movies: jurassic world

jurassic world - the park is open
Jurassic World definitely feels like it's recycling much of the plot from the first two Jurassic Park movies. Okay, that may not be fair... not recycling so much as a homage.

They're just homaging all over the place in this movie. Literally so in more than a few places when things from the first movie actually show up.

But the first mistake they make is to think that we're really going to give a crap when presented with a sullen teenager (Nick Robinson) and his annoying hyper know-it-all little brother (Ty Simpkins). The most annoying and pointless part of any of the Jurassic movies has been the badly written children. And even though you eventually partially warmed up to the children in the original movie, there really isn't any point in this one where I gave a damn about what happened to the two boys.

Actually that was fairly widespread throughout the movie... it was full of stupid people doing monumentally stupid things. Even for this franchise, there were some really, really dumb things going on.

The other things that irked me was that they seemed to have gone straight to the "Big Book of Character Tropes" for all their characters... there's the sullen teenager, the precocious preteen, the person in power who views integral plot element as "numbers on a spreadsheet", the woman who is too focused on her career to make time for family, the uptight control freak (those last three are all the same character, Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire), the nefarious military aligned man, the scientist doing things he shouldn't, the token black friend (seriously I'm pretty sure he was the only black character with a speaking part), the awkward geeky guy who comes through in a crunch and last but not least the loveable rogue. Oh, and add to that parents who may or may not have been getting a divorce, because the movie falls into the "tell don't show" category for that little revelation, and honestly, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the story.

And I'll be honest, with the exception of the lovable rogue, Chris Pratt's Owen, there really wasn't another character I particularly liked.

Although when Pratt wasn't running he was staring intently at things and frequently saying "no".

Every scene he has with the velociraptors was pretty damn good though, and it's a shame that wasn't utilised more than it is in the movie.

The scenes at the end of the movie, although they don't necessarily make a lot of sense if you think about them too much, are pretty damn cool though.

Overall the visual effects are pretty spectacular, but weirdly it feels less like the movie takes the time to really highlight the dinosaurs like the previous movies did. Maybe that's part of the context of the movie world where dinosaurs have existed for the last twenty years and teenagers like Robinson have never lived in a world without dinosaurs and find the whole thing terribly dull.

But really it all just feels like stuff we've seen before, just with slightly prettier packaging.

yani's rating: 2 viable embryos out of 5

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