The ingredients for a dynamite entry into the Jurassic Park canon are no great secret. They’ve been in the public domain since 1993, after all. Quite why it’s taken thirty years and six attempts to remix them into a genuinely thrilling, and legitimately original is less clear. To be clear, 2015’s Jurassic World was good fun but a legacy remake if ever one were. No matter. Not content with gifting LucasFilm the best Star Wars film of the twenty-first century, Gareth Edwards has done it again for the Steven Spielberg’s Franchisousaurus Rex. Putting a new tranche of stars through hell, Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing short of a hoot.
There’s a nostalgia premium to the Pixar original experience these days. It’s in the combination of formula familiarity, winsome messaging and – for the grown ups at least – the reminiscence of a bygone era in which Pixar could do no wrong. Uniform commercial and critical acclaim has long evaded the Disney-owned studio, with no Pixar original enjoying box office success since 2017’s Coco. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their latest attempt at reasserted relevance recalls that particular Mexican favourite in more ways than one. Where Coco mined themes of belonging, familial fracture and loneliness from the Land of the Dead, Elio seeks the same in taking its hero to the cosmos and into a space where no one can hear you reach for your hankie.
Imagine. You wait 23 years for Hollywood to carbon copy a Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders animation in live action form and two come along at the same time. And they say creativity is dead. What’s more, each facsimile is proving a monster hit in its own right. One can but imagine the wild ride 2025 is proving to be for DeBlois and Sanders. With Disney now no longer the sole studio exponent of the toon-to-live cash in, the form is more genre than trend these days. AI should make the process quicker. Feed the original through an app, with ‘remake in live action’ as your filter and the new-ish How to Train Your Dragon is your result.
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