Welcome to Jurassic Franchise..

Rating: 8/10 (20 June 2015)

My thoughts on Jurassic World have been so mixed for a while. Jurassic Park is a classic with sequels that really do not hold up, the trailers for this one were released and they didn't really set my mind at ease, so for a while i just sort of thought "at least Chris Pratt is in it". I hoped it would go down the Mad Max: Fury Road road ( that sounded weird) and for the most part it did. The film does a good job at setting you up for a nice nostalgia trip and when it started i felt like all my worries would be invalid.
The plot is hard to explain and keep spoiler free but don't worry i wont give anything away. 22 years after Jurassic Park, a new theme park Jurassic World has opened. A new breed of dinosaur has been created from splicing two existing breeds together and manages to escape from its facility, Owen Brady (Chris Pratt) and the somewhat uptight Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) take it upon themselves to stop the terror from destroying Isla Nublar and everyone in it. The way i have described it makes the film seem very basic and to be honest, yeah it is pretty basic, but there are things in the film which need to be seen as a fan of the original. What i like about Jurassic World is that you can see the film without any knowledge of the others, yet seeing the original film is definitely a bonus. There are a ton of throwbacks to the events of Jurassic Park, some are hilarious and others feel a little shoehorned in and don't always work, but just know that they are very much there. From the moment that the doors open and we pan around Jurassic World with the iconic theme blasting out around us.. that is when we know that this film is more of a passion project than anything and it does a good job at being nostalgic. In this sense i will say Jurassic World is definitely the best sequel of the franchise.
Chris Pratt as always is an absolute delight to watch. He takes this role like all of his others and makes it his very own. His character was very much an Indiana Jones type which makes the rumours of him playing Indy all the more exiting. I also never realised how hot Bryce Dallas Howard is until i saw this, as well as this she too does a great job and is a badass towards the end which made her so much more than the critics calling her a cliché uptight business type woman. After Daredevil it is awesome to see Vincent D'onofrio in anything but in this he felt kind of out of place and his character felt a bit wasted in my opinion, and ramping up the nostalgia again BD Wong returns as the only original Jurassic Park cast member and i found myself welcoming him back with open arms.
The most important thing is arguably the dinosaurs here. When i saw the trailer they looked like they were a CGI mess and found that the animatronics from the original held up much better. I still feel the original dinosaurs did look better but the velociraptors really do look and feel like a real part of the cast and the new dinosaur introduce (Indominous Rex) was honestly a thing of nightmares. It was scary as hell and looked so cool, the design of it alone was nothing short of spectacular and every scene featuring it (there are a lot) was intense and had me on the edge of my seat because like the original, you never know who will survive this beast and posed more of a threat than most monsters in movies today.
I will wrap this review up by saying that if you go into this film expecting a fun monster movie with some cheesy one liners and some brilliant action sequences then this film will please you. If you're a Jurassic park fan this will please you also. No it is definitely not as good and does have its fair share of flaws, but the climax sets the series in a new direction and it was a welcome one. Now having the biggest opening weekend of all time and a set up like that scream sequel. You know what? Im okay with that and with the return of the current box office king Chris Pratt i can see a whole new trilogy on the horizon. Mad max did it, Jurassic World did it.. don't let us down Terminator Genysis. You may have a ridiculous title but give us the nostalgia we crave!