Jurassic World: Safe, Solid Fun

Are we as a society impressed with movies anymore? Back when motion pictures were first invented, they were an astonishing feat of engineering and imagination. In fact, some people leapt out of their seats and fled the cinema when a train in one such moving picture barreled towards them. Now, I sense that we take movies for granted. Don't get me wrong, our fascination with stories isn't going anywhere. It's just that we're not as impressed by the commodity of cinema as we used to be - a common-enough sentiment when a privilege becomes taken for granted. Now, let's get fictional. The dinosaurs of Jurassic World aren't as impressive to the world anymore. In fact, 12-year-old Gray Mitchell doesn't seem that excited at all to go see dinosaurs at Jurassic World, the theme park where his Aunt Claire works. His brother Zach is older and more sympathetic, and while he seems to be genuinely interested in seeing these creatures up close, Gray just isn't buying it. However, when a bio-engineered carnivore called the Indominus Rex escapes and threatens the safety of those at the park, Gray's disinterest fades real, real quickly. The brothers are going to have to team up with their Aunt Claire and a Raptor trainer named Owen lest Jurassic World become yet another example of why cloning dinosaurs back into existence was a terrible idea. 

I may be reading into this movie too much, but I sensed that Jurassic World put in its best effort to feel as commercialized as possible. When we first invent something, it's exciting. When John Hammond reinvented dinosaurs, it was exhilarating. But these exciting discoveries become mundanities when we give them enough time to, and Jurassic World punches in the point that dinosaurs just aren't as exciting to us or the people inhabiting their world as they were in 1993. It may be a blockbuster, but Jurassic World is a self-aware blockbuster, and this is a valuable thing to be. It's a self-aware blockbuster that's also inhabited by some mostly interesting characters. Chris Pratt brings a bucketload of charisma to the lead role of Owen, a dinosaur trainer with a soft spot for his domesticated Velociraptors, a refreshing repurposing of a creature we'd been conditioned to call the villain. Even if Pratt may play a variation of the same character in every movie starring him, he somehow makes Star-Lord in jeans and a biology assistant teacher's jacket more than watchable. 

The concept of Jurassic World is incredibly familiar. Humans make dinosaurs, dinosaurs break out, humans run for their lives, rinse and repeat. It's yet another story of our hubris as humans, and while that's cool, I wish it were more. Jurassic World is a safe movie, entirely risk-averse and predictable because of it. It borrows countless habits from its predecessors, though it does inject these tropes with a fresh aesthetic and some new gimmicks that can be pretty cool when they try to be, among them the aforementioned Velociraptors that actually aren't the spawn of Satan. It's a fun movie, but not once does it take any real chances. We can't have everything.

Jurassic World is a solid-enough reboot of a classic franchise with the same premise, same ideas, same mistakes, and same consequences. It functions as fun, exciting, and familiar escapism, where the dinosaurs we try so hard to create end up eating us all over again because we're naive enough to allow them to. While it does play with some new and until-recently unseen elements, it admittedly doesn't do much more than line up another running and screaming feast for giant CG dinosaurs to munch on. Nevertheless, it remains a well-acted and enjoyable affair, even if it doesn't dig up anything about this franchise that's dying to be redone.

Jurassic World - 7/10

Proverbs 12:10-11