Jurassic World Review!

Alright! Today I’m reviewing the fourth film in the Jurassic Park franchise and the first attempt to bring it back to 1993-level success after the abject failures of The Lost World and Jurassic Park III. That’s right, today has 2015’s favorite summer blockbuster Jurassic World, which had the coolest hook for any of these sequels: The park is open. 


While the specifics of how this timeline played out are still uneven, the hook of an open, functional park as envisioned in the first Jurassic Park is incredible and well worth the ticket price. Just seeing what fun habitats and enclosures the graphics team can come up with is entertaining, not even mentioning the fact that the dinosaurs break out and eat people. 

Jurassic World has its fair share of stupid plotting - the main human villain, Edgar the Bug and the Kingpin himself Vincent D’Onofrio, wants to *checks notes* weaponize the velociraptors to win wars for the U.S. military. It’s stupid, but the movie never takes that seriously and thus it works. The same goes with the Indominus Rex’s wide range of gene splicing, which technically gave us our first billion-dollar blockbuster with a cuttlefish villain. 

However, for all of its silliness, Jurassic World has two very important things: Hot people and dinosaurs. The hot people leading the movie this time around are Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, both of who barely have a personality outside of “cool at everything” and “uptight business lady.” There’s something so cool about Chris Pratt’s “cool at everything” characters that make Owen Grady work, though. Pratt is just too likable. 

It’s not a true Jurassic Park film until children are involved, and Jurassic World introduces the kid from Iron Man 3 and the one from Love, Simon in spectacular fashion, creating a thin retread of the (superior) Tim from Jurassic Park and a teenage stereotype. Their parents are also getting divorced, which is mentioned in one scene and never brought up again in what was likely just part of the disaster movie checklist: Hot people ✓ Children of divorced parents ✓


Jurassic World’s biggest attraction, both in-universe and out, are the dinosaurs. There’s something so inherently cool about dinosaurs that speaks to the inner five-year-old inside all of us. The Mosasaurus is my personal favorite in the film, creating some iconic moments and terrifying marketing. The aforementioned Indominus is neat and definitely the best of the World-era gene splice baddies, and the velociraptors begin to border on deus ex machina by the end of the film. 

The movie’s not perfect, nor is it as smart as its predecessor. But it’s a good example of how to do fan service (Small production details rather than bloating shots), legacy sequels (Thing you liked in a new flavor), and a summer blockbuster. I’ll never forget that hot summer of 2015 where I stepped into a chilly theater and had my eleven-year-old mind blown by some very cool dinosaurs. 



Overall, I give Jurassic World an 8/10. “Jurassic World may be bigger, louder, and dumber than the original in every conceivable way, but it’s still full of fun.” 




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