If I haven't said it before - which I likely have and just have a bad memory about it - I used to love dinosaurs when I was a kid. This was largely due to the early to mid 1990s being the absolute best time in the last sixty-five million years for the great beastly lizards who had once conquered the Earth. Jurassic Park, an adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, had a lot to do with that. I remember seeing the first movie in my youth, if it doesn't qualify as my first fandom then I don't know what does. The thought of seeing these ancient creatures brought back to life fascinated me...and terrified me, as the movie intended.
And, of course, it spawned a sequel in 1995 - The Lost World: Jurassic Park - and another in 2001 - Jurassic Park III. They both sucked. A lot. So for fourteen years, the franchise laid dormant after Dr. Alan Grant escaped from Isla Sorna and it seemed that we would thankfully never have another disappointing sequel to the great film from 1993.
...and as of 2015, this still holds true because the latest sequel and the one I'm here to talk about now, Jurassic World, makes up for the previous two films by kicking all the asses! It ignores Lost World and Jurassic Park III - which wins it so many awesome points to begin with - but it also takes the themes of the original film and cranks them right up to eleven. It's a popcorn movie, sure, but it gives an important message (that is, "quit screwing around with nature, you stupid humans!") without feeling like it has to ram in into our eye sockets in the way that Lost World did.
We pick up some two decades after the first movie - skillfully avoiding any references to the previous two films (you really have no idea how much I love that) - to show that Isla Nublar is home to John Hammond's vision realized. Multimillionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) has opened the brand new Jurassic World which he owns and has run by Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). With attendance in the park dropping, she and the investors at the park have made a potentially risky move - creating a brand new dinosaur out of existing DNA.
Now, you might be calling this mad science...and it is, though I do have to wonder if they actually meant to rip off Doctor Connors's experiments from The Amazing Spider-Man...which Irrfan Khan was also in...oh, damn...
MadCap Crossed The Streams: 2
Back to the point, however, a new dinosaur has been concocted in the labs of the Masrani Corporation - the "Indominus Rex". It's a creature with the basic form of a T-Rex and a bunch of other dinosaur and animal genes to give it special abilities as the plot requires because...of course! Don't you know anything about science? Thankfully, this never goes over the top with the Indominus getting nonsensical powers out of nowhere that make it completely untouchable by the main characters.
And of course, the biggest draw to this movie - besides the dinosaurs - is Owen Grady (Chris Pratt). Owen is a former resident of Pawnee, Indiana who...sorry, he's a former space pirate who becomes a Guardian of the Gal...no, sorry, a former Navy office who is also a Velociraptor expert, and thus trains the raptors on the island at the behest of InGen, studying their intelligence. Pratt's Grady serves, rather predictably, as a combination of both Dr. Grant and Ian Malcolm's characters from the original film, though putting Chris Pratt in a film and not giving him snarky dialogue is just a waste of his talents.
Nevertheless, in the moments where he has to be serious it really comes across. He is the one character saying pretty much what the audience is thinking, including rather blatantly bringing up the fact that making a new dinosaur from the genes of others was probably not a good idea. He also shows off his badass action hero stripes he more than earned in Guardians, in both his interactions with humans (particularly Vincent D'Onofrio as an InGen crony) and with dinosaurs.
Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire is a neurotic, micro-manager who has been put in charge of Jurassic World and has been running it without a hitch for years. A workaholic, she has made no time to see her sister or her family, particularly her two nephews (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) who she has not seen in around seven years. She also apparently has some romantic history with Owen, having gone on one date with him in the past. She made an itinerary, he wore board shorts. Whacky romantic hijinks!
Rounding out the main cast are Claire's nephews, Zack (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins), who are sent to the island for a perfectly innocent vacation and not for their parents to get them out of the way while they deal with a nasty divorce that's brewing behind the scenes. I really enjoy the brothers and their scenes together, such as one where they repair an old park jeep and riding around in the Great Glass Hamster Ball. It's a pity they aren't developed more, but what we do get is very nice and - let's face it - being trapped on an island running for your lives from man-eating dinosaurs is an exercise that would bond just about anyone.
As for the plot itself, it quickly goes from Jurassic Park to Aliens with Vincent D'Onofrio and only returning character from any previous film Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong) wanting to put Grady's raptors and other dinosaurs to military applications, despite the fact Grady does not have remotely the amount of control over the raptors that the trailers had us believing. It's a thin rope by which Grady controls the raptors, the D'Onofrio only sees a way that he could be a real kingpin of innovation in how the Army conducts warfare.
...huh, where did that come from?
While I have made reference to the previous two films, this film is not one that's afraid of worshiping the one film that was good - loads of merchandise from the original park, a character that's only in the film to tell us how good the film is, and the original Visitor Center getting a cameo from where it's been swallowed from the original film. Though, really - for the most part - it's not done so much that you get sick of it. Just some wonderful homages and references to the previous movie that is now the only other movie in the franchise, because continuity...did I mention how much I love typing that?
The CGI is actually consistently pretty good throughout and we don't get many, if any, of those weird moments that Lost World and III gave us with the hokey-looking dinosaurs. Even the Indominus, when it finally does show up (the filmmakers wisely taking the road of building up suspense), it looks pretty damn good. Far better than the other Jurassic Park IV pitch that leaked some years ago about the U.S. Military trying to creature human/dino hybrids.
...seriously, I'm not kidding, look it up.
There is admittedly more than a little sequel baiting in the last act, but the entire film is brought to a conclusion that makes it where it can very well stand on its own. You could call it the passage of time or my own nostalgia about the first film, but as I was sitting in the theater, I was feeling like a kid again when we saw the first shots of Isla Nublar and the dinosaur attractions therein. Hearing the original John Williams score over some of the most majestic creatures of the land before time, I found myself in a place that - watching them as an adult - The Lost World and Jurassic Park III never really took me too. It was that sense of wide-eyed wonder coming back as it was almost as though I was looking upon all of this for the very first time as a six year old.
If that doesn't make this an absolutely awesome movie, then I don't know what does.
Jurassic World is now in theaters from Amblin Entertainment, Legendary Pictures, and Universal.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
No comments:
Post a Comment