Director: Colin Trevorrow
Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, BD Wong
Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, sure.
Did I like it?: If a movie isn’t a Marvel movie, chances are it is a legacy sequel. Some have been delightful, like Halloween (2018). Some groan through the bloated run time and are instantly forgotten as soon as the lights in the theater come up, like Tron: Legacy (2010) or, for a far more apt comparison here, Independence Day: Resurgence (2016).
Why does this one work so well? One might be tempted to say that it doesn’t try to groan its way through including an aging cast member in the proceedings, and lets us learn to like the new characters that are the vehicle of the plot, but movies like Star Trek (2009) and the aforementioned Halloween’s best moments are with Leonard Nimoy and Jamie Lee Curtis. Even so, this film has a reprisal from BD Wong as geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, but it’s not exactly like that was a special moment in the trailer or a focal point in the poster.
Maybe Jurassic World’s secret weapon lies in a mostly successful attempt to capture the spirit of the original film and not just pepper the film with references to the original and jam it into some kind of framework that would be more palatable for a modern audience. The references are there—an extended sequence in the ruins of the original park from Jurassic Park (1993) and a few brief glances at a book written by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)—but they aren’t the main thrust of the plot. I’m looking in your direction, Luke/Anakin’s lightsaber. The movie tries its best to capture that Amblin spirit, complete with a sensitive, mop-topped young boy dealing with the fantastic things around him while the family situation may be unravelling a bit.
It doesn’t hurt that the true focal point of the film is one of the more charming movie stars to become a leading man in recent memory, Chris Pratt. He manages to sell the notion of trainable Raptor soldiers, and that isn’t exactly something that any other actor could make watchable. Sure, the special effects have already aged a bit even in the five years since its release, where the first thing remarkably holds up after thirty years, but it is imminently digestible entertainment, and that is all that it aimed for.