Kernel Rating (out of 5): 
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Length: 124 minutes
Age Appropriate For: 13+. The movie opens 20 years after the original “Jurassic Park” on Isla Nubar, the island from the original movie. It is now a huge Disney-like theme park with 20,000 people, dinosaur petting zoos, Triceratops “pony” rides and state of the art technology. The movie contains minimal cursing but has several scenes of violence, including dinosaur attacks on people and other dinosaurs and lots of gun violence aimed at the predators. There is a subtle sexual reference, but the kiss between the main characters is chaste.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard team up in this action-packed movie filled with dinosaurs, a few scheming bad guys who want to use the dinosaurs as weapons for war, and more dinosaurs.
By Claire Kovacs
It’s finally here — the first movie of the 2015 summer blockbuster series: the long-awaited addition to Steven Spielberg’s beloved “Jurassic Park” franchise.
“Jurassic World” is set 20 years after the original “Jurassic Park” and is now a multi-million dollar conglomerate of a theme park, genetic laboratory, training facility and dinosaur zoo.
We first meet Gray (Ty Simpkins) and his brother Zach (Nick Robinson) as they say goodbye to their parents at the airport and fly to Isla Nubar, Costa Rica, to spend time with their Aunt Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), who is the VP of Jurassic World. They play her to be the uptight businesswoman with no time in her busy work schedule for her 8- and 16-year-old nephews. She has arranged for her assistant to escort the boys to their VIP access of all things Jurassic while she has a business meeting with the director of development.
Claire takes the director to the newest creation, a genetically modified dinosaur they call Indominus Rex. To keep the park a success, they need bigger, scarier, more exciting dinosaurs. Apparently, the T-Rex is as common as an elephant to the people of the world today, and if you can train deadly Velociraptors to act like eager puppies, then anything is possible.
Chris Pratt (of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Parks and Recreation” fame) is Owen, a former Navy man and the Velocipraptors trainer. Pratt has excellent comedic timing and can play the arrogant yet affable character quite well, but they relied too much on his swagger and likability as an actor and never gave him the chance to be anything other than predictable.
Speaking of predictability, Indominus Rex has escaped and is on a killing spree, violently maiming everything in its path! SWAT teams are sent on a mission, only to perish, and an air-strike is called that crashes into the aviary, thus releasing even more violent dinosaurs bent on wreaking havoc throughout the island.
So Owen and Claire, whom we are to assume have had a previous love affair, put aside their differences to single-handedly fight these killing machines. Meanwhile, Gray and Zach have survived an attack from Indominus Rex, cliff-jumping into unknown waters and wandering through the untamed jungle of the “restricted area.”
The main takeaway from these scenes is a sweet, brotherly-love type relationship between the boys and their working together to overcome their fears of their parents impending divorce, Gray being alone when Zach goes away to college, and oh yeah, the threat of being killed by a dinosaur.
The sub-plot of using the trained Velocipraptors as weapons and the head scientist breeding newer, bigger dinosaurs for this end-result gets lost in the violence of dinosaurs attacking everything they see. A brief reprieve from the severity of the situation is Jake Johnson (New Girl), who offers his loser-brand of humor to his control-room tech job while wearing a vintage Jurassic Park T-shirt that he paid $150 for on Ebay. Fans of the original movie will enjoy other throwbacks from the original movie, such as BD Wong as the head scientist.
So will this movie be recognized by the Academy for its cinematic greatness and engaging dialogue? Probably not. But is it a fun, entertaining movie with cool CG and 3-D effects and the two main characters walking off into the sunset at the end? Absolutely.
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