Not a Dinosaur

And so, twenty two years after the original and a full fourteen after the third movie, we finally get another movie in the series where scientists resurrect the dinosaurs by mixing-and-matching their DNA with those of contemporary animals, and no-one sees the inevitable bloodbath coming.

It's actually a funny thing: you get movies where science is held up as a sort of 'new God', scientists are the wisest and most benevolent people in the story, and where they're responsible for everything good that happens in a world which is being torn apart by superstition, and then you get movies where, for example, scientists can say, for example, "Oh, we gave this dinosaur some cuttlefish DNA for this reason, but never dreamed it would inherit that cuttlefish trait as well!"

It's also funny that, in literally creating a new dinosaur, through more extreme genetic engineering than was used to bring back the dinosaurs in the first place, they have created a film which is a damning indictment of Hollywood sequels generally: everything has to be bigger, cooler... and with more teeth.

Before I get too far into what seems to be slagging the film off, I would like to say that I really enjoyed it - the dinosaurs (and the locations) are, with a couple of exceptions, every bit as spectacular as they were back in 1993, when I saw the first movie. It was nice to see a sequel that properly acknowledged the passing of time (someone mentions that it's taken over 20 years to get the Jurassic World theme park off the ground), and the setting in a fully-functional theme park populated by dinosaurs made it slightly more compelling, for me, than that of the 'proof of concept' setting in the first three movies... However, given that Jurassic World is operating in the same old location as Hammond's original Jurassic Park, one has to wonder how they managed to build a theme park on an island already populated with dinosaurs.

The film presented more questions than answers throughout, as if conscious that it's not really a movie in its own right, merely part of a series which is, as the old television cliffhanger goes, "To Be Continued".

The casting was excellent, but there were a couple of occasions when Owen Grady/Chris Pratt's look of surprise/shock veered a little bit too far into comedy mugging (then again, this was a kids' movie - rated 12A - so a lot of it was pitched toward lightening the atmosphere), but he was otherwise a believable and sympathetic character, particularly in his dealings with his four Velociraptors. Bryce Dallas Howard played a fairly stereotypical character - Jurassic World's operations manager Claire Dearing, very efficient at her job, terrible with her family - pretty well, and had some good comedy moments, my favourite being the bit where she pulls her blouse out of her skirt to tie it round her waist, rolls up her sleeves and poses with her hands on her hips, only to be asked why she'd done that and, looking rather put out, responds that it means she's ready to go. It's also worth noting that her character apparently survives the entire film wandering around in all sorts of terrain in high heeled shoes. Never once slips, falls, breaks a heel. Surely a first?

There were some pretty massive plot holes and character inconsistencies, but the film moved along fast enough that they didn't have much of an impact. There seemed to be several subplots, too, though resolution will evidently be happening in a later movie (or not at all, in the case of the park's slightly dodgy financier, Simon Masrani). Probably my biggest gripe about the film would be the unnecessarily protracted demise of 'the assistant' (played with a delightfully plummy English accent by Merlin's Katie McGrath). It was obvious the moment she got picked up by one of the flying dinosaurs that she was done for... but watching it happen so slowly, with so many moments where she might have escaped her fate, just seemed like a kind of torture porn.

On the subject of the flying dinosaurs, I felt they were the only special effects that didn't convince: some looked like something out of How To Train Your Dragon, others looked like the sort of flappy rubber thing you'd have seen in a 1970s Hammer Horror movie.

The trouble with making a sequel to such a phenomenal movie after such a long time is that, in spite of their many attempts, there's no way to match the 'wow' factor of the original. The grand confrontation at the end of the movie was fairly predictable (as was its outcome), but it mostly left me thinking that Jurassic World had given us the Godzilla movie we all wanted out of the 2014 movie...