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Pop Culture Happy Hour, Small Batch Edition: 'Jurassic World'

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in <em>Jurassic World</em>.
Chuck Zlotnick
/
Universal Pictures
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World.

You may have heard that Jurassic World made more than $500 million worldwide in its opening weekend. That's $500 million, 5-0-0. Its nearly $209 million weekend in the U.S. alone makes it the highest-grossing U.S. opening weekend ever. That's ever, e-ver.

So how's the movie? It's fine. Does it justify having had the biggest domestic box-office opening weekend of all time? That's a pretty tall order for a pretty medium-sized movie, creatively speaking.

But really. It's fine! It has some enjoyable dinosaur business, a couple of nifty supporting performances, the same interesting underlying questions as a lot of other movies about science gone awry, and two lead characters who are given no humanity whatsoever beyond "rides a motorcycle; is hot and always right" (him) and "has unfriendly hair; is foolish and usually wrong" (her). Stephen Thompson and I sit down to talk through the good stuff, the not-so-good stuff, and the power of the prehistoric.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.