A big part of what made the original Jurassic Park work so well and that makes it so memorable is the sense of wonder that comes from experiencing something truly incredible for the first time. In an in-movie sense, that wonder came from the characters being among the first human beings to ever lay eyes on real, living dinosaurs. For the audience, the wonder came from seeing CG special effects that brought these dinosaurs to life on the big screen in a seamless, realistic way for the first time ever. The visuals of the first Jurassic Park still look great even this many years later.
Seeing something incredible again isn’t as memorable as seeing something incredible for the first time, however, so the Jurassic Park sequels each experienced diminishing returns upon release. One might even argue that, despite its success, Jurassic Park was exactly the kind of movie that should never have had a sequel, and now that the franchise is seeing a reboot with director Colin Trevorrow’s (Safety Not Guaranteed) Jurassic World, those problems have multiplied to the point where the characters in the film even have to address them. In this world, seeing dinosaurs has become old hat and boring, much like seeing impossible things brought to life on the big screen via CG effects has to movie fans in our world, so the answer that the film offers up is that it’s become necessary to create a dinosaur that’s bigger, scarier, and more impressive in order to capture people’s imaginations. The problem with that strategy in our world is that, after seeing entire cities destroyed on film countless times over the last decade, the visuals in these summer movies can no longer be made any bigger, scarier, or more impressive, so Jurassic World, as it’s crafted, really has no reason to exist. Instead of solving this franchise’s irrelevance problem by making something bigger, they should have attacked it by making something completely different.
The story starts off many years after the disaster that occurred at the original dinosaur-cloning theme park, in a world where the park has successfully been rebuilt—bigger than ever and renamed Jurassic World—and has been successfully serving thousands of tourists for years. Young actors Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson play a pair of brothers who are traveling to the park to spend time with their aunt (Bryce Dallas Howard), who happens to be a high-powered suit who oversees many of the park’s longterm operations. Also along for the ride is Owen (Chris Pratt), an ex-military man who currently serves as a trainer for the park’s group of velociraptors, Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), a higher-up in a privately funded army that has something or other to do with the park and who has the completely ludicrous goal of using raptors as the next generation of super-soldiers, and Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), the main investor of the new park who is looking to raise attendance by creating a new, genetically engineered animal called the Indominus Rex that is bigger, scarier, and more impressive than any dinosaur that’s ever existed. Of course, this being a Jurassic Park sequel, the Indominus Rex eventually gets out of its containment and goes on a rampage that leads to the deaths of many people, and thus we have our monster movie. Life finds a way, it’s not nice to play with mother nature, and all that jazz.
In addition to the visually impressive environments and thrilling action scenarios constructed by Trevorrow and his effects teams, Jurassic World also boasts an impressive cast of performers who do their best to keep the film from falling apart, predominantly Pratt, who proved that he has what it takes to anchor a big action blockbuster with Guardians of the Galaxy, and who provides much of the same appeal here. It’s a bit of a shame that an actor so good at comedy and who has so much cocky swagger is relegated to playing a fairly stoic, pose-striking hero in this movie, but Pratt’s presence is still able to provide the film with a lot more fun than it would have been able to muster otherwise.
Howard has the thankless job of playing the role of the stick in the mud workaholic who has her priorities skewed and who makes all of the wrong decisions, leading to everyone’s doom, but she has a warm enough presence that she’s able to keep you from completely hating her character anyway, even if the script has her go too far down the road of obstinate idiocy to actually gain any real redemption. She does her best to keep you from completely vilifying a horrifically negligent and greedy authority figure, and she rocks a tank top during an action sequence better than anyone this side of Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard.
Though Howard’s character may be a villain in the audience’s eyes, it’s D’Onofrio who’s playing the human villain in the film’s eyes, and he’s the one who really gets it. He seems to be the only one who realizes that he’s in a stupid, senseless, exploitation movie, and he amps up his character to ridiculous levels as a response. D’Onofrio’s Hoskins is all lumbering, clumsy paunch. His spray tan is deep orange, his capped teeth blinding white, and his goatee is as mid-90s dork as possible. He’s the loudmouth who forces everyone at the bar to engage him in unwanted conversation, and who refuses to take a hint when nobody is into listening to his bluster. With Hoskins, D’Onofrio has created a character as ridiculous and stupid as his plan to train prehistoric, carnivorous reptiles to be soldiers in an army, and he ends up being a lot of fun to watch as a consequence.
Simpkins and Robinson are fine as the kids. They’re playing wide-eyed child and eye-rolling teen, respectively, so they didn’t get much to do other than be victims put in peril. The way roles like this get messed up is if the kids are too wooden to be believable or too precocious to not be annoying, and both avoid those traps, so they’re welcome additions to the film. Even more welcome than them is Jake Johnson though, who plays a park employee who’s a dinosaur expert with a heart amidst a sea of greedy, corporate types who could care less about animals or science. His role is a small one, but he’s able to add a lot of soul to the film, even with limited screen time. What he’s doing here is different from his usual schtick, so it’s nice to see that he’s a more multi-faceted performer than he’s been able to show in films thus far.
None of what these people are able to accomplish is able to make up for Jurassic World’s storytelling though, because it’s abysmal. This movie has the sort of script that’s not only poorly written on a macro level, but that’s also so inept that it’s not even able to make any sense, scene to scene. So many subplots are started and then never paid off that you get the sense that, not only did the film start out as several different studio scripts that got haphazardly mushed together, but that there were also several edits of the film that include or excise these various subplots completely, and what we got was the compromised version that tries to do a little of everything and ends up accomplishing nothing.
For fun, let’s just run down a list of things that happen for seemingly no reason. The opening scene establishes that the story is taking place during Christmas, and then Christmas not only never gets mentioned again for the rest of the entire movie, the rest of the entire movie takes place at an immensely popular theme park that doesn’t have a single Christmas decoration put up anywhere. Why? The Indominus Rex is established early on as having the ability to cloak itself like a chameleon, and then that ability is never utilized or mentioned again for the rest of the film. So why was it established? One extremely out of place scene sees the boys come to the tear-filled revelation that their parents are on the verge of getting a divorce, a bit of character conflict that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie whatsoever and that’s never again even referenced. So why was it shot, let alone included in the final version of the film?
These strange asides aren’t the only amateurish elements of Jurassic World’s storytelling either. The film is also full of bits of lazy writing where any sense of logic or reality are thrown out the window so that the plot can progress to places that the (four credited) screenwriters needed it to. For instance, the exact genetic makeup of the Indominus Rex is kept from everyone, including the people who handle it, for no logical reason other than they wanted to have a revelation about its nature in the third act, so the characters have to constantly dance around the fact that they don’t know exactly what it is. Then there are lazy little plot holes that make no sense, like how Pratt leads the raptors on a climactic hunt while riding his motorcycle even though it’s established earlier in the film that his motorcycle is parked outside of his house and not at the raptor pen. Are we supposed to believe that he can summon it magically, like Thor can his mythical hammer, Mjolnir?
In a better movie, whose big action sequences really swept you away, these inconsistencies wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but Jurassic World exists as one or two thrilling scenes that are built on a foundation of inconsistencies and coincidences, so it doesn’t take long for the whole thing to sink. The film over-explains itself when it doesn’t need to, and only makes things more stupid and confusing with its explanations. It should have just realized that it was a simple, B-level exploitation story, like all of the giant monster movies from the 50s, and been off to the races with death and destruction. If you’re making a movie that’s silly and stupid, go silly and stupid. Don’t make yourself blue in the face trying to explain away all of the silliness and stupidity to your audience. That way lies insanity.
And yet, even given all of the complaints that can be lodged about Jurassic World’s shoddy storytelling, it’s still the sort of movie that features an extended sequence where thousands of blank-faced amusement park visitors are attacked by a flock of razor-toothed pterodactyls who snatch them off of the ground and tear them to pieces, so it’s next to impossible to say that nobody should see it. Just be aware that what you’re getting into is the shoddy sort of production that’s best enjoyed with a drunk and rowdy audience who aren’t afraid to cheer at the big action moments as well as sneer at all of the bad dialogue and talk back at the screen during the moments that make no sense. In no way should you approach this movie as if it might be a worthy successor to something as focused and well put together as the original Jurassic Park. Jurassic World is Jurassic Park if it was dropped on its head as a piece of amber-encased dino DNA.
