A decent movie, but still not as good as the original

Rating: 5/10 (31 October 2015)

Jurassic Park was a movie that tried to be a lot of things. It wanted to be intelligent, it wanted to be heartfelt, it wanted to have a sense of mystery and wonder.
Jurassic World is not that kind of movie. Instead, it feels like it's a robot's understanding of what Jurassic Park's ideals are.
Nothing about this film feels natural. In the original Jurassic Park, you had great character moments, like Ellie and Alan's tension over wanting to have children, and how that evolves over the course of the movie. Jurassic World vaguely gestures at some tired, generic personality traits, and figures that's good enough. She's a hard-nosed business woman who learns to stop neglecting her family, he's a rugged modern cowboy with a heart of gold, and a pair of brothers bond despite their age difference. It's basic film 101 stuff, the sort of thing you'd see in a forgettable Hallmark Channel made-for-streaming movie, and nobody ever feels more human or nuanced than this.
The end result is something that feels processed, manufactured, and factory-made. Maybe not the worst thing in the world for a film, but not interesting or unique. Just the next thing off the assembly line.
That being said, at least the action in Jurassic World is pretty decent. The dinosaurs still look cool, and it makes the most of its two-hour run time to show you a lot of them. At the time of its release, this movie might've actually had the highest dinosaurs-per-minute ratio out of all of the Jurassic Park movies. The explosions are big and the creatures are bigger, and that part is still fun.
But I couldn't shake the overall feeling of cynicism. Even the movie itself spells it out: Dinosaurs, it claims, are boring now. The public just wants scarier thrills, and louder roars. Jurassic World delivers, but at the cost of its soul. It's ironic in a sense; it's almost as if the movie suffers the same failings that the real Jurassic Park itself would.
A movie that was made without anyone considering whether it should be made. Profit and franchise potential above all else. They stood on the shoulders of geniuses just so they could slap it on a plastic lunch box. A product, nothing more.
I don't regret having seen Jurassic World, and I don't hate it. But Jurassic Park was a movie I could watch over and over again, and love every single time I saw it.
Jurassic World is not a movie I have any immediate attachment to, or desire to re-watch any time soon. It exists, and it was not terrible. That's about the best endorsement I can give it.