LEGO 75929 Carnotaurus Gyrosphere Escape from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom [Review]

vrijdag, 20 april 2018

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The full range of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom LEGO sets were released earlier this week, and we’re continuing our reviews of these new, dinosaur-centric sets, following on from 75928 Pteranodon Chase and 75932 Jurassic Park Velociraptor Chase. Today, we’re taking a look at one of the sets with a brand new dinosaur, 75929 Carnotaurus Gyrosphere Escape. The set includes 577 pieces, three minifigs, a baby dinosaur, and the main attraction, Carnotaurus.

The box & instructions

The parts for Carnotaurus Gyrosphere Escape rattle out of a standard LEGO box in five numbered bags, plus an unnumbered bag with a couple of larger pieces and the usual creature bag with the dinosaur. The sticker sheet is loose in the bag, though it’s small enough that it’s unlikely to get especially damaged. The instructions are also loose in the bag, and are split into two booklets.

The sticker sheet includes a lot of yellow and black stripes, plus some unique Jurassic World designs, and is unlikely to be of enormous utility in other contexts.

The build

Let’s be honest, we’re not here for the innovative building techniques. The Jurassic World sets as a whole feel a lot like recolored LEGO City sets with some terrible lizards thrown in for fun, and the build process reflects this. We’ll focus this review on the finished model and the dinosaurs, but for a modicum of completeness here’s how the build plays out:

Bag 1: Includes Owen and the parts for the cab and chassis of the truck. Bag 2: Includes Franklin and the parts for the back of the truck plus the gyrosphere. Bag 3: Includes Claire and the parts for the gyrosphere trailer. Bags 4 & 5: Includes the parts for the gyrosphere station.

The finished model

Despite a fairly uninspiring build, the finished set is actually rather fun, with a truck that looks like a heavy-duty Mercedes Unimog (one of my favorite off-road vehicles), plus a playset section with lots of foliage.

The gyrosphere itself is essentially identical to the version in 75916 Dilophosaurus Ambush from the first Jurassic World back in 2015. In this case, the transparent 6×6 radar dishes attached on either side of the sphere are printed with cracks, and I thought immediately that they’d be perfect for a LEGO Bioshock diorama.

The truck is modular, with a bed with interior storage, which detaches from the chassis, and a hardtop cover with some great ridge details.

While I do like any LEGO Unimog, the scale of the truck is huge — particularly for someone like me who loves the wonderfully scaled cars in the LEGO Speed Champions line.

The overgrown gyrosphere station is built from several shades of brown, with a variety of foliage pieces, including 15 of the new three-leaf pieces we first saw in Downtown Diner.

Pushing a knob pops the gyrophere off its base, and it rolls down a short ramp.

Pulling a knob near the top of the tree removes the support from a trapdoor, and a bunch of trans-orange 2×2 round bricks drop down. We’ll see what this play feature corresponds to when the movie comes out on June 22nd.

Minifigures & creatures

75929 Carnotaurus Gyrosphere Escape includes three minifigures — Owen Grady, Claire Dearing, and Franklin Webb — plus one baby dinosaur (not two as shown in our photo below) and Carnotaurus.

Each minifigure has an alternate expression in the usual duality of neutral/positive and negative/distressed.

Carnotaurus was a dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous period, 70 to 72 million years ago. Known from just one specimen, Carnotaurus Sastrei has unique projections above its eyes. While resembling the LEGO T. rex at first glance, almost every element is new. We’ll be comparing and contrasting the entire Jurassic World menagerie in a separate article later, but for now you’ll notice the ridged back and tail as well as the smaller arms. As with previous LEGO dinosaurs, Carnotaurus is fully articulated, and thus capable of meting out jungle justice in defense of its kind.

Conclusions & recommendation

As commercially successful as the new Jurassic World movie was globally, it certainly wasn’t a critical favorite, and my expectations for the next movie are fairly low. So for me at least (and I suspect a sizable minority of our readership) these sets are about parts, minifigs, and creatures. At $80 for 577 pieces, the price is obviously weighted heavily toward the complex dinosaur centerpiece.

But with a fun truck, cool transparent pieces that are useful in many contexts, lots of foliage, and an excellent new dinosaur, it’s hard not to love this fun addition to the long-running LEGO Jurassic Park line (now including Jurassic World as well). The price point is painful, but we can certainly hope for discounts — and there’s always BrickLink or eBay just for the dinosaur itself.

75929 Carnotaurus Gyrosphere Escape includes 577 pieces and three minifigures plus a Carnotaurus dinosaur. The set is available now from the LEGO Shop ($79.99 in the US | £59.99 | $99.99), Target, eBay, BrickLink, and elsewhere.

The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.