It's hard to believe that it's 22 years since Steven Spielberg's groundbreaking Jurassic Park.
There's something about Spielberg's magical filmmaking, combining technological advances with storytelling prowess, that leaves the image of his T-Rex marauding across the screen as fresh in my mind as when I first saw it.
But by the time of 2001's Jurassic Park III, without Spielberg at the helm, the chomp-and-chase template had worn thin. The biggest, perhaps only justification for a return to the franchise is that we finally get to see the dinosaur theme park that was the failed dream of Richard Attenborough's colourful entrepreneur in the opener. And with Jurassic World, you might say that the park and the film have become one and the same. "No-one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore," park manager Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells her new investors. "Consumers want them bigger, louder, with more teeth."
The most prehistoric item on display here is the script, its plot the same as ever: a pair of kids in danger, protected by adults other than their parents; the billionaire idealist paying the price for playing God; the hero with an empathy for the dinosaurs and respect for the danger they pose. The key difference is that the park is now open - with 20,000 happy punters lining up as dino dinner.
Still located on the lush island near Costa Rica, the now-thriving Jurassic World is a vast, jaw-dropping theme park with a difference: children ride animals, which happen to be baby triceratops; the waterworld attraction has a megaton creature that devours Great White sharks; the safari has visitors driving glass globes through herds of dinosaurs.
But as stiff-laced, number-crunching Claire knows, they need new attractions to fuel interest. And so the scientists move from cloning actual dinosaurs from DNA, to gene splicing and designing new ones. Their latest, Indominus Rex, will lead to an awful lot of trouble.
Hot from his breakthrough in Guardians Of The Galaxy, "Star Lord" Chris Pratt is Owen, an ex-navy chap who has been attempting to tame those nasty little Raptors, and who helps Claire find her lost nephews when the Indominus breaks loose. The wonderful Indian performer Irrfan Khan is the entrepreneur whose desire to entertain gets the better of him, Vincent D'Onofrio the military oaf who sees an opportunity as chaos ensues.
The cast hold up their end, but they're not the main attractions. CGI now dominates the recreation of the creatures (other than one use of animatronics, in a poignant dinosaur death scene) and it continues to amaze. Effects are nothing, though, without a director with a sense of the dramatic.
Spielberg is only executive-producing this one, but you can feel his spirit in newbie director Colin Trevorrow. It's there in the slow build (the reveal of claw marks and a lizard eye before escalating to the more deadly stuff) and in some wonderful images - the frightened boys in their broken sphere, seeing the reflection of the Indominus behind them, Owen racing through the night on his motorcycle, Raptors gliding alongside.
And like Spielberg, Trevorrow appreciates that sometimes a sound effect (more chillingly, a crunch) can be just as effective as explicit visuals. There are some large-scale, 3D-enhanced set pieces, notably when the occupants of the Jurassic aviary descend on the visitors, but the greater pleasures are in the small or unseen. In this, one can feel the reference not only to Jurassic Park, but to Jaws - which can only help Spielberg & co take another bite out of the box office.
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