4. Jurassic World
In an age where the current trend is to rejuvenate long abandoned franchises with a shinier coat of paint known as CGI, Jurassic Park is one of the very few series that benefits from that fancy modern technology. I’ll always be a supporter of practical effects and doing everything the hard way, but two decades worth of advancements in cinema equate to being able to do shitloads of cool stuff with dinosaurs, more importantly stuff the original trilogy was incapable of pulling off.
Of course this results in a different approach tonally; it’s even mentioned in the movie that Jurassic World must be bigger and scarier. Director Colin Trevorrow uses this opportunity to add a dash of unexpected yet welcome satirical edge on the current state of Hollywood; consumers want new ideas and to see things they have never seen before, while it is up to corporations and focus groups to test a myriad of concepts in hopes of finding something that makes gangbusters. The analogy here is with the Jurassic World itself; it is hard to believe that an amusement park filled to the brim with living, breathing dinosaurs could lose its “wow factor” but it is, revenue is still climbing but so are costs. The solution: genetically splice different breeds of dinosaurs to create a mega-attraction…
Read the rest of Robert Kojder’s ★ ★ ★ review here.
And also, listen to Luke Owen defend the movie’s merits on the Flickering Myth Podcast episode below…
https://soundcloud.com/flickeringmythpodcast/episode-133-jurassic-world-2015
Originally published July 13, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
