Spoiler
I've been a Jurassic Park fan since I was a kid. Michael Crichton's novel was the first chapter book I read that I finished, and I instantly fell in love with the series. The movies are a big part of my life and has inspired my love for science fiction and film. Jurassic Park 3 was the last Jurassic Park film to come out and that was a bad way to go, so the long awaited Jurassic Park 4 became sort of an obsession. People have waited years and have followed the film's rich production history, filled with hilariously bad or deemly interesting concepts (some of which actually ended up in this new one), and I cannot think of any other film that was in development hell for so long that continued to be posted around the internet and continue to give fans hope or disappointment. So as a Jurassic Park fan, Jurassic World was highly anticipated.
Originally, I thought the basic idea of the film was completely wrong. A new park felt repetitious, they'd done in two of the three sequels already and I thought they needed to move on. But I eventually realized it had been a long time for some fans, and seeing the 'what if the park was populated' overwhelmingly overruled any qualms I had with it. It was the right decision. I hated the concept of the Jurassic Park series including something like the Indomnious Rex, but as the movie's production went on I realized that it was going to be done tastefully. The trained raptors had me initially skeptical but I thought they were going to pull that off. So by the time I watched it, I thought they had the full concept down and I knew none of that was going to be the issue. The only qualm I held to the very end was the fact that the new Jurassic World took place on Isla Nublar, which seemed to have implied to be either bombed or raided until there were no more dinosaurs left by the second film. However while watching it, there were no dinosaurs implied to be living from the old days of the park except for the Rex (who could have survived, along with a few other dinosaurs, long enough for Masrani to buy the island or it could have at some point been moved to Sorna.) It's also entirely possible that InGen did nothing to the animals and that during the second film, there was some negotiations between Masrani and InGen and Peter Ludlow, the antagonist of The Lost World, only said that they had 'deconstructed' the island so he could keep it a secret. Whatever the details of it are, it doesn't seem like anything contradicts it. So in my eyes, Jurassic World is very much a fourth film and not a reboot that takes the last two out of canon.
So, as I said, the movie's premise sounded fun to me, and I was ready to watch it. However, the film has some issues and after watching it twice, I think I can say I know where the movie's problems lay. The Jurassic Park series has always been comical and to some extent cartoony, but with this film it felt too cartoony at times. Almost comic book-ish. To be honest, it felt like a Marvel film at times. Which is fine, but it did go overboard with the humor, cheese, and lack of realism in moments. But overall it did not have a big enough impact on me as I was expecting. The film tries it's hardest to capture the tone and feel of the original movies and I think it mostly does, even if there were a few jokes that missed the mark for me ('Yeah definitely him!' and 'sorry I have a boyfriend' for example) and that the film fluctuations from a dark tone to a light tone very suddenly (something that the original films are guilty of, but not to the same extent as this film). Personally, I had wished that this movie take on the tone of the Planet of the Apes reboot series and 2014's Godzilla. I had always envisioned the films getting darker, not lighter. And unfortunately I feel jumping on the lighthearted Marvel-esque bandwagon is the easiest way to go. I'm not going to consider that a flaw in the film, but I do think there were better ways to do it.
I thought I would have a problem with the acting, but for the most part I didn't. Pratt did a great job, better than I thought. He's written as a simple rough and tough guy, simple but good. He doesn't overact in a classic Harrison Ford style. I know people are tired of hearing it, but Pratt does make a good Neo-Harrison Ford and I'd watch as Indiana Jones for sure. Bryce Dallas Howard is okay, she acts the way her character is written, and people have claimed that her acting was wooden and I think it's because she her character has a lot of humor (not that she makes jokes, but that she's a cartoonish depiction of a female scientist who's too busy for a family and is a bit 'prissy') and so when you're playing that kind of character, a certain amount ham and cheese in that performance helps. The one actor who didn't like was, of course, Ty Simpkins, who had a few cringe worthy moments of bad acting. The kid's bad by kid actor standards and it's him that makes some parts of the movie a groan. But, one child actor doesn't ruin the movie for me.
The role of the kids in the movie wasn't that bad either. I know a lot of people seem to be annoyed, but I thought the scenes were watchable. What makes kids in movies a drag is when they have no reason to be there, like in the second film. In this movie, the kids are there for a reason and they are made a central plot point which is exactly what they needed to do. I actually wished that they were lost in the jungle for a bit longer, because I would have loved to see a movie of just those kids exploring the ruins of the old park. Maybe that's more so because of ruined park than the kids, and I felt it was a lot of lost potential to put it in the movie for just a small amount of time.
There does seem to be a few plot points in the movie that should have been explained further or brought up again later but weren't, mainly (as I said above) the ruins and the I Rex's ability to camouflage. I'm not sure why they were introduced if they were only going to be seen for a few seconds. There were a couple references to the Dilophosaurus and it feels as if they intended to make a scene with the Dilophosaurus but it was pulled at some point. We see Jimmy Fallon talk about them and we see it later in the film as a hologram. What I find interesting is that they'd go through the trouble of making a CGI model for the Dilophosaurus and only use it for a hologram. I feel they added that scene in the movie because the other scene was cut and they didn't want to the cheat the audience. I do not think this movie was overplotted though, I've seen that word used to describe this movie and I find it hilarious. People have said that the parent's of the kid's divorcing was an unnecessary plotpoint, but I didn't see it as a plotpoint, just some added backstory so we know that the kids generally aren't happy and that something is wrong with the happy family, but at the end it comes together because both mom and dad, forgetting about their divorce, care nothing more than to see their kids after traumatic event. It was fine, and they even did something similar in the first two films. The fact that the kids are somehow car experts should have also been set up earlier in the film.
Dialogue didn't feel as bad as people have made it out to be. There were actually quite a few lines I liked (Larry alluding to the chaos theory, Wu explaining that the dinosaurs aren't actually what the dinosaurs look like, the speech Hoskins makes about using raptors as weapons.) They felt within the realm of Jurassic Park's dialogue. The moments the dialogue didn't work was when they tried to be funny but it didn't work. Nothing dialogue wise is bad, and I don't really understand why people have had a hard time with it.
All the characters are written reasonably as well. None of them are amazing well written Walter Whites here, but they don't really need that. The series has never been known for amazing characters except for Ian Malcolm, and development for characters are mostly nonexistent in these kinds of movies. So the characters are acceptable and Pratt's character is sort of a staple character that's hard to hate. Howard's character could have used some more work, could have had a bit more to do than just let loose a Tyrannosaurus instead of staying with her two nephews.
By the way, letting loose the Tyrannosaurus was a hilariously bad idea to me. There is this big dinosaurs mutant that could kill your and your nephews at any moment, and you choose to leave them and run away (which, if she was able to run away to get that Rex, they they were all able to run away and find safety), to set another giant animal on the loose. It's a risky idea that would have only worked in the context of this movie, and all because the nephew said 'not enough teeth' The fight scene at the end was cool and all though, up until the Mosasaurus came. My suspension of disbelief of seeing a raptor side with a Rex to fight the bad guy was already on the edge, and to see the Mosasaur coincidentally in that area and deciding that it would bother those two large animals boggles my mind a bit. It goes into what I was saying earlier, there are moments in the film where it gets too ridiculous. Not so ridiculous that it makes the whole movie ridiculous, but it was too silly for my taste.
Claire letting loose the Rex wasn't the worst bad decision making of the film, that goes to Masrani deciding that he, who as the film shows was humorously bad at flying, fly the helicopter filled with weapons and soldiers to take down a very important danger that could hurt a lot of people. Could a more experienced pilot have avoided the Pterosaurs? Not only was it a stupid mistake on Masrani's part, but it made the tone confusing. His bad piloting skills was a joke, and then he's crashing. It's hard not to unintentionally laugh a little in my head.
There were two other really bad aspects as well. The first one was the two instances where a cell phone and a walkie talkie stopped working for absolutely no reason other than plot convenience. That's utterly unforgivable to me and was simply just lazy writing. The other thing is the product placement, which worked during the scenes in the main center of the park, but did not work when Claire was driving the Mercedes around and Chris Pratt drinking Coca Cola like it was a TV commercial. Now, they made a joke about it during the film with, talking about letting the companies name the creatures, but joking about it like that doesn't make it acceptable. This film may have had more product placement than any film this year, and I wouldn't even be surprised if it beat Transformers: Extinction. I know Trevorrow tried to say that it was used to further the anti-corporate message, but I don't completely buy it. That Mercedes car was used a bit too much, or at least used in the wrong way. But like I said, the moments in the park's center worked fine and I would have even allowed it to go further in those areas, but they were most prominent elsewhere.
The movie wasn't without it's little moments of genius though. There were a lot of tiny references and homages to original three that were done tastefully and were subtle, making it neat. It copies cinematic shots at times, which is a nice subconscious addition to make it seem more fitting with the other films (the best being the destruction of the Spinosaurus skeleton, the worst being Hoskin creating the yell that Dennis Nedry makes when he dies). There are some nice touches like the moment where Grady reaches out his hand to help Claire down the steps, but her hurriedly walking past him. It felt very spielbergian. There was also nice shot of the Hoskin grunt in the helicopter shooting down the Dimorphodon. The scene where the older kid ignores the Tyrannosaurus Rex eating the goat to answer a phone call was good as well (and, from my understanding, was part of the initial pitch that director Colin Trevorrow gave) And, of course, the beginning in which shows a giant foot which pans into the foot of a small bird. I want to say that those little moments had to have come from Spielberg or Frank Marshall because they felt like classic filmmaking.
The film's pacing was very good at first, I thought the scenes before the I Rex escaped were great. You felt this good sense of wonder and you really got the sense that this was a theme park. It's not exactly the same kind of wonder as the first film though, because in the first film there was this sort of primal wonder involving the fascination of dinosaurs. This felt different, like the wonder of Disneyland. Maybe that was the intention though. But anyway, the pacing eventually turns too fast and I really thought that there should have been a night scene after the raptor chase that was just calm. There needs to a be scene like in the first Jurassic Park where they find a tree and just sleep in it for awhile, and then they run into the Brachiosaurus. There needed to be a little bit of the return of the wonder during that time. The film in general felt too short as well, but not in such a way that I was unsatisfied.
Visual effects were fine. None of it was state of the art and it'll look goofy in five years, but it's not different than most visual effects these days. I think what gets people going about it was that there really hasn't been many movies like Jurassic Park since Peter Jackson's King Kong. It's not like Transformers or any these superhero movies, filled with CGI robots and side grunts, and it's not like Godzilla where there is only one or two CGI creatures. This was a movie with a large amount of CGI animals and when you've got that, it's going to look different to you. But at the end of the day the visual effects were fine. I only had an issue during one scene, and that was when the overweight employee was killed by the I Rex near the beginning, the shadowing was very odd (that guy's comical face also didn't help improve the scene). I am, however, upset that there was only one animatronic that I could see. I thought they had built an animatronic of the I Rex head, but I couldn't see it used anywhere. The Raptor heads, when in the muzzles, may have been partially practical. But overall I am disappointed of the lack of practical dinosaurs. I wouldn't be if they hadn't promised it first though.
What really helps improve this movie a lot is the soundtrack. Michael Giacchino does a very good job making the Jurassic Park music. It feels like it fits in with the other soundtracks without continuously reusing the classic themes. It ties everything together and solidifies it as Jurassic Park film. The soundtrack doesn't compare to the original film's soundtrack or The Lost World's soundtrack, but those are hard to beat.
I quite liked the setup and it seems to imply that Wu will be the villain of the next one in some capacity (I also simply just liked that Wu returned to the series in general). It seems that Hoskins and Wu created the I Rex as a weapon, and that the next film will involve dinosaur hybrids as bioweapons. My fear is that it's just going to end up being ridiculous. Did anyone else catch the Stegoceratops on the computer screen? It's not a direction I want the series to go. But I'm excited nonetheless.
This film also has a meaning behind it, a sort of subtext, which is nice. From what I got, this film is almost a satire on the film series itself. It's been a long time since the last one was out, and now people today don't really pay much attention to the original Jurassic Park. Some of the younger generation simply don't like it. So, in real life, when deciding how to solve this for a fourth Jurassic Park movie, they came up with the I Rexo to parallel it the film with real life, they came up with the idea of the I Rex being used to up the wow factor at park where everyone is getting bored of dinosaurs. It was a great way to approach it and the way it. And before you think I'm bullshitting, this is coming from Chris Pratt who said this awhile ago during the film's production.
Overall, this is a respectable sequel that I think is the third best in the franchise. The best way to sum it up is that they went too far in a few places, but only a few. At the very least it's good popcorn fun, which is exactly what the other three were.
Jurassic World- 7/10
