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Midway through Jurassic World, two young brothers come across a storage building
that’s essentially a crypt full of artifacts from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 smash
hit Jurassic Park. Moldering away in there is the boxy 1992 Jeep Wrangler in
which Laura Dern so memorably fled the Tyrannosaurus Rex. (You can learn how to
soup up your own vehicle to resemble it, if your affection for Jurassic Park
runs that deep.) An old Jurassic Park banner—not unlike the one that drifts
ironically past the T. Rex at the climax of the first movie—gets rolled up by
the older boy to be used as a torch—an old prop turned fuel for the new movie’s
purposes. In Jurassic World, director Colin Trevorrow—a surprise pick for the
job, given that his only previous dramatic feature was the modest sci-fi indie
Safety Not Guaranteed—pays homage to the Spielberg original even as he mulches
it. But from that mulch grows a pretty robust hybrid, for both good and
ill—which I guess is appropriate for a film that’s all about the joy and
stupidity of bringing back dinosaurs.
Jurassic World, the third and (for whatever it’s worth) probably best sequel to
Jurassic Park, is an old-fashioned monster movie. It’s also a special-effects
extravaganza that pushes the boundaries of digital world-creation. A cash grab
exploiting nostalgia for a recognizable summer franchise. A preachy
re-re-re-retelling of Frankenstein. An ickily retrograde gender parable, if you
stop and think about it for a minute. A whomping good time, if you don’t—and who
has time to think when there’s a genetically engineered mega-dinosaur on the
loose?
Jurassic World is set in the present day, a technology-jaded age in which, a
generation after the opening of the first cloned-dino theme park, enormous
prehistoric lizards have become old hat. In fact, the older of the two brothers,
Zach (Nick Robinson) doesn’t even want to be at Jurassic World—he’s more
interested in flirting with every girl he sees. But the younger, Gray (Ty
Simpkins, a shaggy-haired boy with old-school Spielberg-kid appeal) is a
dinosaur nerd who’s thrilled to be exploring the carefully controlled wonders of
the now purportedly danger-free park, which takes up a whole (fictional) island
off the coast of Costa Rica.
The person insisting the hardest that this new dino enclosure is seriously the
safest place ever, not like the last time or the time before that or that first,
really scary time, is the boys’ aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), the chilly,
business-obsessed manager of the park. Claire speaks almost exclusively in
corporate jargon, quoting focus-group feedback like it’s scripture and referring
to the dinosaurs as “assets.” “They’re not assets, they’re animals!” replies the
park’s resident expert on dino behavior, Owen (Chris Pratt)—maybe not in those
exact words, but in very similar ones, and in multiple scenes. Ideas about
nature, technology, ethics, and corporate greed get chewed over nearly as
thoroughly in the first half of Jurassic World as theme-park patrons do in the
second.
Claire and Owen’s ideological differences over the park’s mission have made them
steer clear of each other in the past, especially after a long-ago date left
them each with a bad impression of the other. But they have to team up when
Claire’s nephews go off-roading in a Gyrosphere—a sort of transparent
hamster-ball vehicle for humans, made for touring the tightly patrolled grounds
of the park—and wind up being chased by Indominus Rex herself.
Not familiar with that terrifying dinosaur species? Not to worry, it never
existed … or at least hasn’t yet. The unthinkably colossal Indominus is the sole
surviving member of a new super-species, a custom blend whipped up by the park’s
chief genetic engineer (B.D. Wong) to satisfy the public demand for ever bigger,
hungrier, scarier dinosaurs. (Comment on the contemporary film industry noted
and filed.) I couldn’t help but think that Owen should have been consulted much
earlier on the project, as he reasonably points out that breeding a creature to
have all the traits of an ultra-predator and then raising it alone in captivity
with no opportunity to hunt is a foolproof recipe for … making a lot of people
ingredients in that dinosaur’s foolproof recipe.
Because Claire is a bottom-line, let’s-get-this-done kind of lady, I’ll be one
too: Jurassic World delivers all that could reasonably be expected from a
non-Spielberg-directed, decades-later entry in this only semi-beloved franchise.
The human stories are often hokey, but they’re really just frames on which to
hang the suspense sequences—we have to care about some characters enough that we
mind if they’re plucked from the Earth by flocks of pterodactyls. (That happens
to one supporting character who didn’t really do anything to “deserve” it, and
you feel for her—but her surprise demise is so cleverly staged that it plays as
a dark comic twist rather than a gruesome comeuppance.) Other
characters—especially Vincent D’Onofrio as a gung-ho military type who wants to
train Chris Pratt’s beloved Velociraptors for use as weapons—do seem to be
cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in the dinosaur department, and they get it. Irrfan Khan
plays a more morally ambiguous figure, the proud owner of Jurassic World, a
company he believes in so deeply he’s blind to the hubris implicit in its very
existence.
I could have lived without the film’s implication that, by privileging her dino-park
career over settling down and having babies, Bryce Dallas Howard’s character is
indirectly responsible for the whole Indominus incident. (No one ever flat-out
says this, but it’s the subtext of a plot involving Judy Greer as the boys’
mother, who’s left them in their aunt’s icy, unmaternal hands for the weekend.)
And yes, the romantic subplot between Pratt and Howard, in which he slowly
breaks down her defenses just by being his sexy dino-handling self, is a little
on the me-Tarzan-you-Jane side. But you don’t go to the fourth Jurassic Park
movie for up-to-date gender politics. You go for the crunchy dino-on-human
action, and Jurassic World provides plenty of that.
We’ve been living with CGI long enough now that it’s easy to forget that in the
original, the Velociraptors were played in small part by stunt performers in
suits. In this film, some of my favorite scenes are the quieter, non-chase
interactions that use not digital technology but puppetry to render the dinos’
heads and faces in close-up. The Indominus Rex is, strangely, one of the least
scary predators in Jurassic World, maybe because vast differences in scale are
one of the hardest things to render believably via digital effects. It’s when
Indominus hangs out with creatures of her own, computer-generated kind—as in the
spectacular final multi-dino smack down—that we finally get a good look at her
relative size. When we do, it’s hard not to feel a burst of awe at the fact that
such creatures as these once walked the Earth. (OK, not the genetically
engineered mega-predator, but the others, who are still pretty damn huge.) It’s
that emotion, more than anything else, that makes me believe anyone would
rebuild anything as comically unwise as a cloned-dinosaur theme park—and that
somehow makes me willing to revisit that ridiculous but exciting place all over
again. |
