by lhb412 » Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:00 am
I'm sorry to say I found Jurassic World pretty poor.
The main culprits are generic characters that seemed to be cliche out of laziness rather than love of the tropes and action sequences with no real feeling of suspense or dynamism behind them - and, sadly, all of those descriptions can be extended to the rest of the movie as a whole. Bryce Dallas Howard and Vincent D'Onofrio, two really good actors, are unable to make their characters anything but grating, and in the case of D'Onofrio, excruciatingly grating. Even the always charming Pratt, given the macho, he-man role, hardly registers as a blip, and the total lack of anything resembling romantic chemistry between his character and Howard's was terrible. Are we supposed to buy them as a couple? I don't think these people should be in the same room together! I mean, I usually have a high tolerance to contrived romance, but this was beyond the pale, even for me. The suspenseful action sequences, a trademark of even the weakest previous Jurassic Park films, are imitated but not successfully. This is a movie that just sort of throws things at the screen for the runtime and then it ends. It's an extremely generic modern blockbuster, devoid of style, wit, and only captures the awesome spectacle you want in brief fits.
... Still, there were dinosaurs, and that does account for something. Dinosaurs are inherently awesome, after all. But even there I felt like we were given an inferior run, as the CGI dinos are unimpressive. They're a step-down from many great CGI creatures in the last decade or so, like the kaiju and jeagers, Ceasar's apes, Rocket and Groot, and... oh, yeah: Godzilla! They're also a step down from the dinos in Spielberg's two Jurassic Park films, no doubt because of his reliance of practical dinosaur props and inherent knack of staging action.
It's a bad sign when the best thing about your film is blatant pandering to nostalgia. When the two kids entered the ruins of the original park I was delighted, but that was earned by decades of rewatching Jurassic Park, not anything Jurassic World did.