IT’S T-REXTACULAR!
With super-sized dinosaurs and a very hunky hero, the new Jurassic Park is a big beast of a movie
Jurassic World (12A) Verdict: Top-notch entertainment, with bite ★★★★✩
PERHAPS the most troubling thing about Jurassic World, the fourth cinematic spin-off from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel about dinosaurs being brought back to life, is that it all looks a sight more realistic than it did when Steven Spielberg made the first film, Jurassic Park, in 1993.
Then, it was a hugely enjoyable fantasy. Now, with geneticists and cellular scientists learning more by the day, it looks horribly like a vision of the near-future.
Still, all that aside, this is a tremendously exhilarating adventure, certain to be a huge box office hit and a worthy addition to what I suppose must be called the Jurassic Park franchise — although the film itself bluntly satirises horrible marketing speak.
Thus the dinosaurs in what is now a fully-functioning theme park just off the coast of Costa Rica are known to the people who work there merely as ‘assets’, and the beefy chaps who must keep them safely behind walls and bars as the ‘asset-containment’ crew.
In another welcome poke at rampant zoo and theme park commercialism, the bigger dinosaurs are even anointed with i ndividual corporate sponsorship. So who knows whether anyone on director Colin Trevorrow’s set recognised the irony of the film’s hunky hero, Owen (Chris Pratt), ostentatiously swigging from a bottle of Coke?
Satire is all well and good, but product placement still brings in the moolah.
THE thirsty Owen is the film’s conscience, a velociraptor trainer to whom the animals are personalities in their own right, not assets, which is why he gives his raptors names.
But otherwise, the island theme park first envisaged in the original film by Richard Attenborough’s character John Hammond has itself become a barely controllable beast.
It operates like Disneyland or Sea World, with T-Rex feeding time announced over the loudspeaker system, yet calamity never seems more than a malfunctioning lever away.
The park is owned by the eighth richest man in the world, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), whose motives are decent enough: he wants his thousands of daily visitors to have the best possible experience.
But this is a world in which children have grown bored with stegosauruses, gazing upon them as if they were elephants.
So Masrani has encouraged his employees to produce ever-bigger, fiercer creatures, licence for his chief geneticist Dr Henry Wu ( played by B. D. Wong, lone survivor from the first Jurassic Park) to produce a terrifying hybrid, the Indominus Rex.
For the film’s principal baddy, Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), this has exciting military implications.
He thinks the Indominus could be cloned — like a more threatening version of Dolly the sheep — and lucratively deployed in battle.
So, what happens next? Well, it’s hardly a spoiler to let on that Indominus outsmarts its keepers and escapes, wreaking terrible carnage.
Trying desperately to elude it are the park’s operations manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her two nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins), visiting from the U.S.
BUT Indominus has keen sight and even keener smell so, from the moment of the escape, the film more or less unfolds as an action-packed version of that old joke about the dinosaur called do you think he saurus.
Or would if Indominus wasn’t a female (which will doubtless have some f olk excitedly declaring it a feminist film, as they did Mad Max: Fury Road, when, of course, it’s nothing of the sort . . . it’s just a film).
Meanwhile, will the incredibly uptight, chilly Claire end up bonding with her nephews?
Will she relax into the muscular arms of Owen, whose charms she has so far resisted?
And will Zach, the moody teenager resentful of his annoying younger sibling, discover a well-hidden seam of brotherly love?
The answers won’t surprise you, but you’ll enjoy finding out.
While it’s not very much more than a monster- on-the-loose movie, and it’s weird that the man- eating dinosaurs only really seem to have an appetite for the bad guys, it’s two hours of superbly realised, really top-notch entertainment.