If we have Raptors...

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2015)

It was clear from the start that 'Jurassic World' was going to be all about dinosaur battle - plenty of effects and little story -, but I was irritated how openly the makers refused to pay attention to the human characters. Owen (Chris Pratt) likes motorbikes and educating Raptors. He once had a date with Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard). That's about all we get to know for the hero's 'background story' before they start running from the dinosaurs. Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) is the opponent of the current boss of the park, Masrani (Irrfan Khan), but their past is hardly explained. They are just there to have a good boss and a bad boss who don't agree on how they run the Jurassic World. In the first 'Jurassic Park', the chaos theory of Dr Malcolm really had a philosophy behind it, and he tried to convince Hammond with reasons and logic, but this kind of depth was lost during the sequels. If we have Raptors, let them out and see what happens - that's the end of the line.
There is a scene when one of the boys tells his brother he is afraid their parents are going to get divorced. And when they meet their parents later - no questions asked, happy family. It seems that some background story about the family was going to be developed here in one of the probably many screenplay versions (no less than 6 writers are credited), but then dropped and forgotten at some point. Did Mum and Dad really intend a divorce, but the fear for their kids' lives brought them back together? This is the kind of thing that breathes life into cardboard characters - alas, the introduction of the possible divorce was leading nowhere, it looks like something was cut from the script here. And this is a typical example that nobody cared about the human characters, they come from nowhere and go nowhere, also in the unlikely love story that begins in a laughable scene when Claire rolls up her sleeves to impress Owen.
Only the dinosaurs matter, but by the time of part 4 of the saga, the ambition to show creatures as real as possible has also been dropped. Sometimes the creatures' size is doubled to make them more impressive (Mosasaurus), or they are explained as genetic experiments right away (Indominus Rex).
JW is a great roller-coaster ride, but surely not satisfactory in the story telling department. It was easy to see why they need not hire brilliant actors anymore, but spend twice as much money on effects instead.