Jurassic World Sets a Record???

Rating: 7/10 (17 June 2015)

Summer is here. It may not be here on the calendar but it is here in Hollywood. The Avengers Age of Ultron kicked the summer movie season off in May and the big budget blockbusters have rolled in week after week. As for me, I saw Age of Ultron and I held on to my precious dollars until this highly anticipated film.
Jurassic World set a single day record this weekend bringing in $511M internationally and $209M domestically. That's an insane amount of money. I never expected it to do that well. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassic Park in 1993 and that movie was a game changer, an absolute classic. Jurassic World was good, but record setting good??? I wouldn't say that.
Jurassic World looked to me like a remake of Jurassic Park with more people and the assumption that you know all of the DNA stuff. Again there were two kids without their parents, a male hero somewhat knowledgeable of the animals, a fat guy looking for a chance to exploit the dinosaurs, a security system not quite up to snuff and a big toothed predator on the loose. Of course there were some storyline differences to differentiate it from the original as well as the other two sequels; and there were shades of Deep Blue Sea and Man's Best Friend.
The characters were bearable enough although there was an interesting dynamic between the kids and their aunt whom they were visiting. If you don't get too caught up into the characters and the potential symbolism of each of them then you can really enjoy the movie. This is just a purely entertaining movie of man v. beast with some excellent "oooh" moments.