Jurassic World (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 124 minutes.

OK for children over 12.

This is as good a monster thriller as you will ever see. The special effects are mind-boggling, the 3D doesn’t dilute the color and is ever-present, and the story is good enough to hold interest for over two hours. There might be a plot hole or two, but they didn’t jump out at me and if they were there they certainly didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the film. When you’re dealing with an island full of dinosaurs created from DNA, you don’t expect crushing reality.

Well directed by Colin Trevorrow with screenplay credits to Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (who also get story credits, even though the whole idea was created by the late Michael Crichton, who does get a credit) and Derek Connelly & Colin Trevorrow, it sounds like they had problems with the script. However they worked it out, this works pretty well, even though there are a few scenes at the end that looked like they were reaching for it.

The film has two attractive stars, Bryce Dallas Howard playing Claire and Chris Pratt playing Owen. They are at odds but, well, they are both attractive and this is a movie.

Despite the fine cast, however, obviously the stars are the dinosaurs and the 3D and IMAX. They clearly spent the money required to make this a first class film. IMAX is IMAX, huge and beautiful.

That leaves us with the dinosaurs. While this film makes them a lot more intelligent than they probably were. But how dumb were they? They were earth’s main inhabitants for 125 million years! Homo Sapiens has been here for, what, 200,000 years at the most? That’s 1.6% of the duration of the dinosaurs’ dominance. And Homo Sapiens has been “civilized” for maybe only the last 5,000 years.).

These dinosaurs are apparently trainable. But Claire has gone off and cooperated with Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong, still around from Jurassic Park, 20 years ago, can you believe it?) to create a monster dinosaur, Indominus Rex, that, naturally, gets loose in the park, wreaking all sorts of havoc. It’s up to Claire and Owen to set things right, even though the park is overflowing with what looks to be 20,000 tourists and Claire is supposed to be overseeing her nephews who are, naturally, out in the park alone while the monster rages.

Nobody’s ever going to see a real dinosaur but these dinosaurs look more like the real thing than, well, the real thing. This movie is a treat!