Absolutely Awful!

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2015)

From the moment I saw the trailer, I felt as though this movie was going to either be brilliant, and revitalise the series, or it would be horrendous. Sadly it was most certainly the latter of the two.
It has done what it set out to do though, and that was to make use of a hugely popular name to make as much money off it as possible. It does so at the cost of good sense and taste though.

There are too many tangential and irrelevant plot lines, that serve in no manner to further the main story. - The characters are hardly likable, and instead are a mash of cliché characteristics, which are put together so poorly that you're unable to form any kind of connection with them; and in my case, I found myself wanting many of the main characters to get eaten by the dinosaurs because of how frustratingly annoying they are. - The movie is half comprised of just a mash of scenes from the previous 3 movies. It's more like a game of guess which movie this scene is from, rather than watching anything remotely creative. - The main plot, besides being logically flawed, also never really builds to a climax. Rather it has many little moments which are supposed to create suspense or to be a twist, but fail to deliver any kind of real impact, mainly because they never developed the story or characters before jumping into the money making action scenes. - And lastly, the dinosaurs. Oh! My! God! Where do I begin? For starters, their portrayal of a lot of these dinosaurs is deplorable, not only because of unrealistic they are in design, but also in nature. There weren't any Pterodactyl species that would go hunting for human sized prey, and there certainly weren't any that had heads twice the size of their body. But perhaps even more annoyingly than that, they scripted the dinosaurs to behave almost as though they were characters in a kids show.

The only saving graces of this movie, were the special effects, and the soundtrack...and let's face it, neither of those are really original. The soundtracks we love have been used throughout the franchise all along, and the special effects, whilst quite grand, are no better than they were 22 years ago for the first movie. In my opinion, I think the first movie's special effects were actually better, because they relied less heavily on CGI. It's impressive to see a whole world created digitally, but no matter how good the renderings are, it'll never be as good as real life sequences.
As a whole, this movie was a monumental disappointment, although not really a surprise. It is however even more infuriating though, because the Jurassic Park series is one I have loved since I was a child, and now I'm seeing it get butchered as they chase those lucrative pay cheques. The fact they're reportedly going to be making a sequel to this is even more disheartening too; rubbing salt into the wound.
It gets a measly 3/10 from me.