Fourteen years since the last installment in the infamous Jurassic Park franchise, and Twenty-Two years since the last really good one (at least in my opinion), Colin Trevorrow's sequel finally unleashed this week. The original Steven Spieldberg directed Jurassic Park was a movie that, to me, wasn't really one of my favorites at first, but now it's come to be one of those classic movies that you just look back on and smile. So, is the sequel a worthy successor?
In a lot of ways, the answer is yes. This new sequel is more of a followup to the original film, while ignoring the later two films. I haven't seen The Lost World and III in many, many years, so I'm not 100% sure if those two movies were ignored altogether or if they just weren't important in the overall story that is told between this and the first film. Regardless, setting this movie up as it's own thing was a great idea.
Usually most sequels to classic franchises try to force in as many references to the old movies as possible and do nothing but pay fan service. I truly admire Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World for resisting the urge to essentially recreate the original. This movie has subtle references to the original, and sometimes they can be a little (a lot) more than subtle, but it never becomes obnoxious about it.
As for the plot of this movie, we're finally seeing the high-tech dinosaur-themed amusement park that's been planned since the first movie, and it's almost as meh as I imagined. Anyways, people are finally realizing that an amusement park dedicated to Dinosaurs is essentially just a glorified zoo, and so buisness goes down. So they decided to create a new Dinosaur to draw attention, because that isn't a bad idea at all.
This isn't exactly important, but I personally don't understand the whole bit about them having to add new attractions to keep people coming. Some of the most popular amusement parks in the world don't need to add new attractions to keep buisness up. And you'd think that the only place on Earth where a child can experience their dream of getting to see real Dinosaurs would have higher attendance than, say, DisneyWorld.
The setting for this movie is great, and I love that this is the direction they went in, and it makes you wonder why they didn't do this earlier in the franchise. However, the actual plot of the movie involving the new Dinosaur hybrid, the Indomnious-Rex (which is pretty sick, may I add) is pretty dull, and it could have done much better.
Jurassic World took itself in a different direction than the previous films, and it's great that it did that, but the movie also feels nothing like Jurassic Park. While the original was an epic sci-fi horror film, this movie is an action movie. It's as simple as that. Sure, it has horror elements mixed in, but it's still an action movie. There's nothing wrong with it, in fact I think it's a good thing, it just feels more like a reboot, or even a different franchise altogether.
Now, the part that most people think about, or even care about for that matter, when they think of Jurassic Park is the Dinosaurs. First of all, the CGI is downright horrendous at times. My god, how is it possible that after two decades the effects got WORSE?! I can't comprehend that. Most of the time, it's so bad to watch, and it's blantly obvious that this is CGI. There are a couple scenes, though, that made me question if it were animatronics. It's pretty bad when you can appear to determine the difference between CGI from practical effects in some shots.
The Dinosaurs as characters are cool, I guess, as cool as you'd expect. I must say, including the I-Rex, no matter how stupid it is plot-wise, was a pretty cool thing to see, as it took things in a different direction. Who really wants to see more T-Rex and Raptors? They were both in the film, but they didn't exactly take center stage, which is good, because it would have been like going back to see Jason kill people for fifty billion movies. Oh wait... that actually happened. No wonder I despise that franchise.
The actual human characters are pretty good, too. As much as I love Dinosaurs, you can't see a movie just for them. You need to have really compelling human characters to actually make the movie good. By far the best actor in this movie is Chris Pratt (Guardians Of The Galaxy, Parks And Recreation). He's proved that he's an incredibly talented actor once again, as he brings the likeability and Chris Pratt-y-ness that he had in past roles into this movie, while also being the most serious he's ever been in his life at times. That's not an exaggeration. Sometimes I forgot I was actually looking at Chris Pratt.
Aside from the always talented Chris Pratt, the rest of the cast is pretty underwhelming. Bryce Dallas Howard (Spider-Man 3) was pretty good in this movie, but her role was nothing too memorable outside a couple good moments. Ty Simpkins (Iron Man 3) is... not a pile of donkey turd? I guess that's a compliment. The Indian dude from The Amazing Spider-Man was in this movie too, but I couldn't understand half of his lines. And finally Vincent D'Onofrio (Daredevil, man there's a lot of comic book movie actors in this movie) was pretty good as well. I don't remember the names of anyone else in the cast, and quite frankly, I don't really care about them. No one else did anything to impress me.
The action sequences involving the Dinosaurs are pretty awesome, and the third act is a spectacle, although a bit of a mess. I didn't see many trailers for this movie, so I can't say for sure if all the good stuff was spoiled, but there was a lot of it, so I'd assume only a small bit of the third act was shown. The scenes involving the Dinosaurs can be very intense at times, not quite as much as the original, but it was still pretty terrifying at times, despite the awful CGI.
There's not much else to say about Jurassic World. I didn't exactly have high hopes for this movie at first, seeing as how we haven't seen anything good Jurassic Park related since the first movie, in my opinion, and most sequels to classic movies are awful, but this movie was surprisingly great. I recommend seeing this movie just because of the fact that this is a Jurassic Park sequel that doesn't actually suck!
Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World is as good as you'd expect a sequel to a masterpiece such as Jurassic Park to be, perhaps even better. It's got everything you should expect from a good movie, but as with every sequel/reboot of a classic film, it's just not needed. This movie is a worthy, but somewhat pointless, successor to Steven Spielberg's original film.
Following Abary's complicated scale of movie grading, this movie deserves a:
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