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Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2015)

Jurassic Park from 1993 was a landmark film that mixed state of the art CGI into a rip roaring disaster film based on the novel by Michael Crichton where the author ripped off his earlier film, Westworld and director Steven Spielberg added some liberal helping from his monster smash, Jaws.
The sequels were lukewarm, even Spielberg who directed Jurassic Park 2 struggled to deliver a worthy follow up adventure. Universal Pictures plans for a fourth instalment was on hold for many years until Jurassic World was released to record breaking box office.
Here we have billionaire Industrialist Simon Masrani (Irfan Khan) running Jurassic World along the lines of John Hammond's legacy. To bring back dinosaurs to life in a safe environment and visitors to enjoy themselves. However to keep visitor numbers up the park needs to innovate bigger, newer and cooler creatures.
Dr Wu (B D Wong who presumably did not get eaten in the first Jurassic Park) returns as a more sinister scientist who has mixed and cooked up new DNA to create Indominus Rex, a dinosaur who is big, cunning and has some kind of superpowers. I can only think that Dr Wu got hold of some Predator DNA from a passing Arnold Schwarzenegger. How the creature escapes from her pen is reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs in the way she fooled her keepers.
Bryce Dallas Howard is workaholic executive Claire making sure the park runs efficiently and at a profit. She does not even have time to spare for her two nephews who are visiting the park and staying over with her for a few days.
When the IR goes loose in the park its up to Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire armed with high heels to come to the rescue of the kids in peril and the park in general. Owen we presume is a sometimes boyfriend of Claire, A navy seal and dinosaur trainer as he seems to have trained Velociraptors like trained dogs. The same Raptors we have been told in earlier films were ruthless, cunning and effective killing creatures. Now they follow orders leading to a ludicrous side plot of having some independent defence contractor hatching a plan to train Raptors for military use in third world countries.
I think Universal is confident that this film will not play in Afghanistan given a region of that country is specifically named in and where its people (already ravaged since 1979 by various wars) would be eaten by the said dinosaurs. I will take this opportunity to remind people I used to gain a dubious pleasure in watching Universal movies specifically to see how long would it be before the black guy died. In fact in the first Jurassic Park, Samuel Jackson did not last long!
Now the film is an enjoyable ride, finally we have a functioning theme park with dinosaurs and those scenes look great because part of the movie was actually filmed in a disused theme park. The CGI dinosaurs look good but its noticeable some of the climactic scenes were set in the dark.
Directed by relatively newbie Colin Trevorrow who has only previously made one notable indie film directs in an efficient manner but without any of the Spielberg flair (nothing like kids climbing over a fence to escape the dinosaurs but unbeknown to them, the electricity is coming back on.) Marvel Films have shown that these days almost any competent director can shoot a blockbuster action film, after all even that Shakespearean legend Kenneth Branagh has directed a blockbuster superhero film.
There is a big problem with the screenplay. Its purely a functional plot lacking in any imagination. It gets to it destination in almost robotic manner. There is hardly any characterisation we know nothing about our heroes except what we can gather from a few broad strokes. Compare this with how we get to know Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough's characters in Jurassic Park, even some of the minor characters were well drawn like Wayne Knight. Here zilch, they are merely to function as heroes or dinosaur fodder.
Apart from the preposterous plot about training Raptors for military purposes the whole IR going loose story is based on people entering its pen before determining from its implanted tracker device where the hell she is in the first place.
I think Universal is pleased that such a slipshod script has turned out to be a monster hit.