Jurassic World (2015)

Twenty-two years is a long time in blockbuster cinema. Steven Spielberg's original Jurassic Park (1993) arrived as a genuine cultural moment, one of those rare films that changed what audiences believed was possible on screen. The decade and a half of sequels and development hell that followed never quite recaptured whatever it was that made the original work, and by the mid-2010s Universal Pictures, working alongside Amblin Entertainment and Legendary Pictures, decided the franchise needed a proper restart rather than another continuation. The result was Jurassic World, released in June 2015. The premise is a direct extension of John Hammond's original vision: Isla Nublar now hosts a fully operational dinosaur theme park, complete with paying visitors, corporate sponsorship, and, inevitably, something going badly wrong. It is the fourth film in the Jurassic series and the first in what became the Jurassic World trilogy.

The film was handed to Colin Trevorrow, whose feature directing experience at that point extended essentially to the low-budget indie Safety Not Guaranteed (2012). It was, by any measure, a significant step up in scale, and the assignment raised a few eyebrows at the time. Trevorrow co-wrote the screenplay with Derek Connolly, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The film runs to 124 minutes, and the production leaned heavily on digital effects to bring its prehistoric creatures to life, with the results landing somewhere between polished and over-familiar depending on who you ask. Trevorrow would later return to the franchise (you can read thoughts on that here: Jurassic World Dominion (2022)), and the wider series continued with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which also brings back much of the principal cast.

Fronting the film is Chris Pratt, who in 2014 had broken through in a big way with Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and the casting here was clearly riding that wave of goodwill. Pratt plays Owen Grady, a velociraptor trainer with a particular affinity for the park's more dangerous residents. Opposite him is Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire Dearing, the park's operations manager, a role that drew some criticism at the time for how the script handles her character arc. The supporting cast includes Irrfan Khan as the park's owner, bringing a quiet warmth to what could have been a purely functional role, and Vincent D'Onofrio as a security contractor with predictably problematic ideas about weaponising the dinosaurs. Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson play Claire's nephews, providing the child-in-peril element that has been a franchise staple since the beginning.

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...

I think that's about the size of it, really. There's enough spectacle here to keep you in your seat, and if you've got a younger viewer beside you (as I did) the film absolutely does its job on that level. But for anyone who remembers sitting in a cinema in 1993 with their jaw on the floor, Jurassic World is the kind of film you watch, enjoy well enough in the moment, and then struggle to recall in much detail a week later. Pratt has shown elsewhere, in films like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), that he can carry a blockbuster with genuine warmth and comic timing, which makes the flatness of his work here all the more puzzling. Sometimes a franchise revival turns out to be more about brand management than storytelling, and this one, for all its surface pleasures, has that feeling written all over it. The park may be open, but the wonder has mostly clocked off.

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

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Jurassic World (2015) on YouTube

Where to watch

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