Jurassic World

Just for once I’d like a Jurassic Park sequel to not be underwhelming. Jurassic World was released recently and it falls into the curse of the sequels. This may get spoiler heavy so turn back now if you’d rather not know details. The premise of the story is basically that the park is open but they need something to up the wow factor. Insert a genetically modified hybrid dinosaur that is made up of a T-Rex and a raptor. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Claire who is some big wig at the current park. She has her nephews in and is supposed to be their guide but work comes first so she dumps her assistant on them. These kids are supposed to play the role of Lex and Tim from the original, but they fall far short and honestly serve no real purpose. One’s a high school aged kid who’s too cool for school and one’s a middle school kid who adores dinosaurs. Their parents are going through a divorce and the mishaps throughout the movie are supposed to strengthen their bond. Insert Owen, played by Chris Pratt, who is a Raptor whisperer; for lack of a better term. He fills the typical white guy hero who the kids automatically are attracted to and the female lead is his love interest. As you can assume chaos ensues, and the hybrid dinosaur breaks loose and terrorizes the park. The kids somehow commandeer the gyroscope to go off-roading and the park has no way to guide them back to base on autopilot. Then Claire convinces Owen to help her find her nephews and he somehow agrees; even though it’s mostly because she’s his ex and he wants to get back in with her. In reality though, he did probably realize that those kids were being tracked by the hybrid so it’d be best to follow it that way. Amidst all the chaos and car chases and lack of any sort of security measures in case of this sort of event, we find out Dr. Wu is working with a secret part of InGen to take their work to another facility. We also find out that the original facility is still around and that the kids can do some magic on a 20 year old jeep to get it running again; and it appears that it happened in a solid couple minutes because they’re on their way in no time. The story gets so convoluted that by the time the ending came around I didn’t want it to be the original T-Rex. I knew they were bringing her back, and I wanted her to be the one to kill the hybrid, but everything was so laughable by that point I didn’t care. Then don’t even get me started on the domesticated Raptors! “Raptors don’t want to be fed they want to hunt!” This line enough is reason to believe raptors wouldn’t be content with dead rats being thrown at them as food. Then they almost kinda fixed it near the end when the hybrid lured them to her side, but it was just false hope. There were small moments here and there that had me hopeful, but it honestly got lost in all the muck. Special effects wise it was just mediocre at best. From the get-go when everyone arrived at the park, even the gate looked so forced. The thing about the original was the real look of everything. You would think that 22 years after the fact that even with CGI they could make it look as good if not better. I did like the little throwbacks to the original here and there, but those were the only redeeming qualities I really took away from this iteration of the franchise. Even the editing and pacing of it all was just off; Jurassic Park was such a part of my childhood that my expectations are always going to be high for this franchise; and I think at this point there’s never going to be a sequel that lives up to my expectations.