Jurassic World, 2015 – ★★½ (contains spoilers)- via letterboxd

Jens HolzeviaLetterboxd2 Comments

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This review may contain spoilers.

It’s always a bad sign if you think about what your comments could be while you’re still watching the film. I saw it on 2D bluray, so once again, the 3D effects are totally lost on me.

I’m afraid this must be the most overrated big movie of 2015. The characters (though played by some great actors) are mostly uninteresting stereotypes with foreseeable arcs in all cases. The assholes are going to die, the kids are going to be saved, the heroes are getting each other. So far so dull. Dozens of humans are killed (in a totally PG-13 fashion), hundreds are wounded but the only creatures I actually empathized with were the poor dinosaurs who are (once more) treated like they are cattle (or useful weaponry) but then turn into actual wild predators (d’uh). As is said in the movie itself, nobody seems to have learned anything from the three earlier movies.
Visually there’s nothing new. Sure, there’s a bigger monster (or several) but that’s an effect the movie itself criticizes in the beginning. The humans are once more doomed to a lot of fleeing while (in the end) the monsters fight each other. It is kind of like in the latest Godzilla movie, where you actually just want to watch the monsters while they keep showing you how everybody gets out of the way. The movie’s narrative is foreseeable at best, sometimes it’s just darn flat to the point where the obligatory kiss between leading man and leading woman has really no basis what so ever (because it seems to be improvised) and the fat security guard of course gets eaten and endangers everybody else.
For fans of the original film: (Almost) none of the actors of the first movies are back, but there are a lot of references at least to the first film. Which kind of bugged me, because they obviously built the new park as if nothing bad had ever happened on this island. Which is not just careless, it’s plain effing stupid.
The new park (thanks to wholesome CGI) looks gorgeous only to be thoroughly destroyed in the second half. And you just know it because it’s totally set up that way! Personnel doesn’t seem to have a clue, they are not armed to take down their biggest ‘asset’ and again some forces in the company have worked on their own plans so they can fuck it up majorly when the time comes (and it comes). While in the first movie this is kind of a domino effect of unexpected events worked well, this movie has a very cheap version of it with only mildly surprising twists. Most are build upon the fact that nobody seems to know what kinds of DNA they mixed which leads to unforeseen (!) mutations and after two instances became an annoying explanation to me. Are they really that dumb? Even after the monster is loose they can’t assemble the facts so that not everybody dies? No, what they do is send other monsters to hunt down the monster. Because… the Kingpin said so.
There are some scary moments but nothing you have not seen in prior JP movies or really any other monster horror flick.
To end on a high note, the overall presentation is fine. You could criticize the amount of CGI, but compared to some of the crude effects on the first film I think they did a great job there. The best parts of the music though are the motifs taken from the John Williams soundtrack, anything else not that epic. Perhaps it’s not actually that bad a movie but many aspects really did not work for me and so it same down to a nice try.

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