The Park Should Have Stayed Closed...

Rating: 1/10 (12 June 2015)

Jurassic World was truly one of the worst films I have seen in my 25 years of life, and millions of minutes of film has crossed my eyes. The acting was wooden, the characters at best forgettable and at worst annoying, and the plot line had the unique blend of idiocy and implausibility now usually reserved for the Land Before Time franchise. (WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS) We begin with the story of Zack and Gray, who go to the now famous theme park Jurassic World to visit their aunt. It's never actually explained how their American middle-class parents actually afford two first class plane tickets to Costa Rica just so their kids can see their aunt. It's just assumed it's on the absentee aunt's bill. Gray is your typical kid, bouncing like a madman from one ridiculous event to the next. JW is a gigantic theme park consuming most of Isla Nublar, where JP was created. This multi-billion dollar facility boasts interactive holograms of each dinosaur species in the park, a research laboratory that made this aspiring zoologist weak at the knees, and a thriving population of both herbivores and carnivores. There is a petting zoo where kids can ride baby trikes and apatasauri, a SeaWorld-like arena where a Mosasaur is spoon-fed great white sharks, and giant hamster balls where visitors can wheel themselves through a gigantic field of herbivores. Zack gleefully informs us that JW has over a dozen herbivore species and roughly 10 carnivore species. Unfortunately, we never get to see most of these species during the pair's jog through the park. We witness at most 5 herbivores (Triceratops, Apatasaurus, Gallimimus, Parasaurolophus, and Anklyosaurus are the ones I can recall) and 5 carnivore species including the Indominus Rex (Pteranodons, Dimorphodons, I.D., Tyrannosaurus, and Velociraptor). It is never explained HOW InGen, the infamous soulless corporation that refuses to learn from its mistakes, got running again after the incident in San Francisco. It's stated that the original JP event happened twenty years ago, which meant that Jurassic World must have started construction only a year or two after JP: III. It is not mentioned how they got control of the island (we saw how well a dying company's last ditch effort worked in The Lost World), or how they even got funding. Their shareholders, realistically, dumped them like so much cow dung after JPand if they hadn't then, they would have after The Lost World. The company should have been going through a terrific melt-down of assets during JP: III, and be nonexistent by Jurassic World. Even with the Marani corporation bailing them out, the public should have avoided any new dinosaur theme park like the plague. So we're left in wonderment as to how this highly advanced, popular theme park Jurassic World was even constructed. In roughly 16 years, the public has completely forgotten the dangerous islands and now treats the viewing of a Stegosaurus akin to seeing an elephant in a zoo. Given the public's long memory of even a single animal incident such as Steve Irwin's death, this is extremely difficult to believe and we are given no explanation as to how this came about. It simply is. Enter a wooden Chris Pratt, an ex-Marine who inexplicably has a rather advanced view on animal behavior. He treats 4 raptors, named Delta, Charlie, Echo, and Blue, like large dogs. He tells them to "stop it", and wags his finger at their snapping and snarling like we would at a disobedient horse. These raptors are quite possibly the worst design in JP history. The CGI looks cartoonish instead of terrifying, and the raptors don't move or act the same way we've become accustomed to. They don't bob their heads like birds, they don't raise their tails high up in the air due to bird hips, they're more muscular rather than slender and fast with beefy heads and necks, and they parrot sound effects that are obviously cannibalized from the other films. While this last is true of the other Jurassic Park films, it stuck out like a sore thumb in Jurassic World. Noises we've come to associate with attacks, such as the "scream", are thrown in casually as background noise. The overall effect cheapened animals that have been the cornerstone to Jurassic Park, and made me utterly unafraid of them. Of course an "incident" is thrown in with a feeding employee yanked into the cage after Chris Pratt's character finishes training them, but it feels wooden and over-the-top. Cheap jokes are thrown in at the hapless new employee's expense after our hero saves him from his 4 pet raptors. Enter easily the most boring human villain on the planet, a fat InGen employee named Hoskins who is the typical Guns, God, and America patriot. He wants to train the raptors to attack America's enemies and sell them to the US Armynevermind that said army was called in at least 2 of the 3 JP films to extract desperate survivors of Isla Nublar and might have a long memory concerning half-mad jungle occupants. Chris Pratt is against this, and emphasizes that the raptors are wild animals and cannot be trusted as suchbefore he affectionately pets a snarling raptor with its head encased in a metal restraining device. It would have been a lovely time to use the gorgeous animatronics JP is known forbut instead we get Pratt awkwardly rubbing his hands over a wiggy CGI insert. In fact, there is only one obvious animatronic dinosaur in this film.a dying Apatosaurus gently petted and sobbed over as it dies of wound inflicted by the escaped Indominus Rex (which looks like a crocodile mated with a baryonyx and was the epitome of disappointing). The hapless Apatosaurus ends up looking like a pool toy, with none of the exquisite detail previously handled by the gods of animatronicsthe Jim Henson company. This movie was worse than the infamously-bad Jurassic Park 3. It was worse than Gigli. Save your money.