a fun B movie with A-movie credentials

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2015)

I look at Jurassic World and I end up holding it up to other movies that are out now as well as the original Jurassic Park and its sequels. It's hard not to, when we live in a film world that gives us Godzilla (some decent monster action, practically non-existent humans) and the new Planet of the Apes films (which has two of this movie's co-writers, and has arguably greater CGI/mo-cap and writing). What Colin Trevorrow and producer Steven Spielberg do here - and make no mistake, this is very much a Spielberg production - is try to give the monster-movie-CGI-heavy blockbuster a jump-start with things that are familiar as well as new creatures, new peril, and a much bigger park. This time it's open, folks, and this place must have a helluva insurance premium.
You know the set up and what'll happen as soon as you see the trailer, or just read the following sentence: the scientists in Jurassic World have 'designed' a dinosaur hybrid (we don't know everything that's in it, which is part of the mystery), and because it's been in captivity all its life, it's extra-dangerous and unfamiliar with the world around it. So, yes, in short, dinosaur breaks out, wreaks havoc, other dinosaurs spring loose, and the velociraptors are used to try and track this other big 'Indominus Rex' down. Yeah, wait, what? Jurassic World certainly delivers on the peril, on some clever lines and witty banter - especially between Chris Pratt, as the Navy-Seal turned raptor hunter, and businessy-turned-sorta-bad-ass Bryce Dallas-Howard - and there are some legitimately funny turns of the story. One such one is when a villain gets the perfunctory monologue about his "real" plans cut-off by another dinosaur. And when the dinosaur action really kicks in, mostly in the last third, it has some umph to it and is directed slickly and with some tension.
What the movie may be missing for me is a full-on 'wow' factor of it. For kids this movie may be the bees knees. For an adult, as I now am, it wasn't very scary (no no, no 'six-foot turkey' comments for now). By this I mean, even though the action is well-staged and it has that solid, Spielberg-sense of direction where you always know where everyone is, the surprises feel genuine, and if there's any excess it feels like it's all in the brazen fun of what the Jurassic series is, when the suspense happens it kind of comes quickly, like the Rex attacks. Part of this for me is that, as good as the CGI is here, I miss the practical dinosaurs of the Stan Winston age. Only once is there a dinosaur that is actually *there* on the screen, and it's for a moment where it would've been silly to have an animated one otherwise.
This isn't to take away from how cool they do look, on the whole. There was never a moment where I thought any of the fakeness took away from the action. If anything the velociraptors, at least in close-up, look better than they ever have (in computer form, I should say). But this is a gripe that I couldn't shake, and still put it a notch below what the WETA folks did with the Apes movies - perhaps more on par with the work in Godzilla last year. As for the humans on screen, they all have charismatic and interesting actors, including Irrfan Khan as the new John Hammond (this time he can work a helicopter). Do they all get dimensions? Some more than others; the kids here basically have two molds, with maybe just a hint of bonding over the course of their escape-from-dinosaur peril. And one of the stranger things is to see BD Wong here, the only carry-over from 'Park', now as a corrupted scientist-engineer. It's like if I were to see Walter Peck in the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot: like, OK, cool, uh, hey again...
Jurassic World does its job better than the previous two sequels - there's no real annoyances with the characters, or involving gymnastics or whatever - and is worthy of a matinée, adults and kids included. The best it could've been though is hard to say.