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Chris Pratt is now at the top of the action hero foodchain
BAbsence does make the heart grow fonder, that is, if you’ve got Steven Spielberg tugging at the heartstrings. The master director didn’t helm Jurassic World, but his fingerprints (he served as executive producer) are all over the finished product. The result is a movie that, at least, gets the big things right, those over ten feet tall or so.
Jurassic World is set on Isla Nublar, home of the ill-fated amusement park in the original Jurassic Park. To keep tourist interest high, the new owner of the park (Irrfan Khan) has bred a genetically modified mega-carnivore dubbed Indominus Rex. Naturally, the I-rex gets loose and has some 20,000 human choices for its next meal. In desperation, the park’s administrator, Claire Daring (Bryce Dallas Howard) turns to animal wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) for help. And, since it wouldn’t be a real dinosaur movie without kids in peril, Claire’s two young nephews (Nick Robinson and Ty SImpkins) wind up stranded in the jungle as well.
What Jurassic World does well, it does very well indeed. The CGI animation is at times amazing, especially the sequences involving dinosaur fights. The film was directed by Colin Trevorrow in only his second feature film, but the cuts between shots with human actors and those featuring dinosaurs are flawless. There are only a couple of moments in the two-hour film with humans and dinos in the same shot that seem fake. On the other hand, the characters in the movie seem completely fake, nothing more than plot devices to guide the film from one set piece to another. Particularly annoying is Vincent d’Onofrio as an all-purpose villain who futilely escalates the film’s level of violence. Surprisingly, Chris Pratt plays his character completely straight with none of the light touch he showed in Guardians of the Galaxy. The screenplay does show flashes of wit and cleverness in the creation of its elaborately designed and well thought out theme park, allowing Jurassic World to poke fun at the very corporate mentality that greenlit it while simultaneously embracing it as much as possible through paper-thin characters and highly predictable plotting. Jurassic World, the movie, proves to be much like Jurassic World, the theme park, totally artificial but so well planned and constructed that most in attendance won’t care. Best of all, the dinosaurs in the theater will only take a chunk out of the audience’s wallets.
In this scene, Chris Pratt tries to rescue a park employee from some raptors (actors in performance capture suits play the raptors). Our full review of Jurassic World is now available on Silver Screen Cinema.
Photo credit: “Chris Pratt” by Gage Skidmore / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
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