Movie review 'Jurassic World': The return to Isla Nublar

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Irrfan Khan, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
Director: Colin Trevorrow
Rating: 3 stars

A significant accomplishment for Jurassic World — the fourth part of the iconic film series that launched 22 years ago with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park — is its meditation on the nature of film franchises. Claire Dearing, the operations manager for the eponymous park remarks, “We must come up with a new, larger attraction every few years to reinvigorate public interest,” and this could very well be the motto for contemporary operations in Hollywood. This single line isn’t the only instance — the film employs strategic imagery to actually extend Claire’s theory: operators in the control room watch hordes of faceless, anonymous people roam around the park’s premises en masse on multi-screen displays; or when a great white is devoured whole by a super-gargantuan water dinosaur, the same public goes silly with awe.

The manner in which director Colin Trevorrow frames their collective daze is interesting: they sit in front of a giant glass screen that causes their faces to flicker. They could very well be watching a film, much like us. It is in moments like this, when the film is self-reflexive, nearly confessional, that it is at its best. There is a plot too, but like many super-budget Hollywood films of recent times (think Mad Max: Fury Road; Furious 7; Avengers: Age of Ultron) it abstracts specific details to the point that it can, as a result, become thematic.

Simon Masrani has inherited the park from the pioneer of the original films, John Hammond. He entrusts the park and its operations to Claire, a woman with an orderly streak who is anxious to validate her employment through statistical windfalls: more people coming in the park, more customer satisfaction. Masrani commissions Henry Wu and his laboratory (again, the analogy is strong: this unit is similar to the animatronics department in the Hollywood studio which will develop new models of dinosaurs for the film) to engineer a novelty: a scarier, larger, “cooler” dinosaur. Wu forges a terror: a genetic alloy of T-Rex, Cuttlefish and a treefrog, which makes it extremely fierce, allows it to camouflage itself in its immediate environment and alter its body temperature to escape thermal detection. It is also extremely sentient. If this reads like a fanboy wishlist, it is because it is. Inevitably, the creature escapes from its enclosure into the open grounds, thereby allowing it to take the narrative wherever it pleases.

This also allows the protagonists of the film — as often happens in crises situations — to embark on exchanges full of homilies and one-liners. They discuss heady ideas: organisation and chaos; control and anarchy; artificial systems and nature. There is also a peculiar gung-ho adventurism that runs through the film: both Owen Grady, the hero and Masrani are written as old-timey environmentalists who resist attempts to domesticate or mould nature, instead revelling in its complete arbitrariness. Grady lives on a makeshift, hand-constructed trailer by a lake, while Masrani seems to have a strange desire for death.

All of this is perfectly generic of course, but in creature horror, familiarity is very much a virtue. For a major portion of the first half, it even accounts for much fun. The build-up to the creature’s first appearance is built up admirably through a series of sinister suggestions: a giant eye in the middle of the foliage; a tail that sweeps across the breadth of the screen; claw marks that run the entire length of a tall compound wall. If the film cannot sustain similar tension later, it is mostly because of Trevorrow’s (whose sophomore effort this is) inability to decide on a suitable tone for his material. He struggles to re-steer the franchise from its summer blockbuster, family-movie origins to a more compact, unironic, horror film, but with the significant pressure of a multimillion dollar budget, it’s not an easy dilemma to resolve.

The writer is programmer,Lightcube Film Society