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Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2015)

I really wanted to like this movie. I was only a wee lad when the first Jurassic Park came out ( OK, a teenage wee lad, but still ). The only live action dinosaurs I had ever seen were the rubbery land of the lost style claymation ones, so a film with realistic giant lizards just blew my mind. With each subsequent film though, I watched with increasing disappointment as they seemed to run out of ideas and milked the concept dry. After Jurassic Park III came out in 2001 a pale imitation of the original, it seemed as though the franchise had finally burned itself out and I was fine with that.
Still, a decade and a half later when they announced a new Jurassic movie I found myself getting excited despite my previous misgivings. It seemed as though they had found a way to revitalize the concept; instead of a constant parade of rich idiots trying and failing to harness the power of an extinct world, we instead got to witness a Jurassic World theme park fully realized. Disney, but with dinosaurs. And with Chris Pratt as the leading man, having just starred in the Guardians movie as a surprisingly good action hero, I was really looking forward to seeing him as a no-nonsense dino wrangler.
And to be fair, he is one of the things the movie gets right. The Jurassic movies have always had a certain "fall to your knees before mother nature" flavor of preachiness to them, one that screeched to a crescendo with Vince Vaughn's Van Owen character in The Lost World. And Pratt's character Owen has that same undertone, but delivered in a much more balanced and palatable format that makes its point without being overbearing. Add to that fourteen years of improvements in CGI that makes dinosaurs so realistic you can almost believe they are out there somewhere and it seems like a winning combination. Seriously, even the first Jurassic Park, as groundbreaking as it was, had moments where you could see through the illusion. Not so here. The dinosaurs in JW are so life-like that you pretty much never get pulled out of the story by the visuals. If I was an actor, I would be seriously concerned about where these capabilities will be in another decade or two.
But unfortunately, this brings us to the end of what JW did right. There are a lot of little things that annoyed me in the film, but really it boils down to two big things. The first is just that the entire thing is not believable. I don't mean impossible; with many movies you have something that would make the story impossible in the real world. A McGuffin, if you will. You start with the real universe, the one you and I live in, and you add something to it. Maybe it's faster than light spaceships, or time travel, or maybe it's a shockingly dangerous school to teach children magic. As a viewer you can suspend disbelief for whatever it is and just enjoy the story. What is important is that after you have made your changes to the universe your story from that point on has to be consistent with the rules you have established; characters have to behave in a way that is logically consistent with the universe you have created or the audience will feel like you are manipulating them.
So if you have created a world that is just like ours except that there are hordes of flesh eating zombies all around, and then have a character that lives in that world get killed while they chill in a backyard hammock, singing at the top of their lungs, eyes closed listening to their IPod, it will tick people off *because nobody who lived in that world would ever do that*. You know, unless they were suicidal or something. That's what I mean about believable.
And this is where JW breaks down in a big way. Obviously they need for something to go wrong so that the dinosaurs can break loose and create mayhem, but they choose to do it in a way that is completely inconsistent with how anyone in that world would actually behave. They have them make decisions that are so obscenely stupid that you almost find yourself hoping they will get eaten just as punishment for being so cartoonishly arrogant and foolhardy. And then three quarters of the way through the movie they double down on the gambit and do it again! It shatters the illusion. I'm not going to go into details because I don't want to post spoilers, but trust me; you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.
The second major problem I had with the movie is about how females are portrayed in it. The friend I went to see the movie with is a woman, and she was kind of upset by the heavy 'damsel in distress' theme of the movies only major female character, who is one of the aforementioned characters making obnoxiously stupid decisions during the film. Her role seems to primarily be to put thousands of people in mortal danger and then to run around screaming and cowering behind Pratt. And I mean really, we live in a post-Katniss world now people. She took down a fascist regime with just a bow and arrow; a woman can kick *ss and melt the heart, I think. Do we really need to cling to this saved by the big strong man theme anymore?
Anyway, the last thing I'll mention is that I saw the film in IMAX 3D and I have to say that it didn't add much to the experience. A few cool helicopter scenes, but that was about all. If you are going to see it, stick with the standard viewing and save a few bucks.