Jurassic World

I’ve been pretty lucky recently to be able to get out and see movies. My wife and I had the chance to see a movie on Sunday, and she expressed an interest in Jurassic World. It’s not a movie I had on my list of movies to see in the theatre, but our window of opportunity was pretty limited, and Jurassic World fit into it, so that’s what we saw.

I enjoyed Jurassic Park and saw both of the sequels, but I none of them in the theatre. I wasn’t desperate to see Jurassic World either, so I went in with pretty low expectations. I will say that I think it delivered on excitement and shocks, even if it had a fair number of problems.

In its defence, I would say that the actors all did well with what they were given and the special effects were pretty cool. I don’t think this will change the face of movies the way the original did, but both my wife and I thought the dinosaurs were well done. The action scenes were existing and the scenes in which the dinosaurs threatened characters had real tension.

That being said, this movie asked me to suspend a heck of a lot of my disbelief. The big bad of the movie was more than a little over the top in its abilities and intelligence. The characters were pretty much all stereotypes with only cursory attempts at providing depth, and other than the Alpha male (seriously, Chris Pratt is the Alpha male, he said so himself), everyone else is there to be stupid or to learn from the Alpha male. Other than the executive that needs the Alpha male to help her realize her Beta-ness, the rest of the main cast are men. Of course, those men are no better than the Beta female, since they too live in the shadow of the Alpha. At least in Jurassic Park, the Laura Dern character could hold her own with the Sam Neill character (the only characters I know by name are Hammond and Ian Malcolm . . . so sue me).

Chris Pratt has enough charisma to get away with such a superficial character, and he is likeable in the role, which is a saving grace for the movie. Still, I would have liked a little more diversity (at least this time there are two somewhat significant characters of colour, rather than the one from the original . . . though that one was Samuel L. Jackson) and I certainly would have liked better written characters. This is once again a movie in which only the hero can be intelligent and capable and everyone else is there to remind us how intelligent and capable the hero is. And while the villain character in the original was a bit of a caricature, the bad guy in this one is a full-on moustache twirler – though Vincent D’Onofrio does do it with gusto.

So in the end, I have to give Jurassic World 3 genetically superior psychopathic dinosaurs out of 5. The action and tension are there, but the script is weak, as are the stereotypical characters.

You can read more about Jurassic World at IMDB or Wikipedia.