Jurassic World (2015)

The new park is open, and it is run by idiots who create a new dinosaur and then let it escape. Their efforts to contain the situation involve many cliche character arcs.

I am so on the fence about this movie. Yes it was fun, the movie is entertaining, but there is also so much to complain about. I feel like it just won’t do to say that this was a Hollywood fun action movie and that I shouldn’t complain so much, and expect less. No, some complaints are in order.

Now, I am a huge fan of the original Jurassic Park. What I liked about that movie is how immersive it is. It is a nicely fleshed out world with great locations and a back story that feels believable. The dinosaurs too still look real, and it is a tense movie. Take the kitchen scene where the kids are tracked by the velociraptors. That is a tense scene; the danger is real and up close, and Spielberg knows how to make it thrilling.

Jurassic World tries to recapture some of the magic of the old movie through references, but it does not offer anything thrilling. Yes sure there are dinosaurs with teeth, but there wasn’t anything scary about it. Tension is not created by animated reptiles, but by skill of the director.

The scene in Jurassic Park in which the T Rex attacks the car with the kids in the rain is still so much more real than the scene in Jurassic World in which the new Indominus Rex attacks the glass ball with the kids. The I Rex’s breath isn’t even visible on the glass, even though it tries to eat it. It just pulls me out of the movie and I start thinking about other things, such as shouldn’t the glass ball be slipping in the wet grass as it moves? I only start nitpicking when a movie is boring me.

While Jurassic Park felt like a movie that was supposed to thrill adults, Jurassic World feels like a movie for kids.

And I guess that is why two kids are the main characters. For some reason, Hollywood thinks that the only way to reach kids is to cast kids, just like in the Star Wars prequels, but it doesn’t really work that way. And most of the time when kids are the main characters in a summer action movie, characterization suffers. The whole brother bonding theme left me yawning, and so did the simplistic love story.

Boring, stock characters make boring stock character arcs. The characters of the old Jurassic Park aren’t fantastic, but they are at least interesting. They aren’t deep but they are still a step away from being stock characters. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, Dennis Nedry, I remember them. I have already forgotten the new characters. I just remember that there was the hunter guy, the business woman, and the brothers. And you know what is going to happen with them from the start. It is nothing but a predictable frame to attach the action scenes on.

In the end I can’t be too negative about Jurassic World. I really liked seeing the park open and all the visitor attractions and I wished I was there. I wished it was real. I would go there immediately. A park open to visitors was a vision that even the first movie was about, but we never saw it working and that made this movie a very nice addition to the dinosaur theme.

I just wonder now how many movies we can make about dinosaurs and how to keep it interesting.