Colin Trevorrow (2015)
Jurassic World is a painfully vulgar movie.
I realized that I was in for something that would at least partially be quite unpleasant during a moment that I feel perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the movie. When we get to the island, Williams’ brilliant score from the first Jurassic Park starts playing. This time though, instead of having a magical moment that reveals to us for the first time the amazingly rendered dinosaurs, we are gloriously introduced to…lobby rooms, escalators and aerial shots of the city portion of the park. Gaze at the majestic hotels ! Ugh.
The movie plagiarises takes inspiration from the first three instalments of the franchise repeatedly.
One of the group of people we follow are two siblings who, like all children in American movies, have an apparent irresistible death wish that is so entirely irritating it makes you root for it to be granted by whatever merciless gods watch over this particular film. The main antagonist of World is an augmented superdinosaur like in episode three ; there is a ptaerodactyl cage scene ; the kids get stuck in a vehicle while the I-Rex insists on breaking through the windows to say hi ; I could go on.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Jurassic World is thoroughly uninspired. It’s great to draw from the earlier movies but it just does it so badly. It either unabashedly copies or goes bigger. There are no clever twists, no originality. It doesn’t add anything and relies so much on the trilogy’s reputation.
Okay, there is that T2 like thing where a previous movie’s villains become allies to the main characters. I did like how the raptors never become fully domesticated and there is always the risk they might turn on you. But it wasn’t enough ; so much more could have been made around that. More than just bringing in the T-Rex to ram the point home.
The film is semi aware of its flaws and there are some meta elements to it but nothing that justifies the over the top nature of the whole exercise like Kingsman did. Chris Pratt’s character says something to the effect of « dinosaurs aren’t spectacular enough » at some point. No, they’re not. Not for the tourists of Jurassic World nor for the directors and producers of today’s Hollywood. Some of the blame belongs to the public you might say, but here I think it belongs with the people who made this. No attempts at imagination are made ; the movies way of achieving relevance after the 14 hiatus is to explode the scale of everything. More guns, more dinosaurs, more deaths, a bigger park, a bigger T-Rex. The I-Rex is so absurdly dangerous it looks like a superhero designed by a washed out comic book writer : there is nothing more to it than an accumulation of powers. If the public has become blasé about giant murdering lizards it’s the filmmakers’ job to find new ways to make them interesting. This is lazy.
There are many other ludicrous elements to Jurassic World : the executive who storms into the dinosaur infested jungle in high heels ; the raptor trainer who doesn’t want the raptors to be used by the army ; the impossibly insolent low-level security man-who-looks-at-computers ; and the plot holes. So many plot holes. If this movie had been named by Inarritu it would have the second title The Unexpected Ubiquity of Human Error and Complete Incompetence. Bloody hell.
The movie is not utterly bad though. Pratt’s performance is adequate. His swagger is spot most of the time but there are instances where he seems to have left it in his other pants. Some of the action scenes are entertaining, though not enough to justify the film’s length. And some other stuff. Let’s just say I didn’t completely hate everything and liked some things and leave it at that.
5/10 – Not a complete failure
Pretensiously Yours 
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