Depressingly Bad

Rating: 4/10 (14 June 2015)

There's a scene in Jurassic World where Bryce Dallas Howard's character discusses why it's necessary for the titular theme park to create bigger, better, new dinosaurs to keep customers interested, as the public has by now gotten bored with "just" the regular dinosaurs. Ironically, this is a perfect metaphor for the franchise itself – it takes more than just a CGI T-Rex to get a "wow" out of audiences now-a- days, and this fourth Jurassic installment seems to acknowledge this, even though it fails to do anything spectacular or different enough to recapture even a sliver of the original's awe factor.
Jurassic Park may have been my first cinematic love, so it was only natural for me to be excited about Jurassic World when it was announced. Although skeptical about certain aspects of the film's production, I held out hope that it would be made with care enough to at least elevate it above the previous two sequels. Unfortunately, this is the first major disappointment of the summer; it's little more than a dumb, run-of-the-mill schlock machine, and has more in common with a SyFy Channel Original than a Spielbergian blockbuster.
I knew from merely the first ten minutes that this was going to be a downhill ride. Incessant product placement, rushed storytelling and bad acting abounding, Jurassic World's utterly forgettable characters and cringe worthy script only remind us what a masterclass in narrative structure and suspense building the original film was. And yes, even this latest installment's visual effects fail to impress – the CGI is average and it really doesn't help that all this has simply been done before, much better.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are both good actors, but the material they're given to work with is abysmal. The character models are cliché and sexist, and the romance feels no less than revoltingly shoe-horned in. After the brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road so refreshingly raised the bar and upset the balance concerning what is expected from a big budget action flick, the many sins of Jurassic World seem all the more lazy and unforgivable. Oh, and the cinematography, lighting and editing give the film the look of a commercial for the entire runtime, which it basically is anyway due to the shameless, nonstop product placement.
Marginally better than Jurassic Park 3, but not even deserving association with Spielberg's original masterpiece, Jurassic World's finale of battling 'Rexes is the sole moment in the film in which I felt even remotely on-board. And even this battle is in many ways an inferior reenactment of the climax of last year's Godzilla, which was a far more successful attempt at a Spielbergian monster movie. Jurassic World is depressingly bad; I can't really recommend it on any basis.