This seventh Jurassic movie boasts Scarlett Johansson among its cast. Her presence might just shake off public indifference to the 32-year-old franchise. As if acknowledging our waning real-world appetite for dinosaurs, Jonathan Bailey’s dino academic Dr Henry Loomis nostalgically remembers the days when the public queued around the block for his lectures and exhibitions, just as we queued in 1993 when Steven Spielberg first brought Michael Crichton’s novel to cinema screens.
How to make dinosaurs exciting again is therefore a question that exercises both Loomis and the makers of this movie, including Gareth Edwards, who directs, Spielberg who returns as executive producer and screenwriter David Koepp who wrote the first two films.
Their answer is, um, mutant dinosaurs. Though only partly. These grotesque monsters are the result of ill-advised genetic engineering that was intended to keep the public (in the film’s world) interested in the subject. The experiments went catastrophically wrong, of course. Yet Koepp’s script is more nuanced than a monster hunt plot line.
Johansson’s world-weary mercenary Zora Bennett has been conscripted to help find a cure for human heart disease. The idea is to capture blood from the three biggest species of dinosaurs.
These mega-dinos respectively rule land, sea and air in their domain, which is a narrow band of equatorial Earth to which dinosaurs have retreated since the end of the previous Jurassic movie, Dominion.
Dino geeks will know the biggest beasts are Mosasaurus, which make our Great White look like a tadpole, the massively winged pterodactyl Quetzalcoatlus, and Titanosaurs, the land-based supersized T-Rex, which in one of the film’s many breathlessly tense sequences chases a dinghy and its frantically paddling occupants.
However the real-world irony of Loomis’s observation about the public’s dinosaur fatigue is out-done by the conversation between Johansson’s Zora and Rupert Friend’s pharma company fixer. Initially uninterested in his offer to work with dinosaurs, Zora is tempted by the “six zeroes” in the fee being offered, a number that begins with ten. Are you counting the zero in the ten, asks Zora? No, says Friend’s suave and sinister pharma man, an expert in the dark art of persudading people to say yes to something they don’t want to do by offering them lots of money.
It is easy to draw the conclusion that artistically speaking Johannson’s interests may lie elsewhere
I make no assumptions about Johansson’s motives for appearing in this blockbuster. But as it is released two months after her directorial debut Eleanor the Great, which is about Holocaust survivors and premiered at Cannes, it is easy to draw the conclusion that artistically speaking her interests may lie elsewhere.
And as her Zora succumbs to temptation it is easy to imagine a conversation between this film’s producers and the star – or their people and hers – also involving many zeroes.
Johansson’s soldier-cum-spook brings a watchful morality to the mission, aided by Mahershala Ali’s Kincaid, a fellow maverick-for hire with a well developed sense of right and wrong.
The scenes in which the team go after the first on their list – the ocean-going leviathan – are pure “You’re going to need a bigger boat” territory. Unlike the Jaws sequels, however, Edwards succeeds in injecting life into a seemingly tired formula. As the team are hunted by evolution’s alpha species, the tension is exhausting and satisfying. The addition of a father (an excellent Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters and the eldest sister’s feckless son is a clever addition that makes us care more about the humans’ fate. The result is as good as a Jurassic movie can be.
Certificate: 12A
