Movie Review: 'Jurassic World'

Jurassic World (2015)

Written by: Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver

Story by: Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa 

Based on Characters Created by Michael Crichton

Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, 
Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Irrfan Khan

On June 12, 2015 (two weeks after its world premiere at Paris' Le Grande Rex theater), Universal Pictures' Jurassic World hit U.S. theaters in wide release. Directed by Colin Trevorrow under the aegis of executive producer Steven Spielberg, Jurassic World revived the long-dormant franchise after a protracted development that lasted over a decade. Set 22 years after the events in Spielberg's 1993 adaptation of the late Michael Crichton's science fiction novel Jurassic Park, the movie is the first installment of a planned Jurassic World trilogy.

Two decades after the disaster at John Hammond's Jurassic Park theme park, a new park created by Simon Marsani (Irrfan Khan), CEO of  Marsani Global Corporation, a huge conglomerate that bought InGen after Hammond's death a decade earlier. Marsani has hired many of the scientists and engineers who planned the original Jurassic Park to build the new park and stock it with more cloned dinosaurs.

The head of Marsani's Jurassic World creative team is Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), the ambitious geneticist who helped Hammond bring back the dinosaurs from extinction back in the late 20th Century. He's older, but not necessarily wiser; not only does Wu play a huge role in building Jurassic World almost on the ruins of the ill-fated Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar, but he also falls prey to his own ego when he agrees to create an all-new species for Marsani: Indominus Rex. 

Marsani, like most successful CEOs, has a large staff that he delegates the day-to-day operation of Jurassic World to, including Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park's Operations Manager. Young and energetic, Claire is a workaholic whose sole focus is the smooth functioning of the decade-old theme park, which now rivals Disney World and other U.S.-based theme parks as a popular tourist attraction.

But after 10 years of "smooth functioning" and the existence of cloned dinosaurs no longer being a novelty, Isla Nublar's theme park is faced with an age-old problem: the public's need for "the new. biggest thing." Suddenly, brachiosaurus, velociraptors, and even T. rex are old news.

And that's where Indominus rex comes in. Egged on by Marsani, Dr. Wu mixes the genes of several carnivores, including the deadly and cunning raptors, to create the largest predator to walk the Earth: a dinosaur that can camouflage itself, track down its prey, and outwit, outfight, and outlast even the mighty T.rex. 

As if that wasn't enough, InGen's chief of security, Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), has his own plans for some of the parks predators, including Indominus rex and the velociraptors being trained by ex-Navy sailor and ethologist, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) who now works as the park's "velociraptor whisperer."  Owen has worked with a pack of raptors since the dinosaurs were hatchlings, now he is their human alpha. Hoskins has kept tabs on Owen's progress with the raptors; now he wants to weaponize the raptors - and Indominus rex - and sell the animals (and Owen's techniques) to the military-industrial complex.

Oh, and since this is another entry in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World adds two kids to the mix: Claire's nephews Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) are on Isla Nublar to visit their mother's sister and see the park for the first time. After all, Jurassic World has been up and running for a long time without any incidents. What could possibly go wrong now?

My Take

Although I'm a fan of Michael Crichton's original 1990 novel and the first two Jurassic Park features, I didn't see Jurassic World during its successful theatrical run in the summer of 2015. My ailing mom was about to go into hospice care at home, and in the immediate aftermath of her death, I was not in a "let's go to the movies" mindset. 

I did, however, get Jurassic World on home media that December and watched it at home in Miami, but because I had so much going on at the time, I didn't watch the movie with an intent to review until recently.

When the film was first announced, I was less than thrilled. I had seen the original three Jurassic Park films by Steven Spielberg and Joe Johnston in the 1990s and early 2000s; I loved the two Spielberg entries and liked Johnston's contribution to the series, but I thought that maybe turning Michael Crichton's duology of sci-fi thrillers (Jurassic Park, The Lost World) into a movie franchise may not have been a good idea. After all, how many times can you do variations on the theme of "dinosaurs and humans have been separated for 65 million years; changing that dynamic is catastrophically bad"?

In the hands of less-talented moviemakers, the Jurassic Park could have devolved into a dinosaur-themed repeat of the Airport or Jaws series, both of which were series that were made by Universal Pictures' previous corporate leaders. Each of those series began with a well-made film which became a box office hit; each of those franchises quickly became a collection of increasingly inane films made solely for squeezing money out of increasingly smaller audiences.

Fortunately, the fourth film in the series - which was greenlit as early as 2001 and originally scheduled for a 2005 release - underwent a protracted pre-production process. Several writers - including John Sayles, Amanda Silver, and Rick Jaffa - tried to come up with a clever and cool script based on three key ideas provided by Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of the new Jurassic World trilogy.

These ideas were:

• The park had to be fully functional and not in "about to open" mode
• One of the characters is a dinosaur trainer who bonds with the animals
• A carnivorous dinosaur escapes and threatens the lives of everyone on the island

Eventually, even though Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa submitted a script with all of these elements,  the film's new director, Colin Trevorrow brought in his writing partner, Derek Connolly, and rewrote the screenplay to fit Trevorrow's notion for the movie, which he renamed Jurassic World as he believed the series had to go beyond the original trilogy and start a new and more coherent trilogy that told one large story instead of being episodic. 

On the whole, Jurassic World deserves the success it earned three years ago when it became the second biggest hit (after Star Wars: The Force Awakens) of 2015. Trevorrow is a filmmaker who knows how to tell a good story and his ideas for Jurassic World are, in many ways, both brilliant and subversive. 

In Jurassic World, two main ideas dominate the story:  the ill-advised pursuit of money leading to environmental disaster and the ubiquity of technology leading to ignorance and the taking for granted of scientific wonder. 

As in all of the Jurassic Park films, Jurassic World delves into the late Michael Crichton's notion that corporate profit margins and advances in genetic science may not be a match made in heaven; indeed, Wu's doubling down on his original decision to use his scientific knowledge to help exploit the dinosaurs is consistent with the notion that Jurassic Park is a variation on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 

Of course, the film is neither a documentary about dinosaurs brought back to life nor is it a dissertation on the moral implications of mixing corporate greed and high-technology concepts. It's a science fiction/horror/adventure film, and the Spielberg/Trevorrow/Connolly team clearly delivers that..in spades.

The cast, which includes Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Indian superstar Irrfan Khan, is well-suited for this kind of summer blockbuster, and everyone, including the two young actors who play Zach and Gray, turns in good, solid performances. 

Sure, there are some off-notes, such as Claire Dearing's almost pristine appearance throughout much of the film and a feeling of "deja vu all over again" that hits the viewer as familiar Jurassic Park tropes come into play (Overly-enthusiastic billionaire? Check. Ruthless exploiters of dinosaurs? Check. Humans that become dino-snacks before the end of the movie? Triple check.). But on the whole, this is a fun, exciting first installment in a planned trilogy; I strongly recommend it.