Time hasn't been kind to Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," the 1993 blockbuster that paved the way for every CGI-driven popcorn flick of the past two decades. But it isn't the movie's visual effects that betray its age: it's the setting. The film's titular theme park may have spent millions on cloning dinosaurs, but as a visitor experience it looked like a total drag.
In this unexpectedly entertaining revival, the park has been brought up to date: It's now a Disneyland-scale enterprise, where families can let their kids ride on a baby Triceratops before heading to the pool area to see an 18-meter Mosasaurus devour a shark in one chomp. In the language of operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the dinosaurs are "assets" — and, market demands being what they are, you've got to keep upping the stakes.
Hence the newest attraction, Indominus rex, a genetically engineered monster that's been spliced together from T. rex DNA mixed with a bit of cuttlefish, tree frog and whatever else they had lying around in the lab. The resulting hybrid is just what the park's cavalier CEO asked for — "Bigger. Scarier. Cooler." — though it doesn't take a chaos theorist to predict that this creation might get out of hand.