It Wasn't What I Hoped; Shallowly Entertaining

Rating: 8/10 (28 March 2016)

The original JURASSIC PARK is and always will be one of my favorite movies. I even enjoyed THE LOST WORLD more than most people. I've read Michael Crichton's novels more times than I can remember. So yes, I am a fan. I wasn't thrilled at the idea of reopening the movie franchise more than a decade since the third film solidified my belief that the series had run out of steam. I was cautiously optimistic when I read that Colin Trevorrow, director of the fun SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, was brought on to helm the project and I was even more excited when Chris Pratt was cast in one of the lead roles. Trevorrow was loud and proud about his love for the original '93 film, so I began to believe he might do the series justice and somehow reinvigorate it. JURASSIC WORLD seems to ignore the previous two sequels, setting it in an operational and mega-successful park built on Isla Nublar. Claire (Bryce Dallas-Howard) is the operations manager, whom we meet when she's balancing a busy schedule of shuffling off her visiting nephews onto her disinterested assistant and presenting the park's newest attraction, the Indominus Rex, to potential investors. Meanwhile, former Navy SEAL and Ingen contractor Owen (Pratt) takes a break from training a team of velociraptors to inspect the Indominus's pen for safety concerns; in what should come as a surprise to no one, the Indominus outsmarts Owen and the park crew and escapes from its pen, endangering the lives of thousands of park guests as it murders its way across the island.
Trevorrow was not lying when he expounded on his love for the original film. In fact, JURASSIC WORLD is his love letter to it and it's probably the film's biggest flaw. You can't go more than a few minutes without some sort of reference to JURASSIC PARK. The visitors' center is featured in a sequence where we see the "When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth" and skeletal remains from the climactic moment. We see a night vision headset (twice!), famous from the T-rex escape sequence. There's little nods scattered around in the background (visual and audio) and even a character in the Jurassic World control room (Lowery, played by Jake Johnson) who seems to encapsulate Trevorrow's own raging fandom. A few references would've been fine but, by the time the film was halfway over, it just made me wish I was watching the original film. I wanted JURASSIC WORLD to be its own film, reminding us why we loved the '93 film without constantly nudging us with its elbow, winking, and murmuring "Remember that part? It was cool, wasn't it?" Even the core plot is pretty much a slightly modified version of the original: dinosaurs get loose, rational man who knows what he's doing makes it his mission to bring two key children back to safety, big climactic moment to close it out. Except the characters in the original film always felt as if they were in constant danger. There was suspense. JURASSIC WORLD isn't all that suspenseful. Maybe it's because the dinosaurs are 99% CG now. Sure, they look pretty good but, no matter how many people the Indominus swallows whole, it's never as scary as the T-rex was in the first film. The lack of suspense could also be attributed to the hollow feeling behind the action. Most of the deaths are nameless extras, be they asset containment crew or park guests. The moment when I knew this would never live up to JURASSIC PARK: when a helicopter crashes in a fiery, gratuitous, unmotivated explosion just so it can happen with the Indominus roaring in the foreground for that perfect "trailer shot". It was almost offensive in how cheesy that moment felt.
Speaking of cheesyhow about that final confrontation with the Indominus? I'm not going to lie. That whole sequence had me rolling my eyes. Especially at the end. Not going to spoil anything here, but you'll probably know what I'm referring to. I'm being sort of hard on JURASSIC WORLD but that's only because I wanted it to try harder. It's not a bad film. It's still pretty entertaining. It's got some great casting (Pratt, Johnson, Irrfan Khan as the park owner, Vincent D'Onofrio as a nefarious Ingen overseer) and I loved the concept of setting the film in an operational park. On the topic of D'Onofrio's character and the whole subplot of "trained" velociraptors: I was wary at first but I thought it was done well. If anything, I think it should've been the main plot the film or, at the very least, saved for a sequel. The sequence in the middle of the film where the raptors are given a field test (which is glimpsed in the trailer with Pratt running with the pack on a motorcycle) was probably the best part of the movie. Overall, I felt JURASSIC WORLD was a tad overrated and, while it was an entertaining couple of hours, teamed with AGE OF ULTRON to jumpstart the "Summer of 'Meh'" (a term I've come to use for the summer blockbuster season of 2015 where I was continuously underwhelmed). Based on the money this film raked in (all of it), a sequel was guaranteed and, just as I was for JURASSIC WORLD, I'm hopeful. This spent too much time pining over the franchise's glory days but there were some promising nuggets in there. For anyone who for some reason hasn't seen it already, it's worth a watch and you'll probably really enjoy it. Personally, I'm more interested in where the franchise goes from here.