Cast: Chris Pratt…Owen / Bryce Dallas Howard…Claire / Irrfan Khan…Masrani / Vincent D’Onofrio…Hoskins / Ty Simpkins…Gray / Nick Robinson…Zach / Jake Johnson…Lowery / Omar Sy…Barry / BD Wong…Dr. Henry Wu / Judy Greer…Karen
I enjoyed the dino-heck out of Jurassic World, just like millions of other viewer that plunked down dollars and yen (Jurassic World was one of the five US movies allowed to screen in China this year), and as summer blockbusters go, it was a slam dunk. Not as much fun as Guardians of the Galaxy, but with wider appeal. Not as smart as Jurassic Park, but with bigger dinosaurs.
The telling fact for me in how the movie stacks up, is that it made me want to see Jurassic Park again, and I strongly doubt that I’ll ever have the same feelings for this movie. The original movie was good on a lot of levels that this movie didn’t touch. Sure, it get’s the basics down.
As Chris Pratt’s Owen points out to Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire, animals need to do three things to survive.
“OWEN: These animals are thinking: I gotta eat. I gotta hunt. I gotta…You gotta be able to relate to at least one of those things.”
He might as well be talking about the movie.
Jurassic World succeeds on all the animal levels, but nothing much above that. Actually, Pratt is selling his raptor friends short, because they’re social animals, and like us, they need more than the basics, which comes out at the end of the film.
Pratt’s character certainly breaks no new ground. As the obligatory kids point out, he’s a bad ass, though we know he’s a reformed new-age sort of bad ass who wouldn’t use his killer dinosaurs as weapons. This does make us scratch our heads a bit. They’re not dolphins, Chris, they’re killer beasts on a very loose leash, and in the end it’s only their use as weapons that give him them a fighting chance.
Bryce Dallas Howard’s character Claire breaks more new ground, though not all of it good. She’s the poster girl for failed work life balance, which is a slam on working women, but she does manage to both run in high heels, and save the day by going to get the T-Rex in search of “more teeth.” At the end, she lets us down as she totters off submissively with her hunk hero, but that’s only because she’s had a rough day. She’ll be back in form after she catches her breath, I have no doubt.
The dinos are again the stars of the film, as they should be, but they only really reach us when the Apatosaurus dies in our star’s arms, evoking all the pathos of a big puppy. I teared up too. The others were largely more of the same, though you really didn’t get the same feeling of cunning out of the velociraptors as you did in the original movie. Come to think of it, you didn’t get the same feeling of cunning out of the kids either.
My real regret is that they didn’t splice a little stegosaurus into Indominus Rex. With the added back plates, he would have been a dead ringer for Bob Eggleton’s favorite movie monster (we’re fans too, Bob).
Sadly, twenty two years on, we’ve learned more about making dinosaurs come to live, but it seems like we’ve forgotten why.