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Features Live Action Movies

Jurassic World Rebirth

Director – Gareth Edwards – 2025 – US – Cert. – 134m

***

A group of mercenary hunters and a traumatised family find themselves on an equatorial island populated by mutant dinosaurs – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 2nd

The difficult seventh movie, made on a shorter production schedule than its predecessors – according to the production notes – and probably made too quickly for its own good. First there were three Jurassic Park movies, then there were three Jurassic World movies, and now there’s a seventh Jurassic. What to call it? Jurassic Beyond? Jurassic Outside? Jurassic Environment? Jurassic Habitat? Jurassic Equator? Jurassic Island? Jurassic Laboratory? Jurassic Lab? Jurassic Experiment? Jurassic Mutation? (Those took me a mere five minutes.) No: unable to think of a word to replace Park or World, this one is saddled with the marketing-led Jurassic World Rebirth. Which no doubt will do the job, but when Michael Crichton coined Jurassic Park for his novel’s title and Spielberg ran with it, no-one outside of palaeontologists and dinosaur-geeks (I number myself among the latter) knew what ‘Jurassic’ was. It didn’t matter: it was Spielberg and dinosaurs, that sold it, and the film more than lived up to the lure and the promise.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Zu Warriors
From The
Magic Mountain
(Shu Shan
– Xin Shu Shan Jian Ke,
新蜀山劍俠)

Director – Tsui Hark – 1983 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12 – 98m

*****

One of the greatest special effects action movies ever made, this groundbreaking epic delivers non-stop, near unbelievable, visually entrancing vistas of Chinese mythology – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th and available on Blu-ray

There are films which seem almost single-handedly to define cultures. There are plenty of elements in Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain that can be found elsewhere in Hong Kong cinema – martial arts stunts, flying wire work, period costumes, stock figures, airborne drapery – and yet the precise way this mixes these elements up then adds in others and adds in lots of 2D effects animation makes it a unique work, even by Tsui’s extraordinary standards.

With the ancient world in which he lives in a state of chaos due to constantly warring human factions, a man gets swiftly out of his depth when he sidesteps all that to follow a hero in the hope of becoming his disciple as the hero battles the forces of evil. If this sounds very highbrow… well, perhaps it is. Or perhaps it’s just an excuse to put together a series of truly extraordinary special effects action set-pieces that transport the viewer to mythological otherworlds the exact like of which have never been seen onscreen before or since.… Read the rest