It is difficult to live up to the legacy of Jurassic Park, a beloved, terribly entertaining Hollywood blockbuster that married incredible technical achievement with genuinely thought provoking scientific content. As a movie, it is one-of-a-kind, and Jurassic World seems to acknowledge that. Throughout the film, characters will talk about how people aren’t interested in dinosaurs anymore, and how difficult it is to maintain interest in properties unless you keep going bigger. The film is adept enough at making things bigger, but it doesn’t really have anything holding all of those big moments together.
The titular theme park is now a thriving business built atop the ruins of the original park. Owen (Chris Pratt) is an ex-military animal expert who is experimenting with taming a pack of velociraptors. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the operations manager of the park, and she’s preparing for the launch of the park’s newest attraction: a completely new hybrid dinosaur made up some truly dangerous genetic strains. This new dinosaur turns out to be highly intelligent, and finds a way of break out of its pen. Claire’s nephews happen to be visiting the park that day, and are out in the wild when the dinosaur breaks loose. Claire asks Owen for help, and they venture out together to rescue the young boys.
There’s more to this story than this basic plot, but these added details don’t do the movie any good. There is a human villain in this film, and he has sort of evil scheme that’s supposed to make him a lot of money or something. It isn’t nearly fleshed out enough to give the film any extra dimensions. The nephews are dealing with their own little issues, but those are all but forgotten when the dinosaurs enter the picture. And then there’s Claire, who gets pretty appalling treatment in the script. Her arc involves her being shamed for not wanting to have children, before being sent out to run around the jungle in four-inch heels.
The film makes it clear that it doesn’t really care about its characters very much, because they don’t really factor what people want. There are postmodern elements to this movie, with lots of discussion about how people are no longer impressed by dinosaurs. They’re looking for something new, bigger and more terrifying. And so the film concentrates on that, on creating a new threat that trumps everything that’s come before. Everything else is secondary, which means that almost any scene with characters talking about stuff is either there to provide exposition, or to fill gaps with nonsense until the dinosaurs come back on screen.
And it gets pretty boring. The film picks up when the main new dinosaur is on screen. Director Colin Trevorrow has certainly studied his Spielberg. He manages a sense of awe when the creatures emerge, the director playing up the dangerous scale in which the dinosaurs operate. A lively cast of actors makes the emptiness of the characters a little more bearable. Chris Pratt is perfectly charming at a lower key. Bryce Dallas Howard is saddled with the worst of the characters, but she works through it all well enough.
Jurassic World isn’t particularly bad. It’s just mind-numbingly mediocre. It feels like the filmmakers just gave in at some point. The film starts out like its making fun of the mentality of how franchises are continued well beyond what’s reasonable. But the film goes on, it just seems to accept the mentality wholesale. It doesn’t try to make a movie beyond the set pieces. And while these big dinosaur set pieces are reasonably entertaining, there just isn’t enough in between to make the movie as a whole worth watching.
My Rating:
