The Jurassic Games
Written and Directed by Ryan Bellgardt
High Octane Pictures
Do me a favour. Take the part of your brain that says “what the hell?” when you come across something especially nutty, and just switch it off.
Okay. We’re good to go.
The Jurassic Games is a movie about a television show, also called The Jurassic Games, in which death-row convicts are given a chance to win their freedom. Ten of them are shunted into a frighteningly realistic virtual-reality environment in which they must kill off all of their competitors – oh, and just to make things more entertaining for the viewers (the show is broadcast live), they also have to avoid being eaten by dinosaurs. Why dinosaurs? As one of the movie’s characters says, they tested better than robots. And that’s good enough for me.
There are two stories here, both of them pretty interesting. We have the drama playing out inside the virtual-reality environment, as the death-row prisoners try to knock off their competitors (if you die inside the VR environment, you die in real life). At the same time, we have the drama playing out inside the television studio, as the smarmy host, the cold-hearted director, and the crew work feverishly to keep up with what’s going on inside the VR environment.
Yes, the movie draws on Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, and other movies. It also has a lot in common with “Judgment Day,” an 18-year-old episode of The Outer Limits. If The Jurassic Games were horrible, it’d be easy to dismiss it as a derivative piece of junk.
But it’s not horrible. It’s actually quite good. Ryan Bellgardt’s script is a bit clunky in places, but his direction is inventive: a lot of the movie is shot on various locations, and he makes the most of them, keeping his actors moving through the landscape, shifting from claustrophobic wooded areas to wide-open spaces to keep the characters, and the viewers, on their toes. He seems well aware his movie incorporates elements from other movies, and he works hard to stage familiar scenes in a new way, or to send the movie off in a new direction just when we’re pretty sure we know what’s going to happen next.
Low-budget movies often suffer from sub-par acting, but here the performances are mostly solid and, in places, surprisingly nuanced. Adam Hampton, as the movie’s nominal lead (he’s one of the death-row cons), does a fine job of making us root for him, and Katie Burgess, as the seriously psychopathic Joy, chooses subtlety of movement and gesture over arm-flailing insanity. Ryan Merriman, as the host of the television show, goes slightly over the top from time to time, but never too far.
There’s a fair amount of computer-generated imagery in the movie, and it’s also quite good. Not up to the standards of Jurassic Park, of course, but well above some of the Asylum’s low-budget flicks. The dinosaur animation here makes it easy for us to suspend our disbelief and just sit back and have fun.
The movie will be on VOD in June, and on DVD in July. Seek it out.
