THE REEL: Jurassic World will keep you on the edge of your seat

So, a few months after Chris Pratt plays a character (Star Lord) who is being blamed for the victory and eventual wiping out of half of the universe’s population by Thanos in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, he is playing yet another heroic character and we hope his character won’t make disastrous choices as that other one did in that other movie.

In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Chris reprises the role of Velociraptor-trainer Owen Grady that he played in the first Jurassic World in 2015.

This science fiction adventure film, directed by J. A. Bayona, sees an expedition head out to the fictional Central American island of Isla Nublar, off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, three years after the events of the previous film.

The Jurassic World theme park on Isla Nublar has been abandoned and the dinosaurs and vegetation on the island have grown wild, leaving very little of the infrastructure still standing.

Isla Nublar is about to have a volcanic eruption that will most surely kill all the dinosaurs on the island and the United States Senate holds a hearing on whether they should step in to save the animals from another yet another extinction.

Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), reprised from the original Jurassic Park trilogy, is adamant that John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) had made a grievous mistake in creating the very first park, Jurassic Park, which nature had time and again tried to rectify.

He warns the senate not to intervene but let the dinosaurs meet their deaths and wipe out the “abomination” they have created.

It wouldn’t be a movie, or rather it would be a very short movie, if everyone agreed with what is sensible and just said, “You know what? You’re right. We made a mistake three years ago and it would simply be crazy to do the same thing again and expect a different result.”

SAVE THE DINOSAURS

Jurassic World's former manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has created the Dinosaur Protection Group to save the dinosaurs.

She is contacted by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), Hammond's former partner in creating dinosaur-cloning technology, who are planning to move the dinosaurs to a new island sanctuary where they will live without human interference. Sounds familiar?

Eli Mills (Rafe Joseph Spall), Hammond’s aide, is concerned that locating Blue, the last living Velociraptor, will be their hardest task and this is where Claire ropes in Owen – he raised and took care of Blue from a hatchling until they acrimoniously had to leave the island.

The two are joined in the mission by the park’s former technician Franklin Webb (Justice Elio Smith) and paleo-veterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda).

The biggest departure this movie has from most of the other Jurassic movies is the amount of times it actually tickles you. It has hilarity at almost every point you can think of.

Pratt and Spall have performances and lines that will leave you in stitches. There are also some witty lines that are employed in the movie.

Catching it on an IMAX screen also made me see how well clean the CGI effects were done, although nothing is ever perfect. It also had scary and gory scenes, and some dark (evil) characters and moments too.

As interesting as this movie was, with moments that kept you on the edge of your seat, unfortunately it seems just all-too-familiar for a guy who’s now watched all five movies of the franchise. I guess there’s only so much you can do with dinosaur movies and I sometimes got déjà vu moments of some scenes or situations.

It was also sometimes annoyingly predictable and if the person I had gone to watch the movie with hadn’t said she enjoyed it, I probably would have written a letter to Steven Spielberg to ask him why he keeps doing it.

It’s a movie you can take young viewers to watch (16 and older) and they will probably have tons of fun at it. I bought into the hype, but it ended up not being all that.