Jurassic World’s terrific, overlooked moment

Jurassic World is a movie with problems - but it does have a lovely touch right near the end...

Spoilers for Jurassic World lie ahead.

Much has been written about the biggest film outside of Star Wars at the box office this year, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. Currently on its way to becoming the biggest disc release of the year as well, the movie has been loved, loathed, pulled apart, put back together and a whole lot more since it first hit cinemas over the summer.

Yet there’s one glorious moment that takes place near the end of the film, that I really think is worth highlighting. Appreciating that Jurassic World has its missteps, I wanted to salute a neat, appreciated turning of convention that takes place right at the end.

For when the necessary dinosaurs have been defeated, and it becomes clear that human beings will, on the whole, survive, we get a simple moment between Jake Johnson’s Lowery, and Lauren Lupkus’ Vivian.

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The pair have been sat in the control room for the duration of the movie, staring at increasingly fraught looking computer graphics, that seem to suggest that elsewhere in Jurassic World, there is peril.

Lowery, the man who’s bought his vintage Jurassic Park T-shirt off eBay, thus turns towards Vivian, a woman towards whom he has some attraction. And he leans in for that usual of conventions. At the end of a traumatic event, a woman falls into a man’s arms.

Only not here.

I saw Jurassic World twice in cinemas, and on both occasions, what happened next brought the house down. “Someone has to stay behind”, Lowery says, as he leans in for his expected kiss with Vivian.

But it’s not to be. “Uh, I have a boyfriend”, she politely says, gives him a friendly hug, and departs. After all, why should she bring talk of her home life into her professional life?

A simple, but appreciated, subversion of the expected norms of the disaster movie. And one I think is worth saluting. I hope we see more of Vivian in the sequel. As things stand, though, that one’s my favourite scene in the film.

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Arguing about the rest of Jurassic World may now recommence.