The View From The Mountain

Released 32 years after the original Jurassic Park , and ten years after the first reboot, Jurassic World , the latest film, Jurassic World: Rebirth , is the seventh entry in the long-running cinematic series and, judging from its strong box office take, it won’t be the last. Scarlett Johansson, who was nine years old when the first JP film was released, is now the lead of Rebirth , starring as Zora Bennett, a mercenary who gets hired for a special mission in the jungles on the equator. And she convincingly plays the part with casual ease. The dinosaurs that had been returned to the modern day through science have not been doing too well in the intervening years, with their numbers dwindling to the point to where they now only thrive in areas along the equator, which is designated off limits to humans. Zora is hired to take a team of her fellow mercenaries to one of these forbidden locations that plays host to the dinosaurs because a pharmaceutical company wants them to e...

It was inevitable that there would be a sequel to Jurassic World , the smash hit film that was the top movie of 2015, until it was dethroned later that year by Star Wars: The Force Awakens . I enjoyed Jurassic World immensely (and still do) because it was a sequel that continued the story by finally doing what was never done in the first three Jurassic Park films: it opened the dinosaur park to vacationing visitors. Of course, these very same vacationing visitors promptly became happy meals for rampaging dinosaurs, but, let’s face it: nobody goes to see a dinosaur movie to watch humans and dinos peacefully co-existing together. Another thing about Jurassic World that I really liked was Bryce Dallas Howard, who played the chief executive of the park, a control freak who tried in vain to manage the raging chaos that crazily blew up all around her. Howard came off as being very endearing to me, especially how she played against Chris Pratt’s rugged dino expert. But what was really coo...