The fourth installment/the reboot of the 'Jurassic Park' series sees the park reopening on a larger scale and with iPhones. All the classic elements are back - a Tyrannosaurus, some unrealistic raptor shit, a couple of irritating kids, and a heap of deaths a la dinosaur (I guess it should technically be "deaths by dinosaur, but "a la" has a certain ring to it, no?). The hook here is that there is a brand shiny new kind of dinosaur in the park! A genetically modified one!
Eh. I'm doing my best here not to wear the rosy spectacles of childhood remembrances. Back when I had 'Jurassic Park 3' (I know, definitely not the best one), 'LOTR The Two Towers', 'Monsters Inc.', and nothing else, on cassette, and would watch all three repeatedly, even though the scene where the pilot dude got eaten out of the torn-open plane by the Spinosaurus always freaked me out - hell, even the lame Velociraptor in the dream sequence (Alan!) scared the crap out of me.
What I'm sort of trying to get around to saying is that a lot is added to this film if you're already deeply in love with its predecessors, which of course applies to many films (cough-starwars-indiannajones-thexfiles-dadsarmy-lordofhterings-ghostbusters-etc-etc-cough) ahem, sorry; I'm allergic to nostalgia.
Nah, I'm not. Nostalgia can get you a long way, it just can't make a movie all on its own (no matter how much fan service). And After a second viewing I maintain that 'Jurassic World' doesn't fully work.
The acting is mostly fine, sometimes pretty great. I liked all the back and forth between the grizzled hunter character and the prim businesswoman character, but none of it felt particularly new. The effects were, of course, excellent, but it all looked a little too effecty at times, and maybe it wouldn't have hurt to use a few more of the ol' animatronics or even 'Walking with Dinosaurs'-style hand puppets (not the shitty movie, the original BBC docu-drama series). Despite this, many shots were downright beautifully shot, and purely visually wise it was a joy to watch.
But despite that it was watchable, even pretty enjoyable, right up until the end. I mean, WHAT?! So the Velociraptors gang up on the whateverthefuck-asaurus with a Tyrannosaurus, and then the big bad just randomly gets eaten by some massive Plesiosaur? It's a disappointment, I actually felt a little cheated. It's kind of like the ending of 'Avatar' where it turns out that nature comes to the rescue and renders any previous struggles meaningless. It's bad story telling, but it's bad story telling with characters that I love, damn it.
I don't like the treatment of the Velociraptors throughout, really. Their intelligence was already made a fuss of in the previous film, but now we slather it on with some nonsense about training them to run along beside a motor bike.
I don't know, maybe I'm just being cynical, but I was underwhelmed. Um.. did I mention that the effects were good? Oh and I liked the helicopter-flying boss, I was sad when he died meaninglessly.
Jurassic World: 46.7