Slick and soulless

Rating: 4/10 (23 September 2016)

The most remarkable accomplishment of "Jurassic World" is demonstrating that it is possible for Chris Pratt to be a boring screen presence. Its most remarkable aspect, in general, is illustrating how challenging these franchise reboots can be. We have had a number of decent-to-excellent reboots in recent years -- here's a healthy reminder of how leaden they can be when things go wrong.
There are a few good ideas buried in the film, especially the soft critique of corporate hegemony and its brand-everything mindset. It tries to have its cake and eat it too by incorporating the significant amount of product placement into this critique, thus attempting to make a virtue of necessity while it cashes the checks. This might have had more resonance if the film wasn't so soulless. The design of the world -- no longer just a park -- is a nicely conceived update of the original that allows for both visually stylish enhancements, like all the holographic projections, and plenty of visual callbacks to the original. Unfortunately, the latter just serve as several well- placed reminders of how much better "Jurassic Park" was. Jack Johnson's character, a coordinator in the central control room whose name I've already forgotten because he's so uninteresting, wears a t-shirt from the original park he bought on e-Bay and says how much he respects its legitimacy. This is another example of the film trying to insulate itself from obvious critiques. As with the product placement scheme, it doesn't really work as well as the filmmakers seem to think it does.
One of the worst aspects of "Jurassic World" is that it takes the least appealing parts of "Jurassic Park" and runs with them, especially the sentimentalizing and anthropomorphizing of the dinosaurs. "Park" was guilty of this too, at least compared to the harder-edged, more clear-eyed novel by Michael Crichton from which it was adapted, but only around the edges and only in service of broadening the film's appeal in an all-ages direction. "World" goes whole hog in this direction, despite regular monologues and commentary from Pratt's Owen Grady, who is supposedly training raptors, that these are animals and should be respected as animals - - commentary the film repeatedly undercuts by depicting the dinosaurs as military strategists. The lack of faith the film has in its own "assets," as Bryce Dallas Howard's corporate functionary who runs the park keeps calling the creatures, is the most depressing and cynical aspect of this whole enterprise, and left me wondering why I went to see a movie that trades on the wonder of dinosaurs while refusing to believe that actual dinosaurs would be wonderful.