Remember that thing from when you were a kid? It’s back! This week, it’s Universal’s turn to play nostalgia pimps, hoping kids and 30-something man-children everywhere will get onboard with a new Jurassic Park (and hoping they’ll forget those two previous crappy sequels). Jurassic World opens June 12th.
Jurassic World comes from director Colin Trevorrow (previously of Safety Not Guaranteed, which I heard was great). It stars America’s boyfriend, Chris Pratt, as a lovable rogue who talks to dinosaurs, and America’s Ron Howard’s daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, as the new corporate ice queen manager of the park, who’s all but guaranteed to drop a line about how she likes to “minimize risk” at some point. Ooh, I wonder if her lack of respect for the animals will come back to bite her!
The twist this time around is that park management has used genetic hybridization to make the dinosaurs more awesomer to bump up attendance (“corporate felt genetic modification would up the wow factor,” says Howard). I.E., this time around, the girls are even more clever. Presumably, one of these mutants gets out and starts to wreck sh*t, and they have to kill it and close down the park out of respect for the dead for as long as it takes to write the sequel. In the process, everyone learns a valuable lesson about performance enhancing dinosaur mods.
Anyway, based on this latest trailer, so far Jurassic World looks… utilitarian. It contains all of the elements that a Jurassic Park movie must, and not a whole lot else. Expository dialogue, conflict between free spirit and uptight corporate chick (maybe they’ll fall in love!), sketchy dude in turtleneck who will probably die, big CGI moment, “oh sh*t” reaction shot, repeat.
Lines like “If we do this, we do it my way” and “Light it up!” don’t exactly build confidence. But the real question is whether they’ll mix enough animatronics in to make it as impressive as the original, or just CGI everything like every crappy movie nowadays. It’s also missing the most important element of the Jurassic franchise: Sam F*ckin Neill. I mean, come on, CGI him if you have to.