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I understand that looking for coherent storytelling in a big summer blockbuster is like looking for water in Death Valley. Trust me, I really do understand this, but even accounting for that, I found Jurassic World to be insanely stupid. Sure it’s fun while watching it in the moment, but I could never stop myself from internal eye-rolling or unintentional giggle fits.
Here is a movie that introduces a series of concepts and tones and never pays them off. It appears to frequently be calling attention to itself through meta-commentary, but it merely pays as lip service. A sound bite about audiences desire for “more teeth” in comparison to the thrills of the original Jurassic Park is akin to this. It says it knows that it’s going to be ridiculous, but it plays everything with a deadly serious tone.
Jurassic Park was not exactly a fountain of correct science, dinosaur DNA preserved in amber for millions upon millions of years? Yeah, right. Dinosaurs recreated with amphibian DNA as opposed to birds, which we were told were their theoretical ancestors? Weird choice, one must admit. But Jurassic Park had solid film-making choices, and if a film is well made and engaging, we will forgive a great many logical blunders.
Jurassic World is not a film made with great care and skill. It constantly wants us to look up in awe, without having earned that awe. The special effects work is rough looking, and at no point did I believe that Chris Pratt was in the same frame as the velociraptors. Jurassic Park gave us accurate enough dinosaurs based upon the cumulative knowledge of the era, while this film is only happy to regurgitate those images instead of expanding the notion of what a cinematic dinosaur could be. Call me old fashioned, but I wanted more animatronic work! The reason the first film is still so beloved and cherished is the top-notch effects work that created believable looking dinosaurs, most of which were made by Stan Winston Studios. And the main plot point of a hybrid dinosaur as something new and shocking is laughable enough, the dinosaurs in the original film were hybrids!
Another problem is that of character. A blockbuster by design plays within well-known character tropes. Bryce Dallas Howard’s frigid all-business career woman will inevitably thaw in the presence of chaos in her perfectly organized world. Jurassic World is also positioning her as the ostensible hero of the film, yet undercuts every single one of her numerous heroic moments in favor of a laugh. It’s an unseemly bit of condescension to the main character in favor of making Pratt’s animal trainer look like the sweaty, masculine alpha star of these things. Pratt’s character doesn’t deserve this heroic view either, as he does nothing much memorable or life-saving for a majority of the film. Jurassic World is also not a great highlight for Pratt’s brand of goofy, insouciant charm as it asks him to play it straight. He gets lost in the shuffle.
What Jurassic World does well is unleash dinosaur related chaos for two hours. I knew going into this movie that it was probably going to be a mess as none of the previews had endeared me to it. But I was a kid who loved dinosaurs, and I still do. Jurassic World certainly gave me plenty of dino-related bang for my buck. The climatic finale had more to do with kaiju film-making than anything else, and while it was appropriately campy (a believed dead character returns cause magic!), it was also strangely satisfying to watch. Man, is it a stupid movie as plot holes and thinly written characters crash up higher and higher, but there’s a level of fun to be had in watching gigantic super beasts cause massive amounts of destruction. It’s still the best sequel in the franchise, but that is an admittedly low-bar to leap.
