It’s been a somewhat light months for films. Normally in Oscar month I’d be desperately seeing as many nominees as possible, but this year I just couldn’t really be bothered. A combination of underwhelming films, trickier availability, and my own mood making me less willing to watch high drama. So I only managed 10 films, and 5 of them were Jurassic Parks. I’ve given you a bonus of Sound of Music which I actually watched on May 1st, but was so good I didn’t want to wait a month to post the review.

Sound of Metal (Amazon Prime)
This is a powerful and really well constructed film that hits all the right notes (pardon the pun) with rich characters and a well paced story with innovative filmmaking that really draws the audience into the main characters experiences. The way sound is used throughout really immerses the audience into the stages of hearing loss that the Ruben is going through, but because it’s not solely from that point of view, when we switch back to the ‘normal’ sound it really heightens what he’s lost. I would say that there were sections of the film that I really didn’t enjoy because of these effects, the muffled or dissonant sounds are quite unpleasant to listen to (I was glad for once to NOT have a cinema sound system) but that discomfort it absolutely a part of the film. Riz Ahmed is miraculous as Ruben, an incredibly complex character going through something utterly life changing, it’s hard to know how anyone would react, but Ahmed’s performance is completely believable and relatable. The only downside is that this focus does mean a lot of potentially interesting supporting characters are quite one-note, they’re all from Ruben’s point of view and felt a little bit ‘used’. However overall, this is a fascinating, impressive and important film that really exemplifies what film can do. Ranking: 9 / 10

Palm Springs (Amazon Prime)
Nyles is trapped at an endless wedding. We’ve all been to weddings that feel that way, but Nyles is in fact trapped in a time loop re-doing the same day over and over attending a wedding that he doesn’t really care about. Rather than join the story at the start though, the writers very cleverly drop us with Nyles after he’s been trapped long enough to have given up trying to escape and is just resigned to his fate. Until someone joins him in the loop. The construction is really clever, bringing new life to the old Groundhog Day trope and playing out mostly as a romcom, but with a vein of quite deep philosophy running through it about. It’s quite a timely question to ask how do you find joy and surprise if you’re just trapped in the same place all the time? At an hour and a half it packs a lot in, leaves a fair amount up to the audience to fill in and is a really satisfying and entertaining package. Ranking: 9 / 10

Minari
I wanted to like this film. I didn’t. I was really really bored. The person I watched it with actually fell asleep. It just felt like there wasn’t enough to sustain the 2 hour run time. What was there was really well done, it looked beautiful, the acting was great and the stories original. But it felt too thin and bitty, missing opportunities to dig deeper, fill in history, or look at more of the relationships and connections. I was just wishing for it to be over. Ranking: 6 / 10

Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon
A lovely, lovely film with plenty of entertainment for absolutely all the family. I particularly loved all the geeky references to science fiction classics and I’m sure that I would continue to spot new things on any number of subsequent watches. The story and humour are gentle but constant, and as the whole thing is wordless it’s a real achievement at how much emotion, laughs and meaning is packed in by the animators and the sound department. Ranking: 8 / 10

An American Werewolf in London
I’ve somehow never seen this before and I found it to be surprisingy low key and charming. I’d been expecting something really silly, and although it had a fairly light touch to it, there was actually a lot more depth and heart to it than I was expecting. The film takes familiar werewolf tropes and doesn’t really muck about with them, just gives the eponymous American a bit of self-awareness and disbelief, the drama is more in him coming to terms with the situation than in the gory rampages (although there’s also a fair bit of that). The effects are a bit laughable in places, although I can see they were impressive in 1981. But although it may look a bit dated sometimes, the story and presentation are timeless. Ranking: 8 / 10

The Lego Movie 2
I wasn’t sure that the bonkers awesomeness of the first movie could be replicated, but they actually do manage it. There’s no way they could redo the twist at the end of the first movie that reveals the multiple levels of the story, but they do manage to continue to evolve the ideas. The concept isn’t quite as strong, but it’s still got a lovely message at its heart that really connects to the core ideas of the Lego brand. It’s a huge amount of fun to watch, there’s so many different things going on, connections to all the different brands that Lego comes with that are charming if you get the references and just add to the weirdness if you don’t and both work well. Ranking: 8 / 10

Jurassic Parks
1 is amazing, 2 is rubbish, 3 is slightly better but still poor, 4 is flawed but fun to watch and 5 is actually pretty good!

Jurassic Park
I can’t believe how old this film is (1993) and how good it still is. The effects still look good, thanks to some very careful direction and editing so that ropey bits are hidden behind lighting and dramatic music. There’s a decent plot behind the running and screaming, but it doesn’t get in the way of the death and maiming and even the small kids aren’t too irritating. The music is possibly the best soundtrack ever, and the moment they first see the dinosaurs and the music swells makes me beam with joy no matter how many times I’ve seen it. Ranking: 8 / 10

Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World
This film should have been good, it would probably have never been as good as the first, but there was more than enough material to play with, a cast and budget to die for and yet it ends up being insulting bad. The biggest issue was the plot. The first half of the film is entirely driven by characters doing stupid things (particularly the lead female unfortunately who loudly proclaims to be an expert on these things and then does absolutely everything wrong. Then the second half when they leave the island is so riddled with plot holes that you can drive a sauropod through them. Then the crappy icing on the rubbish cake is that somehow, 4 years after the original, the special effects are substantially worse. At least the music is still good. Ranking: 5 / 10

Jurassic Park 3
Jurassic Park 3 is not as bad as Jurassic Park 2. While it’s not a high bar to step over, it is something to celebrate. This film keeps things relatively simple, just a small number of people trying to get away from the dinosaurs through a series of set pieces that felt rather less organic than they could have done. Everything about the film is fine – it’s playing up the humour rather more than the first one did, it feels quite light in comparison, I didn’t have any particular emotional investment in any of the characters but the action sequences barreled along. Some cheaper special effects were hidden away behind things being dark rather too often, but at least they were hidden I suppose. It’s fine, but it’s nothing special. Ranking: 7 / 10

Jurassic World
I was particularly harsh about this film the the first time I watched it in the cinema. I felt that they’d over-commercialised the idea and lost the heart and soul of it. I called out the moment early in the film where it lost me – the music swelled into the familiar theme, one that in the first film played as the helicopter swept over the beautiful landscape, eventually coming to a climax as the herd of brontosaurus are revealed to audience and characters for the first time. John Williams’ genius score carried us along with the power of nature, the joy of the paleontologists seeing dinosaurs walking around – the majesty, the surprise, the delight, the wonder. In Jurassic World, it plays as we pass over a sweeping landscape of shops at a theme park. The music automatically made me feel all the old emotions and then made me hate myself because I was connecting them with commercialisation. I acknowledged that this was possibly done deliberately to show us the wonder being turned into a dollar sign, the product placement being ironic… but it just felt hypocritical and smug rather than self-aware.
However. I’ve just watched it straight after watching the original trilogy, and while it isn’t in the same league as the first one, it’s a definite step back in the right direction compared to 2 and 3. At least this film was made with competence and even some heart, where the previous two felt like absolute cash ins that they couldn’t even be bothered to make any effort at all with.
At least the plot and characters make sense here, the action sequences and special effects are really well done (and mostly in the daylight rather than hidden in shadows) and the way some of the ideas have evolved shows thought rather than lazily rehashing the same things. Chris Pratt is rapidly turning into the go-to guy for this kind of charming, slightly insufferable hero. He injects an energy and a heart to the film that is otherwise sadly absent. And Bryce Dallas Howard is a perfect partner for him.
It’s not the original, but it ain’t terrible.
Ranking: 7 / 10

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
This film manages to find some of the heart that was missing from the previous films, raising some interesting questions about the dinosaurs and tug at the heart strings. The mixture of actual plot and action sequences is just right, never leaving it too long without some excitement, but also not dragging sequences out until they get dull. Yes, there’s plenty of cheesy moments, and the plot doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but the characters are fun, the cast charismatic and the special effects convincing. There wasn’t a single moment of the film when I was bored or my brain escaped back to the real world. Exactly what I’m looking for in Jurassic Park films. Ranking: 8 / 10