Monstrous Mistakes Make JW a Complete Disaster for JP Fans

Rating: 2/10 (12 June 2015)

What a shame, and a waste. If you loved Jurassic Park, you could skip Colin Trevorrow's mishmash sequel/reboot. In fact, you should skip it. What made the first Jurassic Park (even the two sequels, really) work so well is that Steven Spielberg clearly decided not to make a monster movie. Genetically engineered or not, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were living animals, skillfully brought to life with personality and gait, pace and vigor. They were neither heroes nor villains. Get in front of them and you're in trouble, get behind them and watch in awe. They, like all wild animals, were dangerous if you didn't respect or understand them, but they were also entirely capable of all the other things living creatures do: resting, rearing young, hunting, etc.
The dinosaurs of Jurassic World? The film can't quite decide. Characters pay lip service to the idea that they are complex, living creatures, but on screen they're ultimately little more than toothy action figures, placed clumsily into scenes to bonk around gyrospheres, bite the bad guy or rumble against one another. They don't behave the way animals would behave, nothing they do confounds, intrigues or surprises. Instead, the little monsters snap and slash and are completely tamed by Trevorrow's limited vision, doing exactly what he and the scriptwriters want them to do -- exactly what the audience expects.
And that might have even been okay, if only it had been a good script. It's not. Nostalgic touches intended to link the film thematically to the franchise only serve to remind us that a better film was made out of this material over two decades ago. The relationship between characters is wafer thin and, even from the start, stale. There is absolutely no chemistry between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, at least partially because Howard is forced into a prehistorically sexist role as corporate yes woman/damsel in distress. And yet, even when she transforms into an action hero and rescues Pratt from a flying reptile attack, her nephews ignore her completely, championing Pratt as a "bad ass" and their chosen hero of the film. The villain of the show, played by a husky Vincent D'onofrio, is even less interesting, chewing out his motives for a dino military force in a constant stream of GI Joe-meets-Halliburton chatter. His exit is absurdly staged, and serves as a marker for when the film is going downhill at full speed.
I won't give away the ending. I don't need to -- everyone in the theater knew exactly what was coming. It's a wreck of CGI and pyrotechnics, insulting to the eye and ear. It clearly was meant to honor the titans of the original Jurassic Park, but it ends up being a poor kind of parody. I found myself wishing that all of the creatures involved could have just been put down, and met a more humane ending than the one they're left with: the prospect of more of this kind of franchise re-engineering to come.