- UK release: June 2015
- Director: Colin Trevorrow · Writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Legendary Pictures
- Genre: Science fiction adventure / creature blockbuster · Runtime: 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Lego Movie) as Owen Grady; Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, The Help) as Claire Dearing; Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket, Men in Black) as Vic Hoskins; Irrfan Khan (Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi) as Simon Masrani
- IMDb: 7.0 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 70% critics / 78% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Twenty-two years after the original Jurassic Park opened its gates to a select few and then ate most of them, the franchise has been dormant long enough that a reboot was the only sensible move. Two limp sequels in the late nineties and a third in 2001 had drained the wonder out of the idea, and the obvious question hanging over Jurassic World is whether anyone can recapture what Spielberg did in 1993, or whether the dinosaurs are now just a brand. Colin Trevorrow, plucked from the small indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed to direct a tentpole on this scale, answers it with a film that is openly aware of the problem. The conceit here is that the park finally works, has been working for years, and the public has grown bored of mere dinosaurs. That is a sharp piece of self-criticism to build a blockbuster on.
The setup
Isla Nublar now hosts a functioning luxury resort, twenty thousand visitors a day strolling past once-impossible animals the way you might wander a safari park. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) runs operations for the park’s owner, the breezy billionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), and the numbers say attendance plateaus unless there is something bigger and scarier to sell. The lab obliges with the Indominus rex, a hybrid stitched together from several species and a few corporate ambitions, engineered to be the headline attraction. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), an ex-Navy animal behaviourist who has been training a pack of velociraptors, is brought in to assess the new asset’s paddock. The assessment does not go well. From there the film does what the title promises: the spectacle the park was selling turns on the people selling it, and a working theme park becomes a containment failure with eighty square kilometres of guests inside it.
The cast
Pratt is doing his post-Guardians leading-man turn here, and it suits the material. Owen is competent, dryly funny and entirely unbothered, a man who treats a paddock of raptors as a management problem rather than a nightmare, and Pratt sells that calm without tipping into smug. Bryce Dallas Howard has the harder and less rewarded job: Claire begins as the buttoned-up executive who refers to the animals as assets, and the script makes her thaw across the runtime. Howard finds more in it than the writing strictly earns, and her late-film competence under pressure is one of the small pleasures of the back half. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Hoskins, the security contractor who sees the raptors as a weapons programme, with exactly the right amount of self-satisfied menace. Best of all is Irrfan Khan as Masrani, who gives the billionaire a genuine, almost childlike delight in his creatures that grounds the film’s better instincts. The two child characters, Claire’s visiting nephews, are functional rather than memorable, there to be imperilled on cue.
The craft
Trevorrow directs the set pieces with confidence, and the film is at its strongest when it stops apologising and lets the animals loose. A pterosaur attack on the crowded main street is staged with real verve, and the raptors-on-patrol sequences have a tactical tension the franchise has never tried before. John Schwartzman shoots the resort in bright, glossy daylight, which is a deliberate inversion of the original’s rain-soaked dread and mostly pays off, even if it costs the film some atmosphere. Michael Giacchino’s score does its duty and knows when to let John Williams’s original theme swell, and the film leans on that nostalgia hard, sometimes shamelessly: a wander through the ruined original visitor centre is pure fan service, and it works. The Indominus itself is a fine creation, smart in a way that keeps the threat fresh. The effects are a blend of practical and digital that occasionally shows its seams, but the animals have weight and the action has stakes.
How it stacks up
The film Jurassic World is forever measuring itself against is, of course, the 1993 original, and on that count it loses, as it was always going to. Spielberg’s film had patience, awe and the sheer novelty of seeing a brachiosaur for the first time, and nothing here matches that first reveal. What this one has instead is scale and self-awareness. It is closer in spirit to a classic creature feature, the lineage that runs back through King Kong and the monster-island tradition, than to the careful science-thriller of the original. Set beside the two nineties sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, it is comfortably the best of the follow-ups, because it has an idea and a tone rather than just more teeth.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running around 70%, broadly approving but with a recurring reservation: the magic of the first film is gone, replaced by something more mechanical and corporate. Audiences are warmer, at 78%, and the box office suggests the appetite for big-screen dinosaurs never really went away. I am closer to the audience here. The critical line is fair, but it slightly misses what this film is doing. The corporate sheen is not a failure of imagination; it is the subject. A park that has commodified wonder until the customers want it bigger is a knowing comment on the blockbuster machine that produced the film itself, and that gives the spectacle a faint, welcome layer of bite.
Verdict
This is not the equal of the film that started it all, and it is not trying to be something it cannot. What it is, is a confident, propulsive, genuinely entertaining blockbuster that understands its own franchise and has fun with it. The leads are well cast, the set pieces deliver, and the central idea, that we have grown bored of miracles and keep demanding louder ones, is smarter than the genre usually bothers with. It is hugely rewatchable, the kind of film that rewards a big screen and a big sound system, and it sends you out grinning. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D, 3D and IMAX. The larger formats are worth the surcharge for the street-level pterosaur sequence alone.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Jurassic World launched a new trilogy, followed by Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Dominion (2022), neither of which recaptured the cleaner shape of this first entry, and the series has since rebooted again with a fresh cast. The film has settled into its reputation as the strongest of the modern revival and the one that proved the dinosaurs still sold. It is widely available on disc and digital and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat, occasional bloody moments, action violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Action violence as dinosaurs chase and attack humans, with several people picked up in the jaws of gigantic dinosaurs. Soldiers fire guns at the dinosaurs to try and stop them. There are also some fights between dinosaurs.
Threat and horror: Several sequences of moderate threat include humans being chased by dinosaurs, or hiding when aggressive dinosaurs are nearby. Some children are shown being scared and upset, but they reassure each other and are not harmed.
Injury detail: Occasional bloody moments feature, without any strong detail or clear focus on injuries. There is sight of blood spray on a window and some blood is seen falling through a tree canopy as a person is killed by a dinosaur. A man is stabbed in the chest when a pterodactyl flies into him.
Language: There is mild bad language, including several uses of ‘shit’ and ‘son of a bitch’.
Alcohol and smoking: Adults are seen drinking alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
