Mess of mashed up scripts drags down what would have been otherwise a fairly average summer blockbuster.

Rating: 2/10 (18 June 2015)

Jurassic World marks the triumphant return of the Jurassic Park series to the big screen after following a fourteen year absence, and mostly it just reminded me of why I haven't really been yearning for another Jurassic Park sequel in that time. Seeing the commercials I expected a big, dumb, fun movie. The dumb was plentiful, the big felt lacking, and the fun sparse. Sadly, watching Jurassic World seemed to disapprove the presumption I based my ticket purchase on, which was it must be a marked improvement over the previous two Jurassic Park movies.
Ignoring the many script problems, Jurassic World's biggest failing is it just didn't pack much wow factor for me. There's little craft in introducing the audience to what's both the film's and park's main attractions. With dinosaurs simply being there with no attempts to build tension and characters in the film constantly repeating how they're no longer exciting, which feels less like a joke and more like an admission of failure as even after everything inevitably goes wrong, there's still not much to get excited about.
Even the trailer's much hyped super beast, the Indominus rex, appears to us clearly in broad daylight with little fanfare as just a T-Rex with raptor arms painted a dull gray and devoid of any of the charm or personality of either dinosaur it's loosely based on. And even the reintroduction of those classic carnivores pales in comparison to their original reveals. There's no real build up like the famous slow unveil of the T-Rex from the original film, or the tension the Velociraptors created from quickly and methodically tracking its prey.
Other dinos fair no better as they're largely just window dressing in the background, beneath introductions or any significant screen time outside of generic hazards, such as the flying dinosaurs who escape the aviary, only to randomly attack and breaks things for a while before simply disappearing from the film. I'm not a fan of The Lost World or JP III, but the former did have an effective top down shot of the hapless humans being surrounded by raptors as they crept silently through the tall grass to their clueless prey, and the later featured a fairly memorable unveiling of the pteranodon as it sulked out of the fog while walking on its wing tips, giving it an oddly alien look.
The lone exception and one of Jurassic World's few saving graces is the mighty mosasaur, who even in the context of the film, inspires awe from the otherwise jaded older brother character, and whose incredible scope was featured prominently on one of the movie's posters. The mosasaur steals all three scenes it's in, ultimately upstaging the film's cast, human or otherwise, in its final appearance, and all with probably only a combined minute of screen time. By contrast, the Indominus rex never rises above something akin to an unmemorable boss from a video game, and whose intelligence and abilities amount to little more than it simply shrugging off attacks.
Weighing down the fairly unremarkable novelty factor is the story, which suffers from an overabundance of undeveloped ideas as well an unneeded focus on the script's weakest elements. There's some interesting potential in possible parallels between the park and Sea World or a crazy military character wanting to use dinosaurs to win wars. But a large portion of the first thirty minutes, as well more scenes in the later acts, are devoted to the park's business workings, establishing the little brother likes dinosaurs while the older one doesn't care, and how Bryce Dallas Howard's character doesn't pay enough attention to her nephews.
Howard's character in particular has an absurd amount of scenes focused on her subplot involving her sister's kids. With the boys' mother calling her at one point to literally cry about her neglect of them just in time for said boys to be stranded somewhere in the park so she can race to them in her pristine Mercedes and repeatedly stress to Chris Pratt just how hard she's going to rescue them. It's very reminiscent of the previous sequels insistence on using cheap family melodrama to pad for time, and fails to achieve the first film's more subdued approach, where Dr. Grant's dislike of children is covered in a few amusing scenes and is resolved by showing him tenderly holding Lex and Tim after the three had to endure hell together all movie.
A lot of plot points and characters are dropped or even completely forgotten, and sometimes even contradict each other. One plot "twist" is that the Indominus can communicate with raptors comes long after a scene where Chris Pratt tells the audience that animals raised in isolation don't develop social skills and can't communicate because they have nothing at all to communicate with or learn from. Then Pratt's commanding officer insists dinosaurs are the future of military missions, after attempting to use them in this fashion backfired hilariously and resulted in almost everything dead, except the one thing they were trying to kill.
Surprisingly the whole dinosaur whisperer thing is actually handled relatively well. The movie depicts him realistically as a trainer of dangerous animals, who develops a relationship and trust with the animals, but doesn't command them. Sadly, the only pay off for this is for the finale where the raptors' loyalty to Pratt turns them back to the human side of the force just in time for the big dumb dinosaur fight that makes up the climax.
It's not worth nitpicking Jurassic World to death though, because ultimately it's not a terrible film, just sub-par, which sadly puts it in the same place as The Lost World and Jurassic Park III for me. Unlike those movies, Jurassic World did have some fresh ideas mixed in, but it never seemed to realize how to exploit them and ultimately is just an inoffensive but forgettable summer popcorn flick.