Jurassic World review (SPOILERS)

I finally saw my most anticipated film of the year today with a buddy of mine - Jurassic World. Being a massive fan of the original JP, I was ultra excited for this movie, but being not a very big fan of the previous two sequels, I was also pretty skeptical. So, what did I think of the movie I was looking forward to for a year? I didn't like it. Yeah, it really didn't do a lot for me. The characters were bland and uninteresting, the pace was rushed, the story was all over the place and contradictory of its self, and any message that actually amounted to anything was just a repeat of the original. I'll break it all down, so hold your horses before you crucify me.

First off, I'll sum up what I didn't like about the story, message and pace of the film. The story is pretty simple, and very rushed. We meet some incredibly bland kids as the film opens, find out they're going for a weekend in Jurassic World, the new tourist attraction built over the original park. There are several references to the events of the first film and that "a tragedy took place", but there isn't much of a decent explanation as to why the park was able to reopen under new management or when that happened. We then meet some more bland characters with no personality, most of which will be quickly killed off before they ever amount to much of anything, and then we meet Chris Pratt's character. He's pretty much the only interesting character in the mix. He's essentially the Alan Grant of this film as he knows more about the dinosaurs than anybody else and respects them as animals, not just statistics or tourist attractions. We very quickly learn that the park is developing a hybrid dinosaur that's extremely dangerous, and before much of anything happens, it already breaks out and kills people. I know most people complain about too much suspense and build up at the start of most movies, but there isn't much of any here. Within probably 20 minutes in this has already all happened. The original had a perfect build up - meet the characters, see dinosaur bones and get a description of one of the major creatures of the film, meet the creator of the island, go to the island in an epic entrance scene, see the first dinosaurs, see how they make the dinosaurs, start the tour, see more and more dinosaurs, power goes off that night, THEN we get our first carnivore attack. This movie's more like - meet a boring family, go to the island, meet more characters, see the biggest baddest carnivore in the film, it escapes. What I thought was going to be the climax of the film happens before you've even gotten comfortable in your seat. So, this mega-saurus goes around and starts killing everything, mostly for sport, which is acknowledged but not really explained. We learn that the dinosaur has DNA from pretty much every animal on Earth and can do anything. Throughout all of this we get little bits of scattered, barely developed and completely irrelevant story about the kids and their home life, like the younger boy being sad that his older brother is leaving soon and likes girls, as well as their parents getting a divorce. Why do we need to know that their parents are getting a divorce? Will that become relevant to the plot of the film? Will the parents actually end up even mattering in this film? No, actually. It's only there to fill the "must have X amount of typical human drama" quota, and to set up the EXACT same Grant story from the first movie for their aunt, who says she doesn't want kids and then at the end, decides it's the bee's knees. Only difference is, Grant's story was fleshed out and built slowly over the course of the film, completely unlike this film's. I guess they had to make too many funny one-liners, they didn't have time to actually explain characters better or tie the plots together. Anyway, the whole movie is pretty much just a hunt for this OP lizard as it destroys fucking everything. We get about 1,000 recreated scenes from the first movie - Mega-rex attacking the two kids in a vehicle, raptors surrounding the main cast as the male protagonist keeps them at bay with extended arms, and a dino on dino brawl at the end of the movie that allows the heroes to escape. We also have some token dick, mostly just recreated Dennis Nedry from the first film, who wants to replace soldiers in the military with dinosaurs... yeah. After everybody who matters dies off, he just sort of takes over the park and nobody asks any questions. He sends Chris' raptors out to get the super-saurus and Pratt goes with them to kick off that misleading, seemingly awesome scene from the trailer. They find ultra-saur and in two seconds it tells the raptors it's now their alpha and the raptors turn on the people. This is just one of many cases where the movie seems to lose its meaning. For the first half of the movie we get nothing but preaching about how killing the dinosaurs is wrong and what they did is wrong, and that the super-don killing the other dinosaurs is wrong, and then the movie goes ahead and becomes a mindless gore fest portraying the death of animals and people as badass, entertaining, and funny. Even anytime we get a scene of 100 people and dinosaurs dying, they instantly cut to characters telling shitty jokes you'd hear in a sitcom. Ultimately, aside from the original JP "man should not play god" message, no message is conveyed here. Any message it starts to portray is tossed away for tasteless entertainment's sake. After Chris Pratt's raptors that he cared so much about are almost all killed and he suddenly doesn't really care about them anymore, we get the most ridiculous part of the movie. The "Lady in the Water" sets the t-rex free and somehow outruns it in high heels, leading it to mega-saurus rex. Conveniently, once the t-rex spots the hybrid, it forgets all about the girl and decides to fight another predator of greater size instead. The t-rex may as well be wearing a cape from this point on, because it and the last raptor pretty much become heroes. The dinosaurs have a ridiculous WWE style tagteam fight. The t-rex is practically dead one second, then gets up and kicks more ass somehow the next, and ultimately the big water dinosaur, mosasaur, finishes the "Destroy all Monsters" melee. The dinos look at each other, shrug, and go their separate ways. Everyone's saved, the boring kids reunite with their parents (do they not get divorced? Did the writers forget about that story?) and Chris Pratt and the aunt's uninteresting romance blooms. The end. There were so many more lame points to the story, I honestly can't remember them all. We get a lot of cheap nostalgia blows that fail to please or serve a purpose. We get TONS of recreated scenes, Dr. Wong from Law and Order of all characters returns, we see Mr. DNA again, and we even have the plain kids stumble upon the ruins of the original Jurassic Park for no reason at all. I was almost expecting them to say "hey, isn't this the place from the first movie?". While there, these young ass boys also not only figure out how to fix a broken 1992 Jeep Rangler, but also get it to run on 1992 gasoline somehow... it would still be good after 23 years, right?....

As stated before, almost everybody and everything dies. So many characters get killed off before they can even become important. The owner of the park dies surprisingly early, the woman looking after the boys gets a fucking horribly long death scene (were we supposed to hate her???), and unnecessary mr. evil government military man gets killed off right in the middle of the scene where his true plan is revealed. Seriously, it's so uneventful. I already thought his story was stupid, but why build it up so much just so you can kill him off the second before we actually have a reason to fear him? The characters even sort of react in a "oh well, I guess he's dead. That's that" manner. And even though so many people die, you mostly just watch dinosaurs get killed in this movie. Whether it be dino killing dino or man killing dino, this movie's pretty much an hour and a half of animals being slaughtered. Kind of hard to be afraid of these things when the humans kill more stuff than they do. In the original, only a few people and dinos die, but the mood and presentation of everything was so much more grandiose, terrifying, and natural, everything was gotten across perfectly. We had human drama with Alan and the other characters but it was well written and developed. Dr. John Hammond had a lot of drama in the film, but it was all extremely relative to the core plot and message of the film - man cannot control or make nature. The human drama lessons we get from this one are - parents getting divorced is bad and hot people should hook up. Does that have anything to do with man playing god or the understanding of animals? Not one fucking bit.

And now, the visuals. Gone are the breath-taking animatronics that made the first one so amazing and here is... CGI that looks worse or on par with the original. Some of it looks pretty good. The major predators look OK, nothing special, but any others look like cartoons. It's tough to explain, but any ones in the petting zoo, the gallamimus herd (another scene stolen from the original), and the herbivores just look fake as hell. They're overly animated and cartoony in motion. It's just really hard to believe they're real, which is a tragedy coming from the name Jurassic Park. I felt the gallamimus flock looked faker this time than it did in the original, 23 years later. The music is also either generic or just remakes of the original themes. 

I can't state most of the problems enough, because they occur so often. The story is a chopped up, rushed mess, the messages go nowhere and say far less than they should, characters are horribly developed and uninteresting, the pace of events sucks, the placement of humor is sloppy and constant, it has nothing new to say, the effects are far from anything special, and every decent scene was edited and put in the cock-tease of a trailer to make it look cooler than it was. This film kind of even contradicts the existence of the second and third movies, and, despite my hating them, that does make the series sloppy and pointless, and this movie's really no better than them. I ultimately find myself saying what I said about the Lost World when it came out - Jurassic Park NEVER needed a sequel. I know, how else will they make more money, but it's really a stand alone film. The movie brings nothing new to the plate. It's kind of just one big metaphor for itself - fans are bored of dinosaurs (original JP), so they try to make something bigger and crazier, and it leads to one big mess. The film feels nowhere close to the scale and splendor of the original, and that's not just the nostalgia speaking, it's the damn truth. I know I'm being harder on this than I should, probably, but I guess I'm just so let down because I got too hyped for it and started to set my expectations too high. I should have just looked at the last two sequels again and remembered "oh yeah, JP sequels always suck". I guess if you like crappy humor and dinosaurs getting killed, then this movie's sure to deliver a couple smiles, but it did nothing for me.

Well, summer's upon us, and that means it's the summer movie season. Expect plenty more reviews of summer flicks soon, hopefully better than this.