the management interested in the bottom line but even she isn’t on the same page as BD Wong’s Dr Henry Wu from the original trilogy. The good doctor is more interested in cooking up new monsters which introduces one of the themes from the original trilogy – just because we can do it, should we?
Enter Owen Grady (Pratt) who comes down firmly on the side of “dinosaurs are animals and you should respect that” which puts him in a different camp to his immediate superior Hoskins (D’Onofrio), who wants to breed the dinosaurs as a biological weapon.
Once the animals get loose Claire and Owen set off in search of the (plotwise conveniently) missing brothers and there is a running joke about her outfit and high heels which cause some of the biggest continuity faults.
The huge number of visitors to the theme park are attacked by pterodactyls but despite this the potential for mayhem is contained and corralled in neat CGI fashion. The vast masses conveniently remain in the background, foregrounding the rampaging dinosaurs.
In a neat homage to the passage of time, the velociraptors, the bad guys in the first film, are now turned into Owen’s sidekicks, tamed just enough to be communicative, but not necessarily friendly.
Mostly the action centres on Claire, Owen and the children who scrape and run their way from one disastrous encounter to the next. The bad guys (the ones who want to exploit this scary situation for their own ends) get chomped in inventive fashion by dinosaurs, but we keep on rooting for the intrepid quartet right till the end.
If you liked Jurassic Park, you will like this.