JURASSIC WORLD

Jurassic Park is one of the first films I can remember seeing in the cinema and, as such, holds a special place in my movie memories. This was not an excitement that the sequels Lost world and Jurassic Park 3 ever came close to capturing. Lost World had its moments certainly but the ending, with the suburban T-rex, did a lot to ruin that. 3 came closer to capturing the feel of the original but still fell short. So I approached the fourth film in the series, after a long, long gap, with no small amount of trepidation. Early stories of dino-human hybrids and tame velociraptors did little to ease this apprehension. Thankfully there is no human–dinosaur hybrid (although I’m sure some embarrassing concept drawings will emerge at some point) and the tamed raptors are far from domestic pets (and actually come across as weirdly plausible in the universe of the film). Jurassic World is a film which lives and breathes on pure nostalgia; there are innumerable call backs to the original films from Tim’s night vision goggles to cues in the music score from both the first and second films. None of this is more evident than the film’s climax which still manages to be extremely entertaining despite the nagging suspicion that it was thought up by an excited five year old. A good dose of level-headed humour helps this - Chris Pratt’s Owen plays a big part in this with verbal sparring with Byrce Dallas Howard’s Claire (the two are complete opposites … and you know what that means.) Of course heroes are useless without a villain and this film’s villain, the Indominous Rex (or Frankensarus Rex as I like to think of him) a hybrid creation which, whenever it looks like the good guys have it cornered, keeps pulling new tricks out of its scaly sleeves. The design for the Indominus Rex is very good and makes it look, well not natural because it isn’t, but realistic in the world it inhabits. This could easily have gone wrong in development so let’s just be grateful we don’t have a fifty foot Godzilla sized implausibility. One slight gripe on the dino front is with Owen’s raptor pack, given they all have names (albeit military style code names) it would have been nice if they had a bit more individual characteristics -after all the dino’s are the real stars of the show surely . FINAL VERDICT 7/10 this is a very enjoyable film which makes the wait well worth it and lets us know that the franchise has survived