Trevorrow: Jurassic World (2015)

Jurassic World is the fourth film in the Jurassic Park franchise, but it isn’t really a sequel, at least not in a traditional sense. Where The Lost World and Jurassic Park III were keen to build upon the original and deliver ever greater special effect-driven thrills, Jurassic World is more of an elegy for and reflection upon the original, revisiting it as a way of contemplating a media landscape in which images have more or less lost their power to scare us. It feels right, then, that this is the first film to return to the original island, which has now been made over, some twenty years later, as “Jurassic World” – a massive theme park that makes the 1993 version look pretty quaint by comparison. At the same time, the marketing department of the park has swelled, with genetic engineering and brand management dovetailed into the continual search for the next big asset, the next big scare for a clientele that seem to get less and less impressed with each new dinosaur. Where the first film had its feet firmly planted in the dusty, dirty world of palaeontology, here we’ve moved completely into the realm of gene splicing – and it really clarifies how much gene splicing was an analog art in the first film, an actual, physical, manual cutting, pasting and editing of genes that has now been well and truly taken over by computers. As a result, most of the types that populated the original film – the elder scientist, the researcher, the lawyer, the security expert – are here more or less conflated into the figure of Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park’s operations manager, who has to deal with the fallout when the latest asset escapes and runs havoc across the island. In some ways, that’s too many roles for a single actor to play, with the result that Howard doesn’t have much to do except play a blank foil to Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady, a Velociraptor trainer whose advocacy for extinct animal rights forms a kind of counterpoint to Dearing’s asset management. As might be expected, their rapport doesn’t really work, except when it’s more or less procedural, subsumed into how they navigate the architecture and security of the park. And that’s one thing that’s very different from any of the previous films – or at least what the conclusion of The Lost World was trying to do – since this is the first time we’ve seen the dinosaurs coming up against such an extensive, man-made infrastructure. Sometimes it’s physical (monorails, aquariums, gyroscopes), sometimes it’s digital (the island control room often feels a bit like the gaming spin-off has been inserted into the movie itself), but it tends to be around those hi-tech thresholds and barriers that the dinosaurs tend to become scary again, if only because it’s where they vanish to the edges of perception, the best space for digital horror, even if it’s the fairly unimaginative CGI horror on display here. Nevertheless, despite those scary moments, the overall tone is a kind of wistful sadness – occasionally cloaked or concealed in ironic self-awareness – and a longing for futuristic spectacle even as the film’s own assets – its set pieces – seem to yield the same exponentially diminishing returns that all the characters seem to be fearing from the park itself. Even its imminent collapse quickly fails to impress all the patrons who are trapped there, and that’s the final sadness: even destroying the park quickly feels passe, inadequate, uneventful, or at least less eventful than the memories of the first film, which haunt every space and character with a melancholy that Trevorrow never quite manages to satiate or quell.