Maybe I’m just too old and cynical but I didn’t really like it, on the whole. There were a couple cool scenes but the whole movie felt like one long Idiot Ball moment and I was actively rooting for every human character except Star-Lord to get eaten.
[spoiler]
None of the humans are likeable, except Chris Pratt’s character. Bryce Howard’s character gets alright by the end of the movie but the start dug her into a big hole and had me taking an extreme dislike to her. Irrfan Khan as the CEO was the reverse - started off seeming interesting, but then proceeded to make a bunch of stupid decisions. Didn’t care about the kids at all though at least the older brother wasn’t as bad as I feared after the mom’s line about “he can be really mean.”
Has no one learned anything from the first movie(s)? Why does the island have only one helicopter and no one to fly it? Why the hell would the gryospheres be self-driven and not on a track or controlled remotely? And you think they’d have better guns and be quicker to use them…
No one thought to check the tracking device on the Indominus BEFORE having three guys walk into the cage? Just use the thermals and that’s it?
Why the heck can’t Dr. Wu share which animals they spliced into the Indominus with his OWN CEO? I can understand him not wanting to share with, say, Bryce Howard, but when Irrfan Khan shows up you would think he would tell him. I have trouble believing the “eighth-richest man in the world” would have any sort of company setup where he can’t find out exactly what sort of dinosaurs they’re piecing together.
The DNA splicing doesn’t really make sense. Okay, they put in some cuttlefish DNA because they wanted to help it age, or something. And because of this, it suddenly has the ability to camouflage. Huh? I don’t think it works like that… you take the sequence you need, it seems unlikely that the same sequence that controls aging would also magically give it camouflage.
The Indominus can talk to the raptors (and apparently convince them to switch sides) because they share raptor DNA. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure[/spoiler]
Overall it just felt like a very poorly-written script. What’s interesting is that its clear there was still a lot of love for the original film put in, with lots of references here and there (some obvious, some subtle)… but because the movie around it is weak, they feel kinda shoehorned in. One thing that stuck out to me was the misuse of the musical themes… they used them for the first reveal of the park (with no dinosaurs in sight) or the part where the CEO is flying the helicoptor (again, no dinosaurs in sight)… what the hell? The Jurassic Park theme is one of the best in movie history, save that stuff for scenes that make sense.
Sorry, but there simply wasn’t a single character I gave a damn about, be they good folks, bad folks, science folks, nerd folks, or assorted dinosaur chow folks.
You got to have someone in the movie you care about following, and I guess it was supposed to be Chris Pratt and the lady Scientist, but I never bought their relationship from their first scene together.
The dinos were awesome, but something I’ve noticed in all 4 movies; as the time the dinos are on-screen increases, the plot and character development gets worse and worse.
Maybe the next film (and there probably will be one) should simply be a documentary with the dinosaurs on-screen all the time and eschew all human acting.
I can’t disagree with you at all regarding JP 2,3 and 4. I will argue that JP1 did have character development, did make you care about what happened to these people, and (IMHO) did the ‘kids in peril’ so well that the other three movies feel that they had to do the same (and failed miserably, again IMHO).
You can do a good special effects movie with enough character development so you at least give something of a damn–in this case, no damn given, at least by me. I’ve see Redwoods less wooden than most of the acting.
I thought the movie delivered the cheese. I wanted to see a movie with some convincing scenes of people being chased, attacked and occasionally eaten by dinosaurs, and I got that. I thought the writing was kind of conventional and the characters not overly well-developed or convincing, but I didn’t much care, i wanted to see them chased and eaten (and sometimes escape from being eaten) not Grow As A Person. There were not enough problems with the movie to keep me from enjoying all the dinosaur action, and that’s the vital point.
That said, there was not a person in the movie I would have MINDED seeing eaten, including Chis Pratt, but maybe I’m a tad jaded.
I agree about the ridiculous of the high heels on the lead woman in the movie, in fact, I kept expecting them to lampshade the trope by making some reference to it as an element of 50s movie plots, but they never did. But at least she wasn’t a total Damsel in Distress, she womanned up and kicked some ass big time in the later portions of the movie.
Chris Pratt is one lovable son of a bitch but this - like all the JP movies - is dumb as shit.
Look, the thing that made the first JP book work is that Alan Grant survived the raptors not by anything other than that which makes humans work: he outthought them. He used his knowledge of them - they eat eggs - to kill them - he injected eggs with a potent toxin and rolled them toward them. Bang, humans earn survival but outcompeting the velociraptors.
But in all of the JP movies - this one included - the humans are just spectators in the final showdown. Instead of
Humans show hubris through technology and thought
Humans pay for hubris
Humans use thought to overcome hubris and learn a lesson
We get:
Humans show hubris through technology and thought
Humans run like hell for two hours
Big dinos fight
Cool on screen, dumb story.
Still, it was awesome in parts. Anyone but me pick up that it was the SAME T-Rex from the first movie fighting the I Rex at the end? I actually yelled ‘Return of the King, baby!’ and got a laugh.
I really enjoyed it. Good action, some unexpected laugh out loud moments, a few eye rolling moments but not enough to make me dislike the film, on the whole I consider it well worth seeing.
The only thing I disliked was the car battery. No fucking way theres any charge left in that thing after 20 years.
I like this, because it accurately conveys the fact that there are a lot of reasons someone might want to see and possibly even like this movie - Mr. Pratt foremost among them - but overall, it’s a pretty freaking dumb movie. I am inspired to comment mostly because of the record breaking box office take. I am good at ignoring these things in general. I don’t think I’ve ever posted in a Transformers thread here! But I don’t want the movie industry to make more Jurassic Worlds. Bad influence. Bad.
I also saw Spy this weekend. My review: Go see Spy instead of Jurassic World. Unless you have kids; you probably shouldn’t bring them to that. Wait for Inside Out. Just don’t support Jurassic World.
(What? Everyone in this thread has already seen the movie and my words have no power? Darn.)
There are no factory diesel jeeps and I think this one sounded like a gas engine when they got it running. Plus it was apparently Hammond’s jeep from the first movie and they called them “gas jeeps” in that movie. It could have been diesel, but I don’t think there was anything to indicate that.
But you’re all forgetting an important thing, they once helped grandpa fix up a Malibu. If that doesn’t prepare a child to fix a 20 year abandoned Jeep at night in a dark building in the middle of a jungle, I don’t know what would.
And what is wrong with making more Jurassic worlds? Not everything has to be high art, I fully enjoyed the 2 hours I spent at the cinema for this and that is by far the most important criteria for a movie as far as I am concerned.
Its a dumb movie? Sure it is. But dumb doesn’t always mean bad. One of the things I liked about this was that it knew how dumb it was, it didn’t take itself too seriously and has happy to laugh at its own premise a few times.
Ideally every film would be a smart product like Fury Road was, but I’ll take a Jurassic world over badly made crap like Transformers any time.
I don’t disagree with the first part. There are a lot of dumb movies where I don’t have a problem with it, and they end up pretty good and enjoyable. This includes a bunch of action movies and generic comedies, several of the not-as-good Marvel movies, and at least three movies with “Fast” or “Furious” in their titles, just over the last few years.
… but I do put Jurassic World more in the category of the first Transformers movie (which, as I recall, was squarely in the “dumb and mediocre” camp instead of the “abjectly terrible” camp that all the sequels have been). There was just nothing there except hoping that the dinosaurs eat everyone. The writing for all the humans was below-replacement-level, and others have already been picking on a bunch of other plot points. It’s just a different kind of not-fun dumb than the movies that fall into the “good-dumb” category, if that makes any sense.
On the other hand, I’m marginally less worried about the sequels after sleeping on it. Universal has been significantly better in taking care of their series than most, and certainly than Paramount. There’s at least even odds we’ll get a better screenplay next time.
The only “death” that got any kind of reaction out me was the death of Jurassic World itself, and that’s because I was a little kid when Jurassic Park came out. I was obsessed with, got the toys & merchandise, went on the rides at Universal, etc. I would have been one of those kids riding the baby triceratops (& if the park actually existed & went there now I probably would’ve been asking of there was a package where adults could ride the full grown ones :o)). So inn a way seeing Hammond’s dream come finally come to life onscreen was like seeing one of my childhood dreams come to life (then get destroyed). Granted Claire’s assistant’s death came off as downright comical.
