FILM: Jurassic World: Sink your teeth into this

28 Jun, 2015 - 00:06 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

WELL, that’s new!

Funny how three words can sum up what ordinarily would take 1 000 words to say. These three words capture my complete awe at the latest Hollywood blockbuster, “Jurassic World”.

After my colossal disappointment with “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, the cliché that was “Taken 3” and the visual catastrophe that was “Furious 7”, it’s quite refreshing to see that Hollywood is still capable of coming up with something bold and new.

Advertised as a reboot, “Jurassic World” comes off more as a prequel – and a splendid one at that. Set some 20 or so years after the last film, Isla Nublar theme park re-opens with a more state-of-the-art establishment and bigger and badder dinosaurs.

For a while, people to the park to see the play on dinosaur genetics. But numbers start dropping as interest declines. The park owners yet again play God and create a whole new super-species of dinosaur; the Indominus Rex.

This is part raptor, part T-Rex and part many other dinosaurs and is tipped as the game changer.

Unfortunately, and expectedly, everything that can go wrong goes wrong and the dinosaur escapes from its confinement.

As a fan of the “Jurassic Park” of the ‘90s, I approached this instalment with preconceived notions about the scripts being the same, the actors changed, and fancy CGI voodoo thrown in to give the appearance of novelty.

I was wrong. The cast is solid, with Chris Pratt outstanding as lead, while Jake Johnson, Bryce Dallas Howard and Vincent D’Onofrio decent as supporting acts. The CGI was surprisingly, or should I say uncharacteristically, toned down and this allowed for more realistic and scarier creatures, not to mention allowing more time for character building and storytelling.

And for those, like me, who enjoy a gruesome and bloody death in cinema, the film has plenty of that.

This is not to say that the film did not have its faults.

As mentioned earlier, Howard was splendid as a supporting act, but someone needs to explain to me how she manages to spend just about the the entire movie fleeing dinosaurs while wearing heels. And while foreshadowing is a sometimes handy technique, there is a thing called overkill.

The open ending of the two-hour film and its US$402 million gross revenue to date tells me there will be another chapter to this story.

 

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