Remember the first time you watched Jurassic Park on the big screen? Steven Spielberg created something like we’d never seen before, taking Michael Crichton’s masterpiece science fiction novel and giving it the visual spectacle it deserved. Remember the ice cream scene? When giant dinosaurs are after you, there’s nothing like ice cream. A new book will take you back to that magic, and teach you not how to walk like a Saurian, but to eat like one. In Dayton Ward and Elena Craig’s Jurassic World: The Official Cookbook, available now here at Amazon, fans of the original movie and the franchise finally get to sink their teeth into something straight out of the amusement park ride adventure, just as the latest movie, Jurassic World: Dominion, is being finalized for a summer 2022 release.
Take a look inside the book, released this week, courtesy of the publisher:
Did you know Jurassic World was a trilogy? The last film in the trilogy–and sixth in the Jurassic Park franchise–makes its way to theaters this summer. Jurassic World: Dominion, which sees a new trailer this week (watch it below) follows 2015’s Jurassic World and 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It looks to be a franchise bookend of sorts, with Jeff Goldblum returning as Ian Malcolm–the character that would define Goldblum’s trademark style thereafter–and digging even deeper to bring back Sam Neill as Alan Grant and Laura Dern as Ellie Sadler. BD Wong is back, too, as Dr. Henry Wu. So far only the first movie, Steven Spielberg’s landmark 1993 CGI and special effects spectacle, Jurassic Park, has matched the excitement and thrills of Michael Crichton’s original novel. But what could executive producer Spielberg and director Colin Trevorrow do to light a fire under this franchise?
It was only back in 2015 that the fourth film in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World, premiered its first trailer, and a rather bad one at that. Now as 2018 approaches we have a trailer for the fifth film in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. And the latest trailer reveals yet another rehash of the original, brilliant, Steven Spielberg adaptation of Michael Crichton’ fantastic novel. As with Jurassic World, the effort is not entirely futile, Jurassic World was simple entertainment on a big scale–a feast for the eyes. But for some of us, for all its incredible special effects and fantastic futuristic technology, Jurassic World proved the maxim George Lucas laid out in reference to the success behind the original Star Wars–“Special effects are a tool, a means of telling a story… A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” And that summed up Jurassic World–the umpmillionth variation on the Frankenstein how-not-to-build-a-monster story, and the latest twist on Crichton’s original look at a theme park gone haywire in his movie Westworld.
Yet if every other blockbuster that takes the leap into Sequel World is able to continue forward with more and more and more and pulls audiences into theaters, why not Jurassic Park? For those that want to reclaim even a spark of the original in the theater again, maybe it’s enough. So what does the trailer tell us that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has going for it?
First off, Chris Pratt is back. Audiences like Pratt movies in part because they simply like Pratt’s charm. He has the same brand of star power as John Wayne, who always appeared to be playing John Wayne in all his movies. Like Schwarzenegger, Willis, Van Damme, etc. It must be an action star thing. So if you’ve watched Pratt (like we have) in everything from Everwood to Guardians of the Galaxy 2, we’re wagering you’re going to like Pratt returning as dinosaur wrangler Owen Grady. Bryce Dallas Howard is an equally good if not better actor, with less of a fan following, and here she and Pratt are back again being snarky with each other (snore) in a Jurassic World preview. If they didn’t have chemistry in the first film, why would we expect it to surface in a sequel? Maybe what we need is the return of Jeff Goldblum in his best-loved role as Dr. Ian Malcolm? His performance in 1993 was so well-received that Crichton, who killed off Malcolm in the original novel, resurrected the character for the sequel. Did Goldblum’s return help The Lost World: Jurassic Park? Not really. But it’s been twenty years since we last saw Dr. Nature… Finds… a Way, so maybe enough time has passed so we can love him all over again.
And there are dinosaurs. We’ll never get tired of more dinosaurs. I want to see a triceratops racing a stegosaurus on the big screen. How about you?
Check out this new trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:
In simplest terms, Jurassic World is simple entertainment on a big scale–a feast for the eyes. But for all its incredible special effects and fantastic futuristic technology, Jurassic World proves the maxim George Lucas laid out in reference to the success behind the original Star Wars–“Special effects are a tool, a means of telling a story… A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” And that sums up Jurassic World, as a film and a 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital release–the umpmillionth variation on the Frankenstein how-not-to-build-a-monster story, and the latest twist on Michael Crichton’s original look at a theme park gone bad in his movie Westworld.
Touted in its marketing as the #1 movie of the year, and proven out at the box office, in many way Jurassic World is a remake and certainly an homage to the original Jurassic Park. More than twenty years after the devastation caused in Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully realized, fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond. You’ll experience deja vu several times as these new characters, and one from the original, fail to learn the lessons of history. Didn’t the production team watch The Lost World (Jurassic Park II) and Jurassic Park III? The new theme park is built over the old park where so much went wrong and so many died, including leaving the original park all derelict and intact as it was in the last scene of the original movie, including leaving old Jurassic Park jeeps around for a modern, distracted teenager to magically restore to driving condition in a single scene. Dinosaur battle shots mirror those from the original, including the finale, although despite new technology the dinosaurs don’t seem as “real” here. Jurassic World seems to repeatedly search for a scene to match that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” scene in the original. Michael Giacchino’s score misses the wonder and excitement of John Williams’s original themes. Although the effort is there, no single scene in Jurassic World captures the startling jumps and wows of Jurassic Park.
With four script/story writers for Jurassic World, it’s obvious why the story failed to deliver. Although we note above that George Lucas knows storytelling, he is also now famous for the stilted dialogue of his Star Wars prequels. The story team in Jurassic World offers up similarly strange words from the mouths of its actors–things no one would possibly say. And we can’t believe these dinosaur monsters are scary when the cast bounces back from each near-death experience so quickly. Even the worst of the characters, the youngest boy (who is a walking disaster) seems barely affected by the death going on around him for half the film.
The real conflicts within the script can be found in the strange parallels and inconsistencies. For one, director Colin Trevorrow has been quoted as saying his inspiration for the film was an image of a little girl texting in front of a T-Rex behind her. The corporate bad guy theme that underlies the plot is that no one cares about dinosaurs anymore, they are old news, and audiences needs something bigger and better. You can just see Trevorrow and executive producer Steven Spielberg laughing all the way to the bank over the irony here. The message, as delivered in the climax, is “bigger isn’t always better” and that often the original, the classic, offers up the best experience. Yet Jurassic World hammers into us the over-sized fantasies of Godzilla and King Kong instead of the science-fictional world that made a success of Jurassic Park.
It’s was a heckuva weekend for movie fans. First a new trailer dropped for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (we revealed it at borg.comhere). Then three more: A second Fantastic Four trailer, the first full-length Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer, and today, yet another Jurassic World trailer.
But see if you agree: Not one of these three new previews really compares to the excitement of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, or the time-bending fun of Arnold returning in Terminator: Genisys (shown here).
Zack Snyder, who we’d had hopes for after his unusual but interesting interpretation of the Watchmen graphic novel for the big screen, is just auguring in the DC Comics cinematic universe after the dismal Men of Steel and now this preview for an equally grim Batman and Superman. Thankfully the best superheroes can be found not on the big screen but every single week with DC Entertainment’s superb TV productions: Arrow, The Flash, and Gotham.
Try on for size this first full-length trailer for Batman v Superman and see if you wouldn’t rather watch Brandon Routh as The Atom fighting some bad guys in Central City with Grant Gustin’s The Flash:
At least if Jurassic World bombs we can’t accuse Amblin, Legendary, and Universal of false advertising.
This weekend the studios released the first film clip for the fourth film based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel Jurassic Park. Normally that would be something to gravitate toward, but not so this time. The clip features the show’s stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard with some over-long, stilted, outright boring dialogue. For nearly two minutes. And no dinosaurs.
We’d love to see the meetings where it was decided that this was the first clip to show audiences to showcase the movie. Already plenty of viewers have slammed it on social media. Even Avengers: Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon chimed in about the staid, sexist set-up on Twitter: “…and I’m too busy wishing this clip wasn’t 70’s era sexist. She’s a stiff, he’s a life-force – really? Still?” And although it’s a bit odd for a director with a competing 2015 film so openly chiding another’s movie, he’s certainly right.
Sure it was brief but even more interesting than the movie trailers at the big game today (except for Terminator Genisys, previewed at borg.comhere earlier) is the teaser for Heroes Reborn. Not only do we get Jack Coleman, the horned-rimmed glasses man, back, but our first look at Zachary Levi on an NBC series since the end of season five of Chuck:
Heroes Reborn does not yet have a release date.
The latest of the trailers for Jurassic World finally makes the movie look pretty good. Earlier trailers seemed a bit thin, but the prospect of Chris Pratt as a circus lion tamer for raptors seems like a great idea:
We’ve just wound down another year of big movies–from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to X-Men: Days of Future Past to Guardians of the Galaxy to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. So what’s on the radar at borg.com for 2015? We think you’ll want to see several of these big sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, and action flicks coming to a screen near you next year.
Vice – Jan. 16 – The next in a long line of Bruce Willis action flicks. This time it’s a sci-fi story about a future resort where humans freely pursue their vices–with artificial humans.
Wild Card – Jan. 30 – A story based on a novel by Academy Award winning writer William Goldman, starring Jason Statham as a gambler.
Kingsman: The Secret Service – Feb. 13 – This Colin Firth as spy action flick will tell us once and for all whether Firth would be a good choice to play James Bond. With an all-star cast including Mark Hamill, Michael Caine, Mark Strong, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Chappie– March 6 – Neill Blomkamp’s latest science fiction entry. A Pinocchio story where a robot learns to live among humans.
Whether or not major genre properties are hosting panels or booths at Comic-Con 2014, studios released some great images on Wednesday preview night and the first full day of the show yesterday. The biggest is probably the above photo of Ben Affleck as Batman from the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, not coming to theaters until 2016. The image was nicely timed to the DC Comics celebration week for the 75th anniversary of Batman’s first appearance.
Warner Bros. also released the first poster for the latest movie in the Mad Max series, to star Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. It’s called Max Max: Fury Road, and won’t hit theaters until next year, but that didn’t stop releasing some advance images from the film, including this image of Theron:
and this image of some post-apocalyptic recycling of cars:
The Amblin Entertainment/Legendary Pictures/Universal sequel to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park trilogy, Jurassic World, netted us a teaser poster for the June 2015 release:
Jurassic World will star Chris Pratt, star of Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy, which also had a new poster reveal for its IMAX 3D version: