Jurassic World – Film Review

Jurassic Park has returned with its latest installment, Jurassic World. This movie definitely had a lot of attention around it between its controversy of how stereotypes of women are depicted, the fighting internally on the writing, and the quality of the film in comparison to the other two sequels. It has been 14 years since a Jurassic Park film was released and with the disappointment of Jurassic Park III they had no where to go but up. With the time the franchise was able to heal and move away from how people thought of the franchise.

Seeing the park in full function was the best move for the studio to make in order to draw appeal. Returning to Isla Nubar was also a smart move since Isla Sorna was the focus of the last two films. The park is very well realized as is the corporate culture of Jurassic World. The story overall isn’t that original but I appreciate the message they were trying to establish in how society today can be bored by something that was introduced so long ago that we can be unphased by said advancement and crave excitement to the point of over stimulation. The premise they tried to set up felt strongly based in reality discussing current social and political issues with surviving wars and genetic research to better our understanding of science. Playing god is the overarching theme of the franchise but in this one its pushed to a higher degree with creating something new that ultimately destroys instead of creating something great.

Don’t worry. It’s gonna be just like taking a walk in the woods… 65 million years ago.

The big star of the film is Chris Pratt. He definitely showed his range in this film. Though some of the dialogue and plot weren’t great, he made it work. His acting has gotten so good that he can be officially called a movie star. Bryce Dallas Howard does a good job and regardless of her character she wasn’t the problem — how the character was written is where it goes wrong. Wearing heels throughout the entire film and being flat as a character didn’t help her likability. If she was better written there wouldn’t be such a problem around her character. There are also one to many characters in the film. The two boys have a subplot thats almost irrelevant. If that part of the film was more tightly written there wouldn’t have been such a strain on the attention from the audience. Omar Sy is great for diversity’s sake but he didn’t add much to the film. Vincent D’Onofrio was an okay villain but needed to be better developed. BD Wong was a flat villain that needed to be condensed into one role instead of two bad guys. Jake Johnson was a fun character. I had no problems with him. He had some of the best lines.

I’m glad that indie film director Colin Trevorrow had his chance to direct and help write this film to give him the experience to get better in the future. I hope the franchise moves beyond the island and has the dinosaurs out in the world were its more of a fight between man and beast. This is one good monster movie that brings the goods with the fight at the end. Even though its an Ex-Machina its still a good time.

8/10