Oh dear. I'd seen this film before, but had mostly forgotten its... insipidness? But in the meantime, having watched The Hundred Foot Journey (2014) fairly recently, it was kind of bizarrely uncanny - they are basically the same film. The fairy tale vibes, the sudden entry of a well-travelled masterchef into a small town, the suspicion of the locals, the fire(!)....

Anyway, this time round we spent most of the time criticising the surprising selection of accents, trying to work…

I can't get over how beautiful this film looks. Every shot is a stunner, and some of the lighting effects and textures are so hyper-realistic. As a narrative it moves along at a fast clip, and as a sci-fi (ish) film, I only got confused like twice. The gravity of the allusion to the 2011 earthquake hit hard but was dealt with very carefully. And can we talk about the wonderful plot device of keeping diaries on a smartphone? I…

Quite hard to review a film like this objectively, but damn the scale of the thing is stunning. That being said, one thing that struck me as the helicopter clears the island, and the sheer size of the park and its infrastructure are fresh in your mind, is how relatively small the cast is - particularly when it comes to those running the park. And yet, it feels like the right scale for the film.

Anyway, all that aside, this…