I registered an account with this forum (after lurking) just to reply to this thread – apologies if I make any accidental mistakes in netiquette.
I hated Jurassic World. I don’t think I got a moment’s pleasure from the film. I grew up with Jurassic Park - I think I saw it for the first time at the age of four years old, and I spent most of my childhood rewatching it with friends. I remained fervent in my desire to be a paleontologist well into adolescence, and while I’m not currently on a digging-up-dinosaurs career path, I am doing evolutionary biology work. Jurassic Park was the first film I ever saw that showed scientists experiencing a sense of raw wonder at the beauty of the natural (and man-made) world - the characters of Dr Grant and Dr Satler were the first "scientists’ I ever encountered as movie heroes, and are actually quite rare still in Hollywood depictions of scientists - the evil BD Wong type (I can’t even remember the character’s name - the type is so boring, and the character so forgettable) is more common.
Lost World and JPIII were forgettable sequels, although Lost World had, to my mind, the best velociraptor scene (the aerial shot of them walking through the field at night, being taken down one by one - spooky!).
What I hated about Jurassic World:
1.) No characters are anything more, or less, than a “type”.
BDH’s character is the icy corporate woman who needs a strong man to teach her about love (and needy children to teach her about the importance of motherhood). There’s the obnoxious teenager and the whiny child; the mercenary is an evil mercenary, the CEO is an arrogant corporate type, the geneticist is a hubristic scientist turned mad after years of playing god, etc. Chris Pratt, who is as likeable a movie star as I’ve ever seen, couldn’t salvage his character, who was arguably the most ridiculous figure in the entire movie. Actually, the only character who intrigued me at all was the CEO, because I thought it would be refreshing to have the big businessman turn out to be the dashing hero of the film, and he was genuinely funny. And then they blew him up.
2.) Every scene contains a reference to a previous film, and every scene attempts to make us feel what we felt when watching that earlier film.
There are references to all three previous films in the franchise; to Jaws, to Alien, to Aliens; to screwball comedies and battle-of-the-sexes Katharine Hepburn films; to Indiana Jones; etc etc etc. The film never tries to innovate, to make you feel something genuine that comes out of its own plot, its own characters.
3.) The film fails to recapture what was magical about the first film, and overdoes what was boring about the two sequels.
What made Jurassic Park /work/ for me as a child was the depiction of the dinosaurs as fascinating, dangerous, unpredictable animals - as forces of nature that human beings thought they understood, in their hubris, but in fact neither understood nor controlled. Yet the dinosaurs always remained, fundamentally, animal. Even the velociraptors, in their wily intelligence, seemed more animal than monster; the T-Rex scenes are so fabulous because you can see the dinosaur trying to figure out what the jeeps are, and so on. My favorite scene in Jurassic Park is probably the scene where the scientists see the brachiosaurus for the first time and are blown away by the animal’s beauty; or Dr Grant hugging the sick triceratops. The dinosaurs are dangerous, but they’re not trying to kill every human on the face of the earth for no reason. The dinosaurs in Jurassic World do not act like animals. The Indominus Rex at least has an excuse for being nothing more than a movie monster, because it was created to be a movie monster, but the pterodactyls/dimorphodons were beyond plausibility to me. They’re described as being territorial - and yet they abandon their territory, fly long distances in pursuit of fleeing humans, and then attack everything in sight without regard for predation. It’s violence without motive, and it makes the dinosaurs animals no longer, which takes away the magic and the awe.
4.) The Chris Pratt character is a huge missed opportunity.
I knew I was going to hate at least 75% of the film before I saw it based on advance reviews, but I went anyway because I find Chris Pratt charming and because I love velociraptors (or, anyway, I love the large raptor-type dinosaurs that might more accurately be called deinonychus or utahraptor - you know what I mean). Then, too, I’m fascinated by large animal training and I know a little bit about it. I am here to tell you that the film got nearly everything WRONG about large animal training. There were obvious, shameful mistakes - Chris Pratt uses a clicker, for instance, but instead of using it as it is used by people who train lions or orcas or other large animals in the real world, as a marker that’s paired with a reward during operant conditioning-based training, he uses it as an attention grabber. Then, too, Chris Pratt acts in a way that is contrary to all animal handling I’ve ever been taught while working with dogs or horses - he is noisy. He shouts. He is tense, nervous, jumpy. His posture is stiff. He radiates nervous aggression in all his interactions with the raptors. The people I know with the best rapport with dogs and horses (and I am not among these people - I have only observed) are still. They are sparing in their motion, their use of their voice. They command attention because every gesture and sound is worth listening to, and their presence brings calm.
5.) The film is joyless.
None of the characters are likeable. None of them. What’s the fun of watching a movie if you don’t like any of the characters? Watching them all get eaten. They don’t all get eaten. They kill off most of the raptors. I was rooting for the raptors at the end, and I didn’t even get to watch Blue eat Bryce Dallas Howard.
The only complaint I don’t have is about the stupid high heels. I went to college with a woman who used to wear high heels on the treadmill because she’d shortened her achilles tendon by never wearing flats; after seeing that, I didn’t even need to suspend disbelief about BDH outrunning the 'Rex in stilettos.
