Exciting, and more consistently entertaining than the original, though less subtle

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2015)

Jurassic Park was a terrific movie once it got going, but people comparing it with the Jurassic World reboot seem to have forgotten the tedious, soap-operish story that dragged down the original. JP followed a pattern I always associate with The Birds; throw us into the tedious entanglements of uninteresting people until we're almost asleep, then start the mayhem.
There is very little soap opera in Jurassic World, and most of that comes in brief spurts later in the movie. The film begins by establishing how incredibly cool Jurassic World actually is, with charming scenes at a dinosaur petting zoo and a dramatic giant-fish feeding that made me feel like I would really, really like to go there. One also sees where things are going to go awry, although the score never telegraphs those moments, sounding perpetually chipper even when you're thinking, that's not going to turn out well.
While JW doesn't subject viewers to the degree of pure tedium that JP did, it's still a movie that doesn't really take off until things go wrong. Once they do, the movie becomes a series of big, wild dinosaur disasters that keep getting bigger as more and more people die.
While this is exciting, by the end it feels as though the movie is a bit too focused on making things big. JW has a lot of excitement, but the original JP had more suspense. JP was a movie that understood waiting for the right moment; JW believes the moment is RIGHT NOW.
There's also some sort of story with Chris Pratt as the guy with sense and a bunch of other people without any, including a greedy owner, a military guy whose ideas are so ridiculously poorly thought out that even a cartoon villain would say, "maybe you should take a minute to think this through," and an executive who gets to run around the jungle in high heels. Her character has been called sexist, and I can see why, but I would say that this comes as much out of a lazy reliance on character clichés than anything else. But what I like about this movie over JP is that it has far less interest in its characters. It knows that all anyone cares about are the dinosaurs, and it delivers those beautifully.