Jurassic World or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Genetic Engineering.

The human race in works of science fiction recently really seem to want to go extinct. After all the endless hype for this movie, I crawled out of my hovel last night with my significant other and went to see if the people who made this movie could, like the titular park, unearth a franchise that has been untouched for almost a decade and breathe some new life into it. It's baffling, really, that after three movies in which people try to clone dinosaurs and end up causing a massacre, that people still think that not only is recreating arguably the predators that gave humanity the greatest run for its money since the dawn of time, but actually creating new monsters is a good idea. So, spoiler alert, I'm going to be looking at this movie meticulously, and I will tell you, in detail, exactly what I thought was good and what I thought was bad about it.

So, this movie takes place in a futuristic world where, even after the three humongous catastrophes that the previous Jurassic Parks were, someone with far too much money, the late great John Hammond's successor, has decided that Jurassic Park needs to be reopened, dedicating an entire island to the place, and hosting events where people can watch prehistoric monsters being fed in gigantic stadiums, guarded only by precarious fences overlooking monster pits.

That's a Great White Shark. This really feels like it violates all kinds of RSPCA regulations.

Now, immediately, I have to ask how on earth they got permission to do this. Three times, the cloning of dinosaurs has led to dozens of people dying, and it really seems like the sort of thing the government would regulate, unless this is set in some Rapture-style libertarian paradise where people with enough money can literally snub their noses at the laws nature, god and man and international law. I suppose it's a message the movie wants to rub in our faces, but it really seems like the negative publicity alone would put people off, but I digress. Without it, they couldn't have a movie, and I get that, it's cool.

So, we meet the main brains behind the park, Simon Masrani, the owner, who, not content simply to recreate dinosaurs that actually exist, but goes out of his way to combine the traits of various, already dangerous animals into essentially a super monster that they give the (intentionally?) goofy name Indominus Rex (I say intentionally, because almost every character snickers at it when they hear it for the first time.) Now, Simon is much like Hammond from the first film (something I will go on about later) being a bit of a shady corporate executive who nonetheless has the heart of a six year old. He's crazily enthusiastic about dinosaurs, and quite literally tells his main scientist to make something 'cooler'. He's helped by his much more grounded assistant and the movie's resident woman in charge control freak stereotype, Claire Dearing. She's having her two nephews visit and has sexual tension with Chris Pratt's character, Owen Grady, who is kind of like a velociraptor-taming Crocodile Dundy.

Now, I need to stop here, because almost every character in this movie is pretty much copy-pasted from the first. You have the eccentric billionaire. You have the control freak who's only interested in profit margins and the guy trying to steal their inventions to sell to the military. You have the sarcastic fanboy dickbag who's a thinly veiled audience surrogate for all the criticisms that will inevitably be leveled at this movie. You have the good-natured scientist father figure, the cynical, hormonal teenager with technical skills and the annoying, hyperactive child. Now, the next sentence is the almost exact definition of a backhanded compliment. Almost every good part of this movie is directly copied from the first one. But that's alright, I guess, because it pretty much rips off three quarters of the script anyway. The plot is almost exactly the same. Two children with parental issues come to the park. They go offroad. The giant, genetically engineered abomination breaks out and starts wrecking shit. The control freak manager morphs into the mother figure from the first movie and goes hunting with the good natured scientist. Almost plot point for plot point, beat for beat, this movie's scenes could be easily exchanged for anything that was done in the first, and quite frankly, was done better.

Do you think we should maybe make it vulnerable to the guns we use to secure the dinosaurs in the park? Nah, that sounds like work.

 Now, this is where we have to get into the sheer ineptitude of every, single, person in authority in the park. The first movie had reasons for the shit to hit the fan. There was a tropical storm. They made the mistake of hiring Newman from Seinfeld, who purposely sabotaged them. Here, these people were either very lazy, very stupid, or criminally insane. First of all, Masrani orders his lead scientist, the returning Dr. Wu to create something 'cooler' than a T-Rex. Apparently Dr. Wu graduated from the Umbrella Corporation scholarship of genetic engineering, because he interprets 'cool' to mean 3 and a half meters tall, camouflaging, superhumanly strong and smart, and best of all, bulletproof (this thing seriously takes a near point blank explosion from an RPG and barely flinches.) He also decides to make it hyper-aggressive and sociopathic, to the point of killing and eating its only sibling, and then keeps it in a pen with no roof covering, and no cameras outside to catch it if it escapes. The monster seriously escapes by lowering its body temperature to the point that thermal imaging can't detect it (loosely justified by technobabble about frogs. Not sure any kind of frog can actually do that, but whatever.), and tricking the handlers into opening the cage and letting it out. This becomes even more infuriating when you realize that all the dinosaurs have trackers implanted into them, and while it does claws its tracker out later, if even one person had the brains to just check where its tracking device said it was, it would have been clear that their pet crime against nature is still in its cage.

Naturally, the monster breaks out and goes on a killing spree, proving its total invulnerability to every weapon that the security are equipped with. Now, they loosely try to justify it by saying that it's super expensive and they don't want to kill it, but they literally have no way to even stop it. It's immune to electricity and small arms fire, and by the time they bring out the big guns, everyone is too incompetent to actually hit it with rocket launchers and a fucking minigun. The stupidity keeps piling up when Masrani is apparently the only guy out of an entire company of highly trained mercenaries who can fly a helicopter, which he naturally crashes into the Pterodactyl lair and causes an even further outbreak.

Now, in the midst of all of this, both Chris Pratt and the Newman replacement in this movie are trying to train velociraptors of all things, and release them against the Indominus. This is the first movie I've EVER seen where the solution to a giant, rampaging, man eating monster is to release MORE man eating monsters. Admittedly, the raptors do seem somewhat tamed, but they almost kill Chris Pratt earlier in the film when he falls into their cage.

Uhhhh......Polly want a cracker?

The obnoxiously and hilariously evil baddy thinks that velociraptors could be weaponized. Chris Pratt accurately points out that this is a fucking stupid idea, because releasing near-uncontrollable, flesh-eating monsters into chaotic area like a battlefield is such a mind-bogglingly silly plan that any sane person would throw it out immediately. Naturally, he gets his way, and the Indominus Rex (which apparently has raptor DNA infused with it, pulled directly out of the writer's ass) takes control of the raptor pack and sends them against the next bunch of redshirts. The idiot who wants to weaponize these things even has an absurd scene where he actually tries to reason with a raptor slowly stalking toward him.

Now, before getting eaten, the baddy actually wants to mass produce the Indominus, in raptor-sized, bulletproof form (after it's plainly shown that it cannot be tamed and is openly sadistic and lives only to cause suffering.) This is the flimsy as fuck reasoning for why the scientists made their indestructible bullshit-osaur. Now, several questions. If the scientists were already working for InGen, the Pentex subsidiary that runs this freak show, why didn't they just......have them shipped out? Why go through the song and dance of pretending to work for a theme park to secretly engineer bioweapons? If the authorities had a problem with that, they sure as fuck would have a problem with monsters being sold as entertainment. This is saying something, but InGen made this entire disaster happen entirely out of sheer stupidity. I don't say this lightly, but the Umbrella Corporation is actually more of a competently run company than these morons. The same Umbrella Corp that lets caused two public zombie outbreaks and then handed over all operations to a professional Johnny Bravo impersonator. Let that sink in for a second.

FINISH HER!

So, onward comes the climax, where Chris Pratt, with zero effort, manages to retake control of his raptor pack. They attack the Indominus with the five tame raptors, but the Indominus is an super-dinosaur abomination and slaughters the raptors. This is when Claire (who's in this movie, remember) gets the brilliant idea to release the T-Rex from the first movie, luring it with a flare, to fight the Indominus. Now, the movie draws attention to her running, and actually clearly shows the woman outpacing a T-Rex in high heels. That bit of stupidity aside, the dinosaurs all team up like the fucking super-friends to push the Indominus into the pool with the giant crocodile monster, where it gets eaten. They don't even turn on each other or the humans afterwards, and just sort of wander of, with the movie barely showing enough restraint not to have them wink at the kids.

Now, I am overstating the negatives, but this movie isn't all bad. It's just fucking disappointing. It goes on for way too long and where it's not trying to reference the original, it's literally ripping off the script. I don't usually mind sequels doing this, but this movie just rams references to the original down the viewer's throat. I get it. We both watched Jurassic Park. Apparently I got something different out of it. Part of what made the original so good was its understanding of tension and subtlety. One of my favorite parts of the original was the kids avoiding the raptors in the kitchen, and that was fucking terrifying, because it made you feel isolated, terrified, and hunted. This movie has no restraint at all, and no sense of subtlety. It beats the viewer over the head with its politics and its endless repetition that man shouldn't  be tampering in nature's domain by literally having the characters wax lyrical about it like drunk philosophy majors. It plays its hand to early and is so much weaker for it. This could have been really, really good. I wouldn't even have minded if it just ripped off the original but made it just as good. It's just this sort of half-hearted mess that devalues the idea and comes off like a pale, embarrassing copy, and reduces the dinosaurs to an almost literal joke.

Final score:

Acting: 4/5 - The movie was acted just fine, as if they were shown the original and were told 'just do that.'
Script: 2/5 - Executed realistic dialogue, but had major, major holes.
Effects: 5/5 - They were fine.
Action Scenes: 3/5 - Nothing much to say. They were fine, nothing mind blowing or vomit inducing.
Originality: 1/5 - It's pretty much a carbon copy of the original.

Overall score: 2/5

- Kephn