Jurassic World: The Movie Review

I’m not sure why I’m even writing this review, as it appears that the entire globe saw this movie before I did, but at the same time, I’m often entertained by reading reviews of movies I’ve already seen, to see if I agree with the review or not. So here goes.

Over 20 years ago, I went to see the original Jurassic Park in the theaters with my two great friends, Becky and Nikki. I still remember the experience quite vividly. Becky watched most of it with her hands over her eyes, and Nikki progressively chewed all the heads off the gummy bears she’d bought as a snack. It was scary, thrilling, and fantastic.

I haven’t watched it since.

So when I went to see Jurassic World, I was sort of in that same frame of mind. I wanted to be entertained on an epic level. To be scared and enthralled. I had to see it in 3D of course. This is the sort of movie 3D was made for. I didn’t really care about being moved by the movie. I didn’t care overly much about plot, either. It’s a movie about people who decide ti build an amusement park around ginormous predators that have been extinct for forever. Any movie with this premise doesn’t have to worry about things like “solid character building.” Give me some explosive dino vs. dino action, peppered liberally with some dino chomping on human scenes, and we’re good to go.

Houston, we have lift off!

Make no mistake about it: this isn’t a highbrow film. It’s predictable from a mile off. Characters in the movie consistently make the dumbest choices possible. Every. Time. And the movie seemed to make a game out of seeing how many articles of clothing it could persuade Bryce Dallas Howard to remove before the credits. (Spoiler alert: let’s just say that if she were playing strip poker, she didn’t come close to actually going bankrupt, but she was only a few articles shy by the end.)

But the movie had everything I wanted out of it. Giant dinos fighting giant dinos. Spectacle. This movie is the modern day equivalent of the Coliseum. ARE WE NOT ENTERTAINED?

I gave the movie an 8/10, and that’s about the limit a movie like this can expect to get. That’s okay. It was worth the price of admission, and worth seeing sprawled across the big screen. It was worth seeing with other people, because something like this demands to be shared. My only real regret? That Nikki and Becky couldn’t be there to watch it with me. Then again, Becky sort of gave up on my movie recommendations once I forced her to watch Tim Curry in It, and Nikki is all the way in Denver, so such a reunion was probably too much to ask.

I saw this one solo. I’m looking forward to my kids being a smidge older. In a year or two, TRC will be able to watch the kids, and I can take Denisa to movies like this. As long as she doesn’t talk to Nikki or Becky first. They might try and persuade her out of it . . .