Jurassic World

Admittedly I saw Jurassic World a few months ago now, and toyed at the idea of writing about it but there was something odd about it that prevented me from putting my thoughts on paper. This may be because Jurassic Park is up there with my favourite films and was part of my childhood. I loved dinosaurs and to have a film about them was amazing.

This was made even better because it had a great cast and was helmed by Steven Spielberg himself. I even loved the idea of this film so much that I was able to look beyond some of the issues with The Lost World and enjoy that, at the time. Jurassic Park 3 wasn't terrible and offered plenty of exciting moments even though the quality levels had fallen dramatically by this point. And after this, dinosaur themed action adventures vanished from our screens until 2015 and I was excited to see what they would do next.

Unfortunately the trailers promised nothing more than a safe CGI popcorn action flick, and that is exactly what this is. The real killer for me was the lack of suspense, a fear that any character could die horribly and build-up that made the original so engaging. The CGI replaces the thrilling animatronics that the previous three all used so well, and the characters were all incredibly bland. Adding insult to injury was the infamous decision to make Chris Pratt's character able to domesticate velociraptors, which looks good on a poster, but betrays everything that has come before.

But Jurassic World is not all bad and I was still entertained. The character subplots do feel like they had been crammed in but when the action picks up, it was a fun ride and the climax towards the end was certainly the best part. I guess it was the film's inconsistency that made it hard to write about initially and even now I'm still not sure whether JP3 is better or not.

Like it or not, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is now on the horizon and the first trailer has just been released. The action appears to be too OTT and the main characters all appear as if no harm can come to them, which confirms my fears that any suspense has been thrown out of the window. Hopefully this is all down to a bad trailer but time will tell...