Colin Trevorrow reopens the park, fills it with paying customers and lets loose a dinosaur built to order. The lagoon show and Chris Pratt are worth the evening; the rest is loud, weightless and unkind to its own heroine.
Colin Trevorrow, whose only previous film was a small time-travel comedy, has been handed the park. It is built now, on Isla Nublar, with a monorail, a lagoon grandstand and a petting zoo where toddlers ride baby triceratops, and the film’s opening joke is that the customers have got used to it. Attendance dips unless something new is unveiled, so the lab has made something new. Jurassic World knows what it is doing here and says so. It is a brisk, good-looking 124 minutes that never once weighs what it should.
The park is the best thing in it. Ed Verreaux designs a resort that looks like a real one, a main street of shops and restaurants with the jungle at the end of it, and John Schwartzman shoots the daytime crowds in the flat, hot light of a holiday brochure, which is the right choice. A gyrosphere rolls through a herd of grazing sauropods and for a minute we are simply tourists. Then the lagoon show: a great white is winched over the water, the mosasaur comes up for it, and the grandstand sinks so the crowd can watch it swim past the glass. We sat up, plainly delighted. Michael Giacchino picks that moment, and the moment at the gates, to let John Williams’s old theme through, and both times it lands.
Chris Pratt is the other reason to stay. He plays Owen, who trains the park’s four raptors from a walkway above their pen, as a man relaxed because he knows exactly how dangerous his job is, and his scenes with Omar Sy’s Barry, the two of them reading the animals and each other, are the film’s most convincing relationship. Jake Johnson has the best lines as Lowery in the control room, wearing an old Jurassic Park T-shirt he knows he should not be wearing, and he is the only person on the island who seems to find any of this strange.
Bryce Dallas Howard has the harder job. Claire runs the operation, and the script by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly and Trevorrow keeps telling her off for it: she has not seen her nephews in years, she calls the animals assets, she cannot hold a baby dinosaur. Daniel Orlandi and April Ferry put her in white and in heels, and the film then makes the heels a joke against her for two hours. Howard plays it with more grace than it was written with. We found ourselves on her side and irritated with the film for not being.
The new animal is the disappointment. The Indominus rex has been assembled to frighten more than anything before it, and it comes out grey and long and hard to remember, a shape rather than a face. Its escape is well built, but afterwards it is a thing that appears and roars. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Hoskins wants to sell the raptors to the army, and every scene he is in stops the film so he can say so again. The nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins), carry a subplot about their parents that is raised twice and dropped. BD Wong gets one scene as Dr. Henry Wu to explain the science and is then mislaid.
Then there is the weight. In 1993 Steven Spielberg’s animals were often rubber and hydraulics; when the tyrannosaur put its head through a car roof, the roof gave. Here nearly everything is digital, and Kevin Stitt cuts so that nothing stands still long enough to be doubted. The night finale is several large creatures fighting in the dark, and we could not have told you at any moment which had the upper hand or, by then, which we were for. We had stopped minding. That is a bad thing to happen in a monster film.
Jurassic Park had one idea: the fences would not hold and the animals would not care what we had planned. Jurassic World has the same idea and a joke about having it, a park that builds a bigger dinosaur for bored customers, made by a studio doing much the same. Said once, it is a good joke. The film keeps saying it and then asks us to be frightened anyway.
Take children of about ten; the 12A allows it, and they will be scared by exactly the right amount and will not care about any of the above. Adults should sit on the aisle and save their trips to the foyer for the Hoskins scenes.
