Movie Review: 'Jurassic World'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Dinosaurs continue to fascinate us.
After all, they're still huge and they're still fierce and they're still dead.
Except at the movies.
Jurassic World is the fourth installment in the franchise kicked off in 1993 with Jurassic Park, director and dino-sorcerer Steven Spielberg's movieization of the best-seller by Michael Crichton, followed up upon by The Lost World in 1997, then continued in 2001 with Jurassic Park III.
One-dimensional – in that they were effects-driven -- these films might have been, but what a dimension. And they continue to set the standard by which we measure all modern creature features.
Jurassic World takes place a couple decades since the idea of a living-dinosaur theme park first surfaced and catastrophe almost immediately befell it.
But now it has become a reality -- an international, upscale vacation destination owned by the billionaire entrepreneur played by Irrfan Khan. It's open to tourists on Isla Nublar, an island near Costa Rica, featuring raptors and an Indominus Rex, a genetically modified hybrid that has Godzilla-like proportions and the "something new" to a jaded, been-there-seen-that public that everyone hopes will boost sagging attendance.
Working at the struggling park are Chris Pratt as Owen Grady, a resourceful behavioral researcher with a military background, and Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire Dearing, the by-the-book operations manager, who now have bigger problems -- literally -- than declining attendance.
The Indominus Rex has broken loose and is running wild throughout the park, at exactly the same time that Claire's two young nephews (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson) have chosen to pay a visit.
And the military consultant and weaponry expert played by Vincent D'Onofrio seems to have a special interest in the velociraptors that raptor wrangler Grady has "trained."
Spielberg is the executive producer, as he was in the previous installment after directing the first two entries. And although his directorial touch may be missed, his fingerprints and footprints are all over this project. How could they not be?
What Spielberg never did, however, and what director Colin Trevorrow -- with only a nifty but small-scale 2012 science fiction thriller, a time-travel drama called Safety Not Guaranteed behind him – sometimes traffics in, especially in the late going, is the kind of frantic action and subsequent sky-high body count that smacks of devaluing human life.
But the setup, which is essentially the film's first half, is a model of slow-build suspense.
The script by Trevorrow, Derek Connolly, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver, from a story by Jaffa and Silver, includes only one character from the original -- BD Wong as a geneticist and bioengineer – and more or less ignores the existence of the previous two sequels by taking us back to the original location.
As for the CGI-generated creatures, well, once again, they-re amazingly seamless. We may take the routinely spectacular special effects for granted, but that doesn't make them any less spectacular.
The test is whether, as did its original predecessor – and, to a certain degree, the first two sequels as well -- Jurrasic World turns us into frightened, delighted, mesmerized ten-year-olds gawking at a groundbreaking, ground-shaking, eye-popping, heart-stopping fantasy.
The verdict: not quite, but tantalizingly, impressively, deliciously close.
That's because the thrills are plentiful and the leads are magnetic.
Pratt, following a part-of-the-ensemble run on TV's Parks and Recreation, has developed into a charismatic, A-list leading man on the movie screen seemingly overnight. And if Howard isn't already a major star, this role will make her one.
So we'll survive 3½ stars out of 4 for the exhilarating escapist adventure, Jurassic World, the dandy dinos-gone-wild sequel encounter of the third kind.