The characters in "Jurassic World" - which should be titled "Will Humans Never Learn?" - keep telling one another that the paying public needs ever more elaborate sensations to keep them coming back for more. Yet, it's hard at times to tell whether they're talking about the audiences at the park or the audiences for the movie.
This little bit of self-reflective self-awareness on the part of the filmmakers is one of the few interesting things about this fourth entry in a tetralogy that began with the groundbreaking "Jurassic Park" in 1993. The problem is that it's hard to break ground more than once in the same soil, and "Jurassic World" finds no real way to bring anything new to the project.
The movie just keeps playing different variations on the same theme. Thus, instead of "mere" (and, now, apparently passé) full-sized dinosaurs being regenerated out of ancient samples of preserved DNA, we've graduated to "super dinosaurs" being genetically-engineered out of a mixture of all sorts of dino types. All this gene- and species-tampering is taking place at a decade-old amusement park, an improvement, we are told, over the ill-fated one that never quite got off the ground in the 1990s. But humans are humans and playing God, especially for sensation and profit, never ends very well in these sorts of scenarios, so we're primed to buckle our seats and hang on for the ride. We aren't disappointed.
Once we get past that one slight deviation, the plot of "Jurassic World" pretty much replicates the 1993 original, right down to the "unlikely" (though, actually, quite predictable) system malfunction and two lost and imperiled kids having to be saved from becoming Dino-food by an intrepid adult at the park (Chris Pratt plays the role of trainer and dinosaur- whisperer here). In fact, virtually every scene in "Jurassic World" has a corresponding counterpart in "Jurassic Park," only what was once innovative and fresh has now become derivative and stale (apparently, none of the characters here ever seen the original "Jurassic Park" or they wouldn't keep making the exact same mistakes as the previous group).
Pratt has an easygoing, good-ole-boy charm that serves him well in his role as makeshift hero, but Bryce Dallas Howard is given the thankless task of playing a rather insultingly sexist caricature as the manager of the park who's in way over her head when it comes to running the joint, not to mention coping with a crisis of this magnitude (think Kate Capshaw in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom") and is, thus, in constant need of rescuing by the stalwart Pratt.
Under the directorial aegis of Colin Trevorrow, the action scenes and special effects are predictably eye-popping and state-of-the-art - helping to generate the "wow factor" one minimally expects from this series - but the overall air of deja vu that permeates the film keeps this latest dino-blockbuster from being much more than an afterthought in the Jurassic universe.
This little bit of self-reflective self-awareness on the part of the filmmakers is one of the few interesting things about this fourth entry in a tetralogy that began with the groundbreaking "Jurassic Park" in 1993. The problem is that it's hard to break ground more than once in the same soil, and "Jurassic World" finds no real way to bring anything new to the project.
The movie just keeps playing different variations on the same theme. Thus, instead of "mere" (and, now, apparently passé) full-sized dinosaurs being regenerated out of ancient samples of preserved DNA, we've graduated to "super dinosaurs" being genetically-engineered out of a mixture of all sorts of dino types. All this gene- and species-tampering is taking place at a decade-old amusement park, an improvement, we are told, over the ill-fated one that never quite got off the ground in the 1990s. But humans are humans and playing God, especially for sensation and profit, never ends very well in these sorts of scenarios, so we're primed to buckle our seats and hang on for the ride. We aren't disappointed.
Once we get past that one slight deviation, the plot of "Jurassic World" pretty much replicates the 1993 original, right down to the "unlikely" (though, actually, quite predictable) system malfunction and two lost and imperiled kids having to be saved from becoming Dino-food by an intrepid adult at the park (Chris Pratt plays the role of trainer and dinosaur- whisperer here). In fact, virtually every scene in "Jurassic World" has a corresponding counterpart in "Jurassic Park," only what was once innovative and fresh has now become derivative and stale (apparently, none of the characters here ever seen the original "Jurassic Park" or they wouldn't keep making the exact same mistakes as the previous group).
Pratt has an easygoing, good-ole-boy charm that serves him well in his role as makeshift hero, but Bryce Dallas Howard is given the thankless task of playing a rather insultingly sexist caricature as the manager of the park who's in way over her head when it comes to running the joint, not to mention coping with a crisis of this magnitude (think Kate Capshaw in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom") and is, thus, in constant need of rescuing by the stalwart Pratt.
Under the directorial aegis of Colin Trevorrow, the action scenes and special effects are predictably eye-popping and state-of-the-art - helping to generate the "wow factor" one minimally expects from this series - but the overall air of deja vu that permeates the film keeps this latest dino-blockbuster from being much more than an afterthought in the Jurassic universe.