Jurassic World
My grade: B+
In short: After 22 years Jurassic Park actually gets a mostly worthy, and different, sequel.
It's been 22 years since billionaire entrepreneur and businessman John Hammond first envisioned a biological preserve/theme park featuring dinosaurs cloned from recovered DNA inside fossilized tree sap -splicing the DNA with present-day frogs to account for the degradation- and he saw his vision crumble before his eyes as his disrespect for the animals as living, dangerous, creatures resulted in several deaths and the near-loss of his grandchildren. And while the Jurassic Park sequels dealt with events on another island -where the dinosaurs were actually created and kept in a more natural environment rather than being segregated.
In the 14 years since the dino-populated islands were last seen in Jurassic Park III, InGen (the parent company of the company Hammond owned truing to build the park) has re-established a new theme park on Isla Nubar and it is fully realized and operating, boasting 20,000 visitors a day, an untarnished safety record and being ran by a man with a vision similar to Hammond. He's uninterested in the park making a profit -presumably letting the park be a "loss leader" for the InGen brand, allowing other InGen companies, products and services to compensate for the park's lack of revenue- he only wants to make sure the guests are enjoying the park and its attractions.
By and large it seems like business is booming and visitors are generally having a good time, seeing the shows, taking the tours and rides around the park and filling the shop and restaurant-line promenade, but InGen is worried that visitors are becoming more and more disinterested in the dinosaurs putting the company's future in jeopardy. So they decide to genetically engineer a new dinosaur by splicing the DNA of several other prehistoric and current creatures to create the Indominus-Rex. To ensure that the paddock housing the creature is safe they consult with, essentially, their game warden Owen who's managed to train a pack of Velociraptors, establishing himself as their "Alpha.
Things, naturally, go wrong and the I-Rex manages to escape from her paddock endangering the lives of everyone on the island and Owen may be the only one capable of stopping them but is thwarted by another group on the island wanting to militarize the raptors.
Oh, and some parents are getting divorced and as a cover they send their kids to the island and they get in jeopardy.
The movie is not without its flaws but it does manage to deliver in many of the ways the other sequels didn't mostly in showcasing the animals in much more... "romantic" way and treating them as animals rather than as typical movie monsters. There's a touching scene in the first movie where Dr. Grant marvels over a sick Triceratops prone on the ground, there's a similar scene here where Owen soothes a mortally wounded brachiosaurus.
The movie certainly delivers on special effects, I saw it in 3-D which serviced the movie quite well, and the final battle with the I-Rex and other prehistoric creatures certainly delivers in a satisfying way.
Nicely, the movie also plays lip-service to why the dinosaurs still look like large reptiles -as opposed to have more avian-like features as we current feel they did- by reaffirming they were using reptilian DNA for the gene-splicing in order to deliver more on common expectations as opposed to trying to be prehistorically accurate.
Chris Pratt (Owen) does a good job here and shows more how capable he is as a leading man, though it's hard to not see his Star Lord persona here but seeing him as the Raptor Whisperer is pretty awesome. Bryce Dallas Howard plays one of the heads of the park and Pratt's love interest and she also does a fairly decent job but at the end of the day is mostly there to play the stereotypical female/love-interest role in the movie. To her credit, though, she's given a couple bad-ass moments and comes up with the idea that ends up saving the day.
All and all, I had fun in it. It a good ride and very enjoyable. The 3D in it may be worth seeing but probably not essential.
Just a couple grumblings here, minor spoilers:
Once the I-Rex is loose they start shutting down the park and redirect park visitors to the main promenade area away from the attractions/paddocks. When they do this are two child characters are in a hamster-ball like vehicle driving around a paddock filled with various benign herbivores. They apparently hear/get the message to return the vehicle to the launching station but opt not to and go exploring anyway. ...
Um, why do they have that level of control over the vehicle? I can see it being, maybe, like when you rent a paddle-boat at the lake and you rent it for some period of time and are expected to return it when that time is up, paying for any "overtime" you had the boat. So, fine, we'll allow that aspect of it. People pay for a period of time, they use the vehicles, and return them on time. If not they pay for the extra time.
But here the park is going into an emergency lockdown and the kids decide to ignore it and go off on their own. Why aren't the vehicles remotely operated to return to base on their own when the emergency recall is declared? The kids even manage to drive the vehicle out of the paddock and into another one, why would the vehicles be programed to allow for them to be taken outside of their area? Why not have them either refuse to do it or shut down once they leave their area?
In another scene the two child characters find the original main building for Jurassic Park from the first movie and explore it some, a nice tribute to the first movie. They come across a garage which holds the "gas Jeeps" from the first movie and are able to get one started in order to return to the park. One of the ways they get it started is by removing the battery from a wrecked vehicle they came across earlier.
Ummmm...... This sort of thing really, really, *REALLY* bugs me. It aggravates me to no end. They replaced the battery. Fine. I'll accept that when the Jeep was parked there it had gas in it, enough to get them to the new park. But, sorry, the gas has been in that tank for OVER 20 YEARS! It's not gasoline anymore it a think, gummy, gunk that's clogging every single piece of hardware between the tank and the engine injectors.
And there's nothing to suggest the Jeep's tank was empty and they siphoned gas from the wrecked vehicle they got the battery from and used it to fill the Jeep up. Even if they did, there'd still be the decades-old gasoline in the lines and engine. The engine is garbage. Plus, later we see Own attempt to do the same thing to get another Jeep running, apparently under the assumption he can get it to work too just by replacing/charging the battery.
No. Nope. Nada.
Also, the kid drives the Jeep which in the first movie had a manual transmission. The kid mentions having taken, but failed, his driver's course so he's not an experienced driver. Considering this day and age I highly doubt he learned to drive stick.
Disneyland's Autopia, when it opened in 1955, had no guide rail. (How it supposedly tied into Tomorrowland was that it previewed the then-in-development interstate highway system.) Realizing the runaway kid driver problem right away, Disney quickly developed a second version of the ride (
