Really Dumb, Not That Pretty

Rating: 5/10 (18 July 2016)

The worst kind of dumb movie - one that pretends to be smart but in a subtle way like it's endearing or something. Except this movie really and truly is stupid. There's a certain kind of suspension of disbelief in any movie, especially one about rampaging dinosaurs. But at a certain point, too many suspensions kills the movie. It's not asking once or twice for dramatic effect, it's literally every twist and turn.
The main premise is simply inane. Apparently, 10 years after the first Jurassic Park was by all accounts an unmitigated disaster, and then a T-Rex destroyed a good chunk of San Diego, people just kind of forget about all that and open a park anyway and customers and lawyers and everyone else doesn't care anymore. Maybe that's smart though? Maybe the movie is asking whether anything is sacred when a quick buck can be made?
Also, people are bored of dinosaurs already. The park has been open for 10 years and there's only one in the entire world with a limited amount of people being given access so they decide to create a new dinosaur. Not some new, cool looking dinosaur, just a more dangerous one because people really like to watch meat get torn up on hooks. But maybe this is smart too? This is a self-reflexive movie commenting on its own status in the summer blockbuster marketplace, where dinosaurs aren't scary or amazing enough anymore - people want more and bigger and louder and with more superheroes! Maybe this is smart too?
You'd be hard pressed to find any more evidence throughout the movie. Maybe that scene of the older kid staring at girls while a T- Rex eats a sheep in the background (wow, meta) except maybe also that's his character development and he just likes girls and he's maturing and well I don't know. He likes the Mosasaurus that jumps out of the water to eat a shark, apparently that's better than a T-Rex because it's newer and differenter (though we are given no inclination that either of these two have ever been here before). Which would seem to undermine the entire movie because it's entire existence is based on homage to the original films. So what is it? A new movie for old fans full of service, or new fans who are jaded of summer blockbusters. Who knows?
Velociraptors are getting dumber but like in a really smart way. Remember how we watched them open door handles, work together, plot and plan, set traps, protect their young? Now they listen to humans. Like dogs. You know how dogs are really smart for sitting when they get a treat? Yeah, Velociraptors can respond to Pavlovian triggers too. Pretty amazing. In fact, they're so smart that when they meet the rampaging Indominus Rex they immediately abandon their Pavlovian loyalty to Chris Pratt and start following it because....I don't know. Somehow they blindly listen to a dinosaur that they have never met before and in which there is no genetic blueprint for ever having existed before. But they know it's one of them. Then they switch sides again at the end because he bad.
All the dinosaurs look like they did in the original movies even though scientific advances over the last two decades have shown where we were wrong. Some dinosaurs had feathers, Velociraptors could maybe fly a bit with wing-like arms. There are actually raptors that resemble the fictional big ones in these movies (Utahraptors) but you won't find that stuff here. A smart choice, writing into the movie that people want the dinosaurs they are familiar with (you know the ones from the original movies, the movies that don't exist in this world because they were real life, where you know they got the dinosaurs wrong and everyone who saw them mostly died...or whatever).
So nice, they genetically modified them to look different. Makes sense. Except people are jaded by these old dinos right? They only want new ones like the Mosasaurus? So why make the old ones when people want new ones? Why not make all the dinosaurs look more realistic, or create new ones not yet seen in the movies so that they are new and people aren't jaded and then there would be no need for Indominus Rex. This one simple subplot completely undermines another one. It can't decide what people are. Jaded and uneasily impressed, or just nostalgic rubes who can't process anything new?
Much like the subplots involving the kid's parent's divorce and the British woman watching the kids who does nothing the whole movie and then gets mercilessly killed for about three minutes straight while the real bad guy in the movie dies off screen in about three seconds. Because the Mosasaurus had to be shown again. So people would remember by the finale. When the epic Indominus Rex vs T-Rex battle is about to conclude (a moment that wants to be so cool, yet Jurassic Park III had the good sense to put this 15 minutes into the movie. Remember that? JP3 had the Spinosaurus murder a T- Rex to establish where it was on the food chain, to raise the stakes for the rest of the movie. A smart move, in a smart dumb movie.)
Here they don't even have a Spinosaurus, they have a T-Rex who gets killed and then Mosasaurus leaps up and eats everyone. Right up onto the main paths that customers use and where all the shops are. Apparently there are no fences or protection there against it. It could have, all this time, for the entirety of this park's existence have jumped up and started eating people no problem. What?!