NEON at Battersea Power Station
£28.95, £23.95 children
It’s up to every primary school parent to wrestle with their own conscience as to whether it’s appropriate to take their dinosaur-loving child to Jurassic World: Rebirth (rating 12A) this summer. But regardless of how much a wuss your kid is, a new installment in the franchise inevitably means a glut of family-friendly mesozoic-related shows.
London is full of them this summer holidays, and foremost is the ‘official’ show Jurassic World: The Experience, which was last seen here three years ago at ExCel London (then called Jurassic World: The Exhibition), the last time a Jurassic World film came out.
God help me, I also saw it the last time around, and can report that the only significant change is the location: it’s now staged at NEON, a new venue just outside Battersea Power Station that will apparently be dedicated to similar immersive events. I don’t have a lot to say about NEON – it’s basically a big box – but the Power Station redevelopment is quite a fun place to take little ones to after the show, which is pretty brief.
It’s all good clean cretaceous fun
The premise is the same as before. The experience is roughly 45 minutes long and begins with us boarding a ‘ferry’ to get out to Isla Nublar, home to Jurassic World. A handful of impressively gigantic animatronic herbivores greet us, along with some fun interactive bits, and then it’s on to the incubation lab where we can pet a ‘baby dinosaur’ (a puppet) and muck around with more displays. Next up we witness feeding time for beloved velociraptor Blue (a sort of giant puppet suit that works a lot better than last time, although it is still clearly much bigger than Blue from the films) and then on to a final section where a T-rex bellows at us while the park breaks down, causing us to take shelter in the only place we’re safe from the giant carnivore (the gift shop).
It ticks all the appropriate dino boxes, and as I recall it’s a bit slicker than last time out, with a few new creatures and better separation between the areas. They’ve rethought the odd decision of having Blue’s handler lipsync to recorded dialogue (he just speaks the lines himself now). It still feels a bit brief and underpowered: it’s a shame none of the cast of the film pop up in pre-recorded form to make it feel a bit less ‘generic dinosaur attraction’, and the arc from mooching around the island to something non-specific going wrong to we’re all in the gift shop now feels overly quick – given how much money this thing presumably makes then another 15 minutes of content surely wouldn’t have bankrupted anyone.
Nonetheless, it’s all good clean cretaceous fun, and there’s no fear that younger kids will find it too long, frightening or hard to follow. Plus, it is actually a pretty solid gift shop!
