You can’t really do a review without pumping out some spoilers, so if you read on, you’ve been warned. I have to be honest though… this movie is nothing you haven’t already seen before.
Jurassic Park is loved by pretty much everybody with eyeballs. A dinosaur movie that finally brings the most vicious prehistoric predators and gigantic teddy bears into the world of today. What’s not to like about a present-day struggle of man-made monsters bumping humanity down from the top of the food chain? Dinosaurs are awesome, mysterious and everyone with blood pumping through their veins has a curiosity about them for the exact reason that makes the concept of Jurassic Park a homerun every time… Dinosaurs are extinct and finally you can experience everything that was mysterious about them, up close and in person.
Jurassic Park 2 and 3 lost their way a little bit. Everyone knows that, but at least they took angles that were unique. Jurassic World came onto the scene with a little bit of ego and said, “Hey, totally ignore 2 and 3 because that’s what we’re doing. Even if you don’t, it wont matter because this movie is going to be so good, you’ll forget about those sequels.” Short of adding in more dinosaurs, I can’t imagine how anyone could say this is the best of the bunch. I’m not even sure I can consider it as the second best.
The biggest problem with Jurassic World is how tired the plot is. As much as everyone wants to believe that the super unique story of humans genetically modifying something and having the arrogance to think they have it completely under control, is the driving force of the movie… it’s not. If you didn’t catch the sarcasm, there’s absolutely nothing unique about that plot line except that it’s with a dinosaur. The real driving force of the movie is that InGen/the government has been funding the raptor training so that they can be utilized in military operations as a dino-black ops team.
If you can think of a more tired set of plot templates, I’d love to hear it. The evil government plot is revealed pretty much right after the raptors are shown demonstrating their intelligence. If you just wanted to see a new Jurassic Park movie and see more dinosaurs, your standards are where they needed to be for Jurassic World. If you wanted to see a good movie with a unique approach to the given mayhem that is certainly going to ensue, that’s not what we have here. What Jurassic World fed us was essentially Deep Blue Sea meets any endless amounts of movies where the government is the bad guy because they had some ulterior motive and at some point forces themselves in to take “control.”
Don’t get me wrong… I’ll watch this movie a bunch of times after I post this review. I wont ever go see it again in theaters and I regret giving my money to see it on the big screen. The only thing I know I did right was sneak my flask in.
There’s some pretty big flaws in Jurassic World. I have a fairly large list right off the top of my head:
- After having already seen what can happen when giant carnivores break free in an isolated area of staff people and customers who have no quick escape options, with all the technology we have and that the movie clearly utilized, how was there never an immediate “kill switch” measure put in place to terminate an escaped dinosaur or all of the dinosaurs at once if it was a massive emergency? That literally eliminates the risk of a total rampage.
- The raptors have visually changed in every movie. It’s probably genetic tinkering, but why didn’t they give a little more love to the science of this movie? That’s a huge part of what makes it great and they only give you little nuggets about the new hybrid, Indominus Rex. Over 2 decades have passed… there has to be some serious advances worth mentioning.
- In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex was able to chase down a jeep maxing out its speed in high gear, but in Jurassic World, it could barely even gain on a woman running in 3-inch heels.
- In explaining why they created Indominus Rex, they state that they needed to create something bigger, smarter, scarier and something people haven’t seen or heard of before. Attempting to make the receipe mysterious then trying to pass off that they used raptor DNA in the mix was about as surprising as your mother wishing you a happy birthday on your birthday.
- How on Earth does a giant DINOSAUR theme park, let alone any kind of theme park, give complete and total control of those gyroscope spheres to the park-goers!?!?!? Sure there was GPS built into them, but there was no emergency override that brings the vehicles back to safety in case of emergency. What happened in the movie is exactly what would happen in real life. Someone isn’t going to listen.
- The idea of Jurassic Park 2 and 3 is actually based on more logic than Jurassic World. 2 and 3 became possible by elaborating on the Jurassic Park process and revealing there were 2 islands: 1 for the actual theme park and 1 for experimenting with creating and growing the dinosaurs until they got it right so that the perfected dinosaur and its genetic technique could be moved to the theme park island. There they can then duplicate more dino’s and use the process in the information side of the attraction. Why in this one did they ever manufacture a huge experimental carnivorous predator on the main island where their entire investment is housed, without having it somewhere else where they could study it and learn all about it and its capabilities??? “Hey we don’t know anything about this terrifying gigantic thing yet, but we’re thinking it’s totally ok to keep around thousands of people with no emergency mass protection. What could possibly go wrong???”
- Ignoring how wildly stupid of an idea it is that the government tried to train black-ops raptor soldiers, there was nothing in Jurassic World that led anyone to believe that the raptors were a reliable option or even capable of taking down Indominus Rex. They almost kill Chris Pratt – the alpha raptor whisperer, in the first act when the no-name worker falls into the cage. Not even mastered in an isolated environment, THEY LET THE RAPTORS LOOSE IN A PARK FULL OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS!!!
- The end of the movie is a little bit of a head-scratcher too. The T-Rex gets to still be the rock star with a little help from the raptor with a big heart and the mosasaurus. Well at the end of everything, you still have a T-Rex and a raptor loose in the park and that is somehow passed off as being totally ok. Alrighty then.
- There were some really bad CGI dino moments. That’s just a fact.
- Chris Pratt is the only raptor trainer on the face of the planet. His salary via the park and/or the government has to be astronomical. He 100% has to be filthy stinking Oprah rich. They have him living in a tiny bungalow on the island and to add some icing to the cake of weirdness, he apparently doesn’t like to take showers much. I’m open to hearing the writers explain that one.
Jurassic World was a C movie at best. There was almost no need to have any stars in the movie because there were no substantial characters to get to know. It was an excuse to show some more dinosaurs while utilizing exhausted plots and failed attempts at mind-blowing revelations. There was a lot of science, theory and philosophy built into the first movie that was pretty much completely abandoned and with it, the substance and soul of the franchise’s foundation.
I say skip seeing it in the theaters and catch it at home where you can crack as many loud jokes at the screen as you want.
