Jurassic World trailer – reaction

Jurassic Park broke records upon release in 1993 and ushered in a new era of summer blockbuster movies. Based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, an author whose many novels also inspired the films The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Terminal Man (1974), Congo (1995), Sphere (1998) and Timeline (2003) as well as directing Westworld (1973), soon to be remade, and Coma (1978) among others. Inevitably, sequels followed in 1997 and 2001, but with significantly diminishing returns against rising budgets, while still successful, silence fell on the raptors of Isla Nublar. Now, almost a decade later, those famous gates are about to open again, and the team have had a peek inside…

Matthew Rutland – So, Jurassic World. Well the original Jurassic Park was a truly spectacular movie that broke all sorts of records, and was the last movie I remember people queuing around the street for. The original trailer was a master stroke in hyping the film without giving away a single shot of dinosaurs.

Sadly the same cannot be said for this new movie. With the stylized blue grey look of an MTV movie, the trailer makes nods at many films from Jaws 3, to Aliens, to Chris Pratt looking decidedly Han Solo in his dashing waistcoat. I have mixed feelings, I would love this to be good, and the score still gives goosebumps, but I fear the reboot generation has claimed another childhood favourite.

Dario Persechino – I’M SO EXCITED!

The grand ship taking them to the island shows the bigger scale of this immediately, then the island itself… Monorails, gyropod things, and even a Jurassic sea world! It all gives the look of an advanced park for the newer age. This is a far grander and upscaled park than John Hammond’s original vision. I am really looking forward to seeing it in all its visitor mutilating glory.

There are weaker elements in the trailer too. The plot shown of a genetically modified super dinosaur that only Star-Lord Chris Pratt can hunt down, doesn’t thrill me as much. I’m sure Pratt will do fine as a new Robert Muldoon “She’s a clever girl” type character, but a big beast hunt for one superdino… I’m not convinced. Also the motorbiking through raptors… meh. Weak and tired effect.

But it’s Jurassic Park! And a real new Jurassic Park, not a handy Site B island, or a crumbling forgotten park, it is the Jurassic Park of the near future and it looks beautiful!

Dinosaurs are gonna be cool again, and we’ll all be humming John Williams scores constantly!

Michael Flett – I’m going to be honest about this in full recognition that it will make me a pariah and an outcast.

I don’t like Jurassic Park. I saw it the day it was released at the cinema back in June 1993 and I hated it. I had read the book long before and it is brilliant, easily the best Michael Crichton I’ve read, though I can’t claim to be an authority on him (it’s better than Sphere, basically), and I had such high expectation, but the film was built entirely around the special effects which we were told were utterly astonishing and indistinguishable from reality, and I thought they were… okay.

But they set a precedent: while many films before had been accused of focusing on effects rather than character and story, Jurassic Park was the first to actually admit it and make it a selling point, and it made money, over a billion dollars worldwide, so it set the template for all the crap we’ve had to endure over the last two decades where it doesn’t matter what the script is like as long as the effects are adequate.

The other problem was that with all the money spent on the effects it couldn’t be a faithful adaptation of the book. Yes, the events are on the whole presented, but the tone was utterly changed. Jurassic Park was not a children’s book. It was dark, it was messy, a lot of people died, but giving a film an adult rating bites into the box office, so it had to be as child friendly as possible. Suddenly instead of being a ruthless businessman who puts profit before sense and safety he’s a kindly grandfather figure who doesn’t die horribly at the bottom of a hill having a pack of Procompsognathids peck at his flesh, he actually survives and dares to make a quip as he exits screen left as though he wasn’t directly responsible for all the blood spilled on his watch.

I saw the second film when it came out; about my only memories are how pointless it was and asking the woman in front to shut up. She later apologised and said she hadn’t seen the first one so needed it explained. I didn’t bother with the third and I’ve still never seen it.

So now, twenty years later, I look at this trailer, and all I see is the same film told over, even down to it being introduced through the eyes of children. How is this different from the original? It seems to be a remake in all but title, though likely with the first now in public consciousness it won’t need so much of the background explained this time. Which means it will be aimed at a dumber audience. Oh, great.

I like Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard will be great, she always is, but a film and a theme park are fundamentally different things yet this looks like nothing so much as the celluloid equivalent of the big ride. Everything is presented like we’re being sold on the environment, which is possibly a conscious choice of the trailer but makes me worry that they have nothing else to sell.

Look at how big and spectacular we are and how many children we can please per hour, don’t concern yourself that it’s all facade with no substance. Digital dinosaurs, digital landscapes.

It’s not telling a story, it’s watching someone else play a video game. It’s not even that good – just look at those gates, obviously artificial with pretend fire flickering against the stone. F is for fake. Like Matthew said, the whole image looks processed, artificial. I’m also concerned by the scale of that ichthyosaur. Not to mention the insurance premiums the customers would have to pay to even set foot inside the site considering the history of Isla Nublar.

I’m also struggling to fathom the need for a genetically engineered mega dinosaur. Were the existing great reptiles not enough? Were the writers not able to come up with sufficient drama and threat without artificially raising the stakes? Again, they’re
not telling their own story, they’re competing with Pacific Rim and Godzilla, and that’s the wrong approach. It’s not a film, it’s an exercise in marketing.

It’s directed by Colin Trevorrow who co-wrote it with Derek Connolly, the same team behind Safety Not Guaranteed a couple of years ago which received a lot of praise which I found mediocre, flat and uninvolving, a premise rather than a film. There was nothing wrong with it, it just did nothing and went nowhere, it played with the idea rather than developed it, and now their big budget debut, $150 million, looks like they’re singing karaoke.

Well, we’ve pretty much established the big studios don’t want anything which might actually challenge an audience, just keep breaking out the same old tunes over and over in ever more tedious remixes.

Stephen Sutherland – I’d sincerely like this movie to be great, but there’s no magic there.

Jurassic Park, for all its science, was ultimately about (what was probably the last) magical cinema experiences. We’d never seen SFX like that before. It had the Spielberg charm and sentiment. Even that glorious piece of music, not exciting and adrenaline fuelled but rather comforting and soaring. But this trailer looks like it’s just an action film with dinosaurs in. And don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with an action film with dinosaurs. But dinosaurs don’t make it Jurassic Park.

There’s enough nostalgia in the trailer to get me interested, but for me it’s just not hitting the mark. Also, they managed to make Chris Pratt seem boring, even when on a motorbike, flanked by raptors.

After careful consideration, I have decided not to endorse your park.

Wes May – Unlike in times past, the franchise doesn’t really shy away from showing its cards up-front, giving us glorious wide screen shots of mammoth lizards doing what they do best (though there are plenty of hints that something is being held back).

The man of the moment Chris Pratt looks hot and appropriately concerned over what is to come, and this trailer does exactly what it’s supposed to do: drum up anticipation for one of next summer’s biggest hits among the fans. Can’t wait to see this in cinema come June 2015.

Les Anderson – Looks like a shot-for-shot remake of the first film but it has Chris Pratt in it so I’ll be going to see it.

Adam Dworak – I always felt that the first three Jurassic Park movies were awful and I thought that with this new movie Hollywood would redeem itself by presenting us something fresh, interesting and intelligent, but instead we have here again this same cold dino… sorry, I meant turkey.

Jurassic World is just stupid, it is like the last three movies never happened. After all those deaths and a T-Rex wrecking San Diego people still are sending their offspring to “see” dinosaurs and mad scientists are still playing god. Hollywood is also trying to forget about the scientific research of the last couple of decades of regarding dinosaurs what I just find infuriating.

Jurassic World
had the potential to be a brilliant movie, taking on the issues of the environment and our impact on it and our future as a species but instead it seems to be just another monster movie, and a fairly bad monster movie at that. Maybe I am just spoiled by Interstellar and its take on science but I expect much more from my science fiction cinema!

Jurassic World is scheduled for release on 12th June 2015

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