Jurassic World (2015)
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by John Hammond.
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One scene evokes Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, another scene borrows heavily from Alien, and there are flourishes from Lassie and Jaws thrown in for effect.
One scene will even evoke warm comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”
But best in show goes to the sequence where park visitors are attacked by pterodactyls that pluck them from the ground like mice—an homage to "The Birds" that amounts to Treverrow doing Spielberg doing Hitchcock.
Trevorrow has littered the film with sly callbacks to the original “Jurassic Park,” plus amusing nods to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Birds” and many others.
He references countless other monster movies, including obvious ones like King Kong and Godzilla and less evident choices like The Birds and (especially) Aliens .
In its attempt to be bigger, louder and toothier, the film not only rehashes executive producer Steven Spielberg's original but borrows from his "Jaws" as well as "The Birds," "Oz's" flying monkeys and "Predator."
Directed by Colin Trevorrow and co-written by Trevorrow and his writing partner Derek Connolly—working from a script originated by Planet Of The Apes rebooters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver— Jurassic World mixes many elements from the first film while shifting the mood from horror and suspense to action, not unlike what Aliens did by reworking the raw material of Alien.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard acquit themselves well in such moments, plus, any action scenes nodding to Aliens/Predator 2 play just fine with me.
A military verses dinosaur set-piece is a cartoonish tribute to the first encounter of the marines with the xenomorphs in Aliens , and the final showdown is a prehistoric prize fight that’s worth the price of admission alone.
He references countless other monster movies, including obvious ones like King Kong and Godzilla and less evident choices like The Birds and (especially) Aliens .
Everything about the action and suspense feels mercilessly pre-ordained and overfamiliar - its best sequences don't so much "steal" from Jurassic Park, Aliens , and Predator , as they use different colored crayons to fill them in - but the film's largely gorgeous CGI (I can only point to one shot where the effects fall apart, a child awkwardly "hugging" a baby brachiosaur) makes those borrowings enough of their own thing that it feels okay to forgive them.
Instead, sequel director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) seems content to execute a lesser Aliens: He’s got his Ripley figure in Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a brittle park manager who blooms into a protective Amazonian mom after a toothy hybrid goes rogue; he mounts generically staged action sequences involving flares and bared shoulders; and he sneaks in an evil military plot represented by an extra-wide Vincent D’Onofrio.
But despite the scientific high-mindedness and the triceratops-calf rides in the petting zoo, Jurassic World is primarily a theme park whose theme is carnivorousness, where the big-ticket attractions involve copiously toothy behemoths chomping down on tethered goats and gutted sharks (the latter bait possibly a dig at Jaws , executive producer Steven Spielberg ’s other vacation munch-fest) And just as your average theme park needs to upgrade its premium roller coaster from season to season, Jurassic World has decided that its next big draw is Indominus rex, a mammoth new species engineered from genetic this ’n’ that.
Coming 22 years after “Jurassic Park,” and 14 years after “Jurassic Park III” all but ruined the franchise, the reboot showcases plenty of reverence for the original while evoking memories of everything from “Godzilla” — the fun, old, rubber-suited movies, not that humorless mess from last summer — to “Jaws.”
Under the obvious supervision of Steven Spielberg, working with writer/producers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and co-writer Derek Connolly, director Colin Trevorrow (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) stacks the emotional stakes while propelling the imaginative action-adventure – with nods not only to the 1993 original but also to “Indiana Jones,” “Jaws,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Birds.”
His film abounds with references to key scenes from the 1993 beginner of the series, and unexpected, outrageous salutes to “Jaws” as well.
With the recent mega-success of Jurassic World and the reminder that people REALLY like monster movies, it seems all too convenient that one of the best monster movies of all time is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week.
It's a beat-for-beat repeat of Steven Spielberg's 1993 smash, "Jurassic Park," but with smoother effects and niftier gadgetry (and more product placement).
Like any good reboot should, the fourth “Jurassic Park” movie, director Colin Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World,” ignores not-so-hot sequels “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic Park III” and starts fresh.
Like the Michael Crichton book on which it was based, Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park (1993) takes place prior to the actual opening of the park, which we are left to assume will never open given what happens during the film, while the sequels The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Jurassic Park III (2001) both take place on Site B, a second island where the dinosaurs were actually created and that has since been deserted.
Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow injects the moribund Jurassic Park franchise with new life by pairing the usual dinosaurs-running-amok formula with a seductive, Westworld-style story hook.
Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time so Colin Trevorrow was going to have to pull off some sort of miracle in order to meet my expectations.
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She and Pratt get a little wet and her hair relaxes as the romance kicks in, and the movie leaves Spielberg’s farm to evoke stuff like the bantering that Kathleen Turner does with Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone.
The bickering romantic interplay between Howard and Pratt seems lifted from the 1980s “Romancing the Stone.”
He certainly gets more to do than Howard, whose part is like a third-generation xerox of the high-strung damsels-in-distress played by Kathleen Turner in “Romancing the Stone” and Kate Capshaw in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
Still, this retrograde Romancing The Stone subplot is much preferable to scenes of Claire’s nephews, teenage Zach (Nick Robinson) and preteen Gray (Ty Simpkins), getting some brotherly bonding in while trying not to be eaten.
Since Hollywood is always trying to remake popular old school movies from the 80s, a studio exec could do a lot worse than pairing Pratt and Howard in an updated version of Romancing the Stone .
Director Colin Trevorrow (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) clearly loves the source material and packs it plenty with “Jurassic Park” references, some lifted almost intact from the original.
In Jurassic World, director Colin Trevorrow—a surprise pick for the job, given that his only previous dramatic feature was the modest sci-fi indie Safety Not Guaranteed —pays homage to the Spielberg original even as he mulches it.
Emerging from more than a decade of development hell, this unwieldy beast of a film cobbles together elements variously cooked up over the years by umpteen writers (including executive producer Steven Spielberg, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes scriptwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) with a final draft by director Colin Trevorrow and his Safety Not Guaranteed screenwriter, Derek Connolly.
In "Jurassic World," directed and co-written by Colin Trevorrow (who did the low-budget charmer "Safety Not Guaranteed"), business at the retooled dinosaur theme park off the coast of Costa Rica has hit a plateau.
The silly but irresistible fourth film in Steven Spielberg’s T-rex-sized dinosaur franchise, directed this time around by Colin Trevorrow (whose first film was the made-in-Seattle “ Safety Not Guaranteed ”), “Jurassic World” would have us believe that a crew of very rich and (theoretically) very smart people would build an entire massive theme park around the experience of interacting with actual dinosaurs — and that the dinosaurs won’t hurt anyone because, well, they just won’t.
And yet director Colin Trevorrow, making the leap to the big-budget big leagues after Safety Not Guaranteed , can’t match the more tactile thrills of Spielberg’s seminal summer movie.
While the characters Pratt and Howard portray are very much in the vein of The African Queen duo Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (one pristine methodical, the other scruffy adventurer), when the dino-crap hits the fan they quickly resemble other iconic roles, with Bryce Dallas Howard channelling the likes of James Cameron’s female action heroines Ripley ( Aliens ) and Sarah Connor ( The Terminator ), while Chris Pratt does his best job auditioning for the Indiana Jones role which many have predicted he has secured.
I made a note to myself at one point that “Jurassic World” keeps channeling “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Dawn of the Dead,” or at least trying to.
But his vision for Jurassic World is enchanting, gratifying, and sure-handed in a way that’s uncannily like Spielberg ’s early period, back when Spielberg was the ’80s king of the gee-whiz blockbuster and movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) were massive, four-quadrant hits.
Pratt effortlessly pulls it off, and if Disney is really considering casting him as Indiana Jones in a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" reboot, well just hand him the fedora and whip, and I'll be the first to buy a ticket.
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Crichton’s book was meant to be a cautionary tale about tinkering with nature and biology, akin to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The galloping gallimimus herd and screen-filling T-rex head of ’93 now seem almost as quaint as the stop-motion ape of the 1933 “King Kong” after the VFX breakthroughs of “Lord of the Rings,” “Avatar” and the two recent “Planet of the Apes” movies (whose writer-producers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, share “Jurassic World” screenplay credit with director Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly).