Jurassic World is Moderately Entertaining and Completely Forgettable

Jurassic World is exactly what I expected it to be.

No more. No less.

It functions as passable summer entertainment, putting forth nearly zero effort into being anything more. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie (It’s not), it’s just not a particularly memorable one. It’s about as inoffensive as can be, providing serviceable entertainment and then disappearing into the ether. Even as I was watching it, I could feel it slipping from memory and while it’s undoubtedly the best of the three Jurassic Park sequels, that’s not really saying much when you consider its competition.

Twenty-two years after the original incident, a new dinosaur theme park has been established on the island of Isla Nublar. Thanks to the ingenuity of InGen (wait a second...InGen...uity...HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS BEFORE?!?!), this new park is fully functional and enjoying great business. But it’s not enough!! The bean counters behind the scenes want more, more, more, and the best guarantee for bigger sales is bigger and badder dinosaurs.

Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), Jurassic World’s operations manager and token female character, has been having conversations with potential investors to find a sponsor for a brand new attraction: the Indominus Rex, a genetically modified dinosaur designed to be the biggest and baddest dinosaur the world has ever seen. She’s so involved in her work that she doesn’t have time to hang out with her visiting nephews, Zach and Gray. (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins respectively) The kids, whose parents are in the midst of a messy divorce, are put in the care of Claire’s assistant in order for Claire can deal with the ‘more important’ things. They escape their babysitter and scamper off to enjoy the park’s attractions on their own.

Elsewhere on the island, dino-expert Owen Gray (Chris Pratt) is training a group of Velociraptors. InGen’s head of security Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’onofrio) hopes to raise the ultimate Dino Squad fighting force to sell to the army for some big bucks. Owen’s not a fan of this plan, insisting that the key to controlling the dinosaurs is by developing and maintaining a personal relationship with them, but Hoskins doesn’t care because, you know, he’s a bad guy and he doesn’t care about feelings. Poor D’onofrio, who excelled as Wilson Fisk in Marvel’s Daredevil series, gets stuck with playing ‘Generic Main Villain #3’ this time around, and despite his best efforts, he can’t quite overcome the lack of material.

All of this setup is basically just biding time for the inevitable dino mayhem, which makes it feel little more than inconsequential. Once the Indominus Rex manages to escape and wreak havoc on the park’s attendees, the film more or less follows the original Jurassic Park’s story beats: Dinosaurs break free, chaos ensues, people get eaten. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’ll give credit where credit is due, Jurassic World is certainly not a boring film. The action is impressive considering director Colin Trevorrow’s (Safety Not Guaranteed) relative inexperience with this genre. Some of his sequences are even, dare I say it, kind of exciting. Additionally, it’s a thrill to see the Dino-Park in all its functioning majesty, as is the sight of Chris Pratt riding into action on a motorcycle with his Velociraptor posse in tow. But beyond the surface-level entertainment, I didn’t feel very invested in anything happening on screen. Despite Pratt’s charms and Howard’s general likeability, neither character feels fully formed beyond their types. The forced romance between them feels awkward and unearned. Likewise, the two kids feel more obligatory than necessary. The main plus they offer is allowing us the opportunity to see the theme park in all its glory, including a giant whale-like dinosaur that eats sharks for breakfast. Literally. But when the bombardment of CG action starts you’ll be hard-pressed to care much about any of them.

Truth be told, I felt more invested in the dinosaurs than the humans. I loved the Raptor Squad and the Indominus Rex makes for a formidable foe, even if the concept of a ‘highly intelligent’ dinosaur already feels tiresome. I felt worse for the dinos that functioned as innocent bystanders than I did the actual human bystanders. There’s this awful scene where Pterodactyls run rampant and you can see them carrying off a poor little baby Triceratops. That got more of a visceral reaction out of me than anything that happened to the humans...so kudos to the animation department!

There’s another particularly emotional scene where Owen and Claire comfort a dying Apatosarus, one of the victims of Indominus Rex’s rampage, which was far more affecting than anything else in the entire film.

While I can appreciate the attempt on behalf of director Trevorrow and screenwriters Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Derek Conolly (Jaffa and Silver wrote Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; Conolly wrote Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed) to instill Jurassic World with an underlying ‘bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better’ theme that seems to be a comment on the state of cinema in this day and age, it can’t help but feel more than a little hypocritical. After all, Jurassic World is exactly the kind of movie it’s supposedly condemning; it’s like your drunken uncle constantly cracking jokes about the cliche ‘Drunken Uncle’ stereotype. It doesn’t make any sense.

Additionally, the screenplay is full of clunky exposition and dialogue. Characters’ backstories are awkwardly recounted to individuals that are already well-aware of said information, and it always seems to happen at the most inconvenient time. For example, the two kids, Zach and Gray, are sitting on a monorail on their way to see another marvelous attraction. Unprompted, the younger one (Gray) starts to talk about their parents’ divorce. As Gray sobs, his older brother desperately tries to comfort him. The moment comes out of nowhere, and feels like a desperate attempt on the screenwriters’ part to make us care about these two.

But let’s not kid ourselves: no Jurassic Park sequel will ever live up to the majesty and sheer thrill-ride splendor that is Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic. That singular work not only raised the bar for special effects and cinematic entertainment, but also gave us lovable characters and reasons to root for their survival. Trevorrow and co. try their darndest to give us a reason to care about Jurassic World’s characters, but never succeed in making any of them live and breathe in the same way Jurassic Park did. The whole thing just feels too calculated; it lacks that elusive Spielbergian touch.

That being said, Jurassic World managed to keep me entertained, even as it struggled to keep me engaged. It’s undemanding fun and has some nice fan-pleasing moments. Chances are you’ll forget about the movie as soon as you leave the theater. If your life was sorely missing a rampaging ‘Dinosaurs Eat People and Destroy Stuff’ cinematic experience, Jurassic World will be the answer to your prayers. But the ‘Dinos Eat People’ concept can only take us so far. At a certain point, this franchise will need to evolve and provide more substance if it wants to survive creatively. Judging from the opening weekend box office numbers, the writers/directors probably won’t need to worry about straining their creative sensibilities too far in order to rake in the big bucks, but here’s hoping they pay attention to Jurassic World’s message and try a little harder next time around to give us a product with some soul.

FINAL RATING: 3/5