The park is open.
Jurassic World (2015)
Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by John Hammond.
rating 7/10 User rating 21,345 votes 67% ❄ Christmas Connection
The final act of Jurassic World takes place during the Christmas holiday season, with the park operating at peak capacity partly because of holiday tourism. The Indominus Rex breakout happens while families have come to the island for the holidays, and there are brief background decorations in the visitor areas. It's a thin connection by any measure, but it's there.
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Our Review
Let's be honest about why Jurassic World is on a Christmas movie site: the film's climax takes place during the holiday season, and there are Christmas decorations visible in the background of a few scenes. That's it. If you came here expecting a movie where dinosaurs wear Santa hats, you're going to be disappointed. What you get instead is a $150 million blockbuster about a genetically engineered hybrid dinosaur eating its way through a fully operational theme park, and that turns out to be a reasonable way to spend two hours of your Christmas holiday.
A Park That Should Never Have Opened
Jurassic World posits that John Hammond's dream finally came true. Dinosaurs are real, the park is open, and twenty-two thousand visitors show up every day. The trouble is that attendance is flagging. People have become numb to the sight of actual living dinosaurs, because human beings are constitutionally incapable of appreciating anything. The park's solution is to engineer something new: the Indominus Rex, a custom hybrid built from a classified genetic recipe that the scientists themselves don't fully understand.
This is, of course, an absolutely terrible idea. The film knows it's a terrible idea. Claire Dearing, played by Bryce Dallas Howard with a controlled efficiency that works better than critics gave her credit for in 2015, knows it's a terrible idea. The park's owner Simon Masrani, played by Irrfan Khan with warm obliviousness, proceeds with it anyway because visitor numbers are down.
That's the movie's best satirical instinct: it's not really about dinosaur hubris. It's about corporate hubris, and the specific kind of institutional stupidity that prioritizes quarterly metrics over every warning sign on earth.
Chris Pratt, Velociraptors, and the Film That Made Him a Star
Owen Grady, the raptor trainer played by Chris Pratt, is the film's other major element. Pratt had just come off Guardians of the Galaxy, and director Colin Trevorrow very deliberately cast him as the same kind of relaxed, competent, slightly smug action hero. It works. Pratt is good at conveying physical confidence without turning it into self-parody, and his scenes with the raptor pack, while scientifically absurd, are the film's most genuinely original sequences.
The idea that velociraptors could be trained through behavioral conditioning, that Owen functions as the alpha of a pack, is scientifically ridiculous but cinematically effective. The sequence where the four raptors run alongside Owen's motorcycle through the jungle is the film's best shot, and Trevorrow holds on it long enough to let it actually be something instead of cutting away every three seconds.
What Jurassic World Gets Right (and Wrong)
The Indominus Rex works as a monster. It's too large for the standard raptor menace and too intelligent for the T-Rex standard, and the film uses that intelligence strategically. The reveal that it can camouflage its heat signature, that it scratched the tracking device out of its own skin, that it understood it was being observed during containment, these are good thriller beats delivered efficiently.
The film's weaker elements cluster around the two child characters, Zach and Gray, played by Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins. Their subplot, running loose through the park while their aunt Claire is occupied with the crisis, generates very little tension. The gyrosphere sequence is visually spectacular but goes on longer than it earns.
The final act, set during the holiday season with the park in full chaos, brings back the original T-Rex from the 1993 film in a moment designed entirely for audience emotion. It works. Trevorrow knows that earned nostalgia is a legitimate tool, and the pterosaur attack on the main plaza, with the park's Christmas lights still running overhead, is the best visual the film produces.
The Christmas Connection: As Honest as We Can Be
Jurassic World does not use Christmas as a theme, a symbol, or a plot point. The holiday exists in the background because the film is set during peak tourist season, and the park would logically be at maximum capacity during Christmas week. You can see garland on the lamp posts in a handful of scenes. The Mosasaurus feeding show takes place against what appears to be a decorated grandstand.
That's genuinely thin. Die Hard has more Christmas DNA than Jurassic World does, and people have been arguing about Die Hard for thirty years.
The honest case for watching it during the holidays is simpler: it's a two-hour action movie your family can watch together, it doesn't require prior knowledge of the original trilogy to follow, and it's available on most streaming platforms. Christmas is also a good time for spectacle, and Jurassic World delivers spectacle in quantity. The dinosaurs are well-rendered by Industrial Light and Magic, the practical and digital work is blended with more care than most films of this scale manage, and the sound design is genuinely impressive in a good home theater setup.
The park's destruction, happening around Christmas decorations, does create an accidental atmosphere: all that festive infrastructure getting smashed by a genetically modified super-predator is its own kind of holiday metaphor. Probably not an intentional one.
Fun Facts
Jurassic World grossed $208.8 million in its opening weekend in the United States in June 2015, setting a new domestic opening weekend record at the time, which it held until Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened six months later in December.
The film was in development for 14 years after Jurassic Park III (2001). Steven Spielberg reportedly rejected multiple scripts before Trevorrow's version was approved, and at various points John Sayles, William Monahan, and Cormac McCarthy were among the writers involved in early drafts.
Chris Pratt spent three months training with actual animal behaviorists to prepare for his role as a raptor trainer, studying how large animal handlers use body language and eye contact to manage big cats and primates.
The original Jurassic Park's T-Rex, now older and battle-scarred, appears in the film's climax. The production team added deliberate scarring to the CGI model to mark it as the same individual from the 1993 film, including the scars from a raptor attack in the original.
Irrfan Khan, who played park owner Simon Masrani, was one of India's most celebrated actors, known internationally for his roles in Slumdog Millionaire and The Lunchbox. He died in April 2020 at age 53.
The gyrosphere sequence required building a full practical sphere set that actors could actually sit inside during filming, rather than placing them in front of a greenscreen. The sphere cost approximately $500,000 to construct.
Jurassic World's final box office total was $1.672 billion worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing film of 2015 and, at the time of release, the fourth highest-grossing film ever made.
Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays the film's human antagonist Hoskins, has said in interviews that he modeled the character on specific real-world defense contractors he researched, not on any fictional archetype, which is why the character reads as unusually grounded compared to the rest of the film's tone.
Cast
