Hash Import 2026 05 18 12 34

Jurassic World (2015)

★★½ — Jurassic World (2015)

Jurassic World arrived twenty-two years after Steven Spielberg's original, making it both a direct sequel and a soft reboot of the franchise Universal had been trying to revive since the mid-2000s. The film handed the directing chair to Colin Trevorrow, whose sole feature credit at the time was the low-budget indie Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), making the $150 million-plus production one of the more audacious director gambles of the decade. Chris Pratt was riding the wave of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and the casting reflected Hollywood's post-Marvel appetite for affable, physically imposing leads. The film ultimately became one of the highest-grossing releases in cinema history, landing just inside the global all-time top five at the time of release, which more or less guaranteed the franchise continuation Trevorrow would not himself direct.

Just… average. It’s flashy, sure, the visuals are top-tier, the dinos look great, and it’s fun to see continuity with the original park and some nods to Jurassic Park. But it all feels a bit hollow. The magic and tension of the original are totally gone. Chris Pratt, bless him, just doesn’t work as a leading man here. Charisma dialled down to neutral, and the script doesn’t help him. The plot is serviceable but feels like it exists purely to reboot the franchise for a new generation, not because anyone had a particularly good story to tell. Bigger isn’t better. It’s just louder. My 6 year old son loves it...

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-04-14

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch (UK)

Stream: Netflix · Amazon Prime Video · Sky Go · Now TV Cinema
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) arrived at a strange crossroads in American cinema: too modest to be a prestige picture, too unsettling to be a forgettable B-movie. Adapted from Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers and shot at Allied Artists on a budget barely

Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production designed by the

Viy (1967)

Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale, it

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and Peter Pan

Read more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Viy (1967)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)