Jurassic World (2015)
StuMo and I walked out after this movie, and while I was skipping along and saying, yay, dinosaurs, or words to that effect, we heard some dude behind us saying “well, that was predictable”.
Sorry? Aren’t we all here to see a movie about a dinosaur park, that will go terribly wrong, and then will have a lot of dinosaur fights, that safely end in a big dinosaur being defeated in a cool action sequence? Aren’t we paying good money and turning up to see precisely that sequence, in order, please?
What did he want? Subversive subtexts?
Having said that, now I’m going to have my own little bitch about predictability and vain wish for subversion. God I wish we could all reach the point in which a female character isn’t reduced to – ooh! – piece of candy!
Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) spending the entire movie running in nude stilettos I can handle, because they were a bit of a feature – I mean, if you're gonna run for your life from a T-rex you may as well do it like a sexpot with a close-up on your improbable heels.
But I must say, I drew the line at the part where her perfectly ironed-straight hair morphed in seconds into a perfectly unruly salon beach wave, coincidentally timed to the second at the same moment she suddenly acquired a devil-may-care kiss-me-Chris Pratt new attitude. The heels I could stomach, but the spontaneous hair change that in reality would have taken hours to achieve made me cringe.
I have to say I think they went a little heavy on the product placement as well – I found it a bit intrusive.
Anyway, hurrah, Jurassic Park! I mean World! Whatever! The park, whatever it was called, was a fantasy come true, to the point I almost wished the general tourist scenes went longer so I could savour the detail they went to in the sets, the rides, the merchandise the tourists in the part were toting around. But if I complained that it got to the rampaging-dinosaur action TOO QUICKLY that would mean Emma had a personality transplant.
Plot was satisfactory (it didn't need much; our consumerist culture demands that dinosaurs need to be bigger better scarier than last year, so we made one. Oh, whoops, we’ve created a monster), and just enough jokes and homages to the original to keep the fun level up.
Acting was satisfactory, with little star Ty Simpkins deserving of a special mention for his all-in performance as Gray. Chris he’s-so-hot-right-now Pratt proved, as StuMo said, he will make a perfectly good Indiana Jones if the rumours prove true.
Look, it didn’t reinvent the wheel, but if you wanted it to you’re an idiot. Go see it at the movies. Totes worth your hard-earned.