By Sean Ray / A&E Editor
Jurassic World attempts to deliver a message about the dangers of making things bigger, dumber and with less substance.
Unfortunately, the film does not heed its own words.
In the new Jurassic installment, someone has finally done the impossible and made a working and profitable dinosaur zoo which has been operating for years. However, faced with declining profits, the park’s owner, Simon Misrani (Irrfan Khan), orders the creation of a hybrid dinosaur.
A mixture of a Tyrannosaurus and a Velociraptor, this new creature is known as Indominus Rex, capable of camouflaging itself, hiding from heat sensors, and having great intelligence. And of course, it escapes.
Chris Pratt, fresh off his newly found stardom with last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, plays main character and velociraptor trainer Owen Grady. Pratt delivers a stunning performance, able to go from humor to seriousness flawlessly.
But that might be because Grady turns out to be the only memorable main character from the film. This isn’t to say the other characters are poorly written or badly acted, but merely that the film has so many characters, most of them aren’t able to have enough screen time for the audience to become familiar.
The film suffers from numerous other problems as well. The details of Indominus’s escape and the idiocy of the park managers trying to contain it is beyond belief, to the point that the only reason I can think Indominus really did any damage was because the plot says so.
Somehow Indominus is magically immune to bullets, able to turn completely invisible, and knows what a tracking chip is and that it needs to be removed. Perhaps the biggest plot hole comes when Indominus talks with the Velociraptors, despite early statements that the reason it kills everything is because it is anti-social.
Ultimately, Jurassic World expects you to turn your brain off to enjoy it. If you can do that, good for you. But for a film series that started out with an intelligently written screenplay and some of the best special effects around, it pains me to see a film that phones in its plot and features some of the worst CGI in a big budget film of recent memory. Jurassic World can be a fun movie, expects you to slog through several bad moments to get to the fun.
