Watch the trailer for Jurassic World, the latest instalment in the dinosaur franchise which began with 1993's Jurassic Park
First it was a Park, now it is a World. And soon, of course, there'll come a time when that too is not enough. The dino-attraction meltdown franchise – invented by novelist Michael Crichton and given an incomparable gloss by director Steven Spielberg – has been renewed and upgraded for a fourth movie. Once again, the prehistoric creatures have bust their pen and they're running riot.
Jurassic World doesn't have an equivalent of Samuel L Jackson's chain-smoking employee Arnold from the first film, or indeed anything like its all-but-subliminal reference to J Robert Oppenheimer. But this is still a terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists on the idea of how dinosaurs could be repositioned in a consumer marketplace where they are almost commonplace, and how the military might take a sinister interest in weaponising these scary beasts. There's an almost Gaia-ist conception of how dinosaurs might solve their own crises and in a (partial) nod to contemporary views, we get a heroine who can take out dinosaurs with a stun gun and also run very fast away from them in heels. All these dinosaurs are female, which incidentally puts Jurassic World in the clear as far as the Bechdel test is concerned.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World It was written by husband-and-wife team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and directed by Colin Trevorrow, whose last feature outing was the indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. But, most importantly, it is executive-produced by Spielberg himself, whose influence is in every base pair of the film's DNA. As the crowds scream in panic while pterodactyls peck their heads, there's a ghost of the chaotic beach in Jaws; the moaning, injured brontosauruses, blinking and grimacing so huggably, are like homesick ETs.
The idea is that this theme park is nowadays quite normal and established; whatever the chequered safety history of Jurassic Park – and the second and third films are effectively passed over in silence – things are now fine. Perhaps the name change helped, like converting Windscale to Sellafield. Anyway, people go to the flourishing Jurassic World in Costa Rica all the time to see tame dinosaurs. Maybe too tame. Something new and different is going to be needed to provide that unnatural and transgressive lurch that sets the narrative in motion.
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Jurassic World is managed by Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a successful uptight career woman who is a little bit controlling and unhappy: she is nervous about looking after her two nephews who have come for a visit to the World, owned by flamboyant entrepreneur Masrani (Irrfan Khan). She is also a bit nervous about the creepy new GM mega-dinosaur they have secretly created to boost visitor numbers: the terrifying Indominus Rex, created by lab supremo Dr Henry Wu (BD Wong) and watched over by the sinister military consultant Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio).
Do these people quite realise how intelligent and aggressive their new dinosaur is, do you suppose, and how very unlikely it is to remain within its paddock? To add to her personal non-dinosaur issues, Claire just happens to have some chemistry with fellow JW employee Owen (Chris Pratt), a rough-and-ready Indiana Jones-ish raptor wrangler and dinosaur whisperer who has actually trained a performing group of prehistoric carnivores to do his bidding for the tourists: he also rides a motorbike, wears a leather waistcoat and appears to live in a lakeside caravan. Needless to say, rescuing the two boys from the upcoming dino catastrophe is going to bring Owen and Claire together and generally end their emotional ice age.
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Owen is an old-fashioned guy, a rough outdoorsy sort, a man's man, maybe kind of a … well, what's the figure of speech for an extinct old-fashioned type? Certainly not "dinosaur": they were vigorous and capable survivors who might yet turn out to have been on earth longer than humans. Chris Pratt gives a tremendously likeable performance as Owen: easy-going, relaxed, somewhere on a continuum between Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks. Bryce Dallas Howard (who I always remember in Lars Von Trier's Manderlay and M Night Shyamalan's preposterous The Village) is also very good: coiffured and groomed and composed as Claire, this actor bring s her kind of intense presence to the part. In fact, it is she who has the faintly raptorish presence, especially when her retroussé nose is seen in profile. Owen, Claire and the horrible Indominus Rex make quite a team. It's a world of fear and fun.
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