Jurassic World

I finally went to the cinema to see Jurassic World last week. It was against my better judgement, but having heard such conflicting reports about it (so many of them from palaeontologists) I was curious to find out what it was really like.

These Velociraptors are scientifically accurate.

The answer? Well, the plot is dreadful, the characters are one- or two-dimensional (excepting the CGI dinosaurs), and the acting is rubbish. With dialogue clunkier than a 1980s seatbelt - much of it inadvertently hilarious - the whole thing is like a big-budget B-movie.

I enjoyed it enormously.

Thumbs up for not appearing in Jurassic World.

Of course, there's always room for improvement, so here are a few suggestions for the producers to consider in advance of Jurassic World 2: Lots Of People Being Chased By Dinosaurs Again:

1. More product placement. I felt that the Starbucks cups and Coke bottles and Mercedes cars and Pandora shops were used much too subtly. Chris Pratt should have Subaru tattooed across his forehead, whilst all the children should have to carry Happy Meals at all times.

Warning: this blogpost contains product placement.

2. Give everyone (in the movie, and in real life) pairs of Dallas Bryce Howard's indestructible all-terrain high-heeled shoes. They were amazing.

3. Make it an actual comedy rather than an accidental comedy. Get David Schneider in to run the park control centre. Replace Chris Pratt with Will Ferrell. Make Vic Reeves a big-top dinosaur circus ringmaster.

4. Don't worry in the slightest about scientific accuracy. Any palaeontologists who complain about the dinosaurs are missing the point completely, like gorilla biologists decrying the plausibility of King Kong. No, go the whole hog. Splice theropod and millipede DNA, and make millipods, vicious hundred-legged repto-beasts! Build Barry the Baryonyx out of bioluminescent onyx. Create six hundred Diplodocus, each of them four thousand feet tall, with lasers firing from their eyes. If you're going to be genetically spurious, at least be ambitiously genetically spurious!

Not preposterous enough.

5. In the interim period before Jurassic World 2, make sure that someone checks up on the creatures left alive on the island at the conclusion of Jurassic World. I'm pretty sure that a mosasaur cannot live off the carcass of an Indominus rex indefinitely.

6. Last but not least, now that Brontosaurus has been resurrected, make sure it appears in the next film, and - most importantly of all - ensure that this song is the new film theme tune.



I am a palaeontologist and I can confirm that this will then be the finest movie ever made.

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