Director: Colin
Trevorrow
Starring: Chris
Pratt, Bryce Dallas-Howard, Irrfan Khan, Vincent D’Onofrio and B.D. Wong
In A Few Words…:
Jurassic World, bigger and more ambitious than Jurassic Park, is a theme park
showing off genetically-constructed dinosaurs one moment, and a killing ground
the next, when the latest creation escapes and terrorises guests.
Kitch’s Rating: 9.5/10
It’s sometime in the present, and brothers Zach and Gray
Mitchell are being shipped off to visit their aunt, Claire Dearing
(Dallas-Howard) who is the operations manager at a resort-island off the coast
of Costa Rica: Jurassic World.
Apparently, people don’t learn things these days. I mean,
after one failed attempt on Isla Nublar and two more incidents on neighbouring
Isla Sornor, people are still seeing big dollar signs when they imagine a theme
park full of dinosaurs instead of, you know, the carnage that ensued in all three
prior circumstances.
So, twenty years after the original theme park was a
non-starter after the group led by Hammond and Dr Alan Grant was mostly eaten
alive, they’ve tried again, paying homage to John Hammond and bankrolled by
eccentric businessman Simon Masrani (Khan). It’s bigger and better than ever,
with all manner of resort facilities, a giant monorail loop, more merchandise
than you can poke a stick at, and more dinosaurs than ever before. My personal
favourite was the Mosasaurus, a giant water-borne creature who, in one of the
most exciting scenes in the film, leaps out of the water to swallow whole a
shark – surely a nod to Jaws, another Spielberg film. The visuals right across
the board are spectacular.
The park has been a money-spinner, but as Claire indicates
early on, the idea of boring old dinosaurs is getting old. Visitor numbers are
down. They need something to bring people back through the gates. That
something, we are soon to find out, is a new dinosaur that’s scarier than any ever
seen before. It’s the product of a laboratory, where Dr Henry Wu (Wong, the
only returnee from the original Jurassic Park) works to create the attractions
that bring people through the gates. The new specimen is called Indominus Rex.
Former Navy type, Owen Grady (Pratt), who trains
velociraptors and has developed a strange sort of bond with the vicious
dinosaurs, believes the whole idea is a bad one when he’s called in to evaluate
the security, and he’s also trying to fight off the park’s head of security
Hoskins (D’Onofrio) who wants to use the raptors in military operations. In the
spirit of Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park, Hoskins is working his own angle.
It isn’t long before the indominus rex gets out of it’s pen
– you knew it was coming, but how it happens is pretty cool – and the hunt is
on. Grady is roped in to help Claire rescue Zach and Gray, who are in a remote
section of the park when the dinosaur flees captivity. The kids have a close
encounter with the dinosaur, which ambushes a park contain team hardly raising
a sweat in the process. It’s not averse to killing many of the Apatosaurus
herd, and Grady notes that it isn’t hunting for food, but for sport. It’s a
predator of the most dangerous order.
Khan is killed during a failed attempt to use heavy weaponry
to kill the indominus, and ends up loosing hundreds of pterosaurs into the air.
Another of the film’s best scenes comes next, with the winged predators swooping
down on the unsuspecting and unprepared tourists, killing many. Jimmy Buffett has
a momentary cameo, and Claire’s assistant is killed in spectacular and gruesome
fashion.
The destruction brings Hoskins back into play, and he takes
over the control room with a crew of mercenary-type soldiers, and the raptors
are put to use tracking indominus. Grady and his offsider join Hoskins’ men on
the hunt, but indominus turns the tables, communicating with the raptors, and
turning them on Grady and his colleagues. It’s a scene reminiscent of something
out of a Vietnam War film, a gunfight in all directions in the tall reeds.
Spectacular, tense stuff, and on the big screen, it’s tense and exciting and a
whole lot of fun.
It’s in this sequence that the film’s big reveal happens,
what we’ve been waiting for: indominus rex is part tyrannosaurus part raptor.
It’s only because of his strange rapport with the raptors that Pratt survives.
The rest of the team don’t, and Hoskins is cornered and killed pretty quickly
after that. But not before he gets Dr Wu evacuated from the island with
dinosaur embryos he plans to use for his work in creating even more
genetically-modified species. These people never learn!
Jurassic World is
full of nods to the original film – vintage t-shirts and vehicles, abandoned parts of the original park, namechecking
and more – which adds to the nostalgic feel, but the best reveal from that
movie comes later, when it seems there’s little hope for Grady, Claire and the
kids. It’s fantastic to see the traditional tyrannosaurus rex in combat with
indominus rex, a sort of meeting of the old and the new. I can still remember the
first time it appeared beyond the fences in Jurassic
Park, skittling the car and eating the lawyer off the toilet.
It takes a bit of old and new to finally rid the park of the
indominus rex in very awesome fashion, but with the embryos and Dr Wu off the
island and presumably to safety, there’s plenty of room for sequels.
Final Verdict: Jurassic
World was good fun. If you liked any of the previous franchise instalments,
you’ll love this one, too.
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