I'm not a 90's kid or anything, but I seem to convey a love towards the 'Jurassic Park' franchise. Jurassic World is the 4th installment in the franchise, and also the 2nd film which Steven Spielberg did not direct starts off well with enough call backs to the 1st installment of the JP franchise, but it quickly turns into a monster movie with a killer dinosaur on the loose that was spliced with DNA from other dinosaur species in order to increase visitor attendance.
To start off this review, I would like to say that Jurassic World doesn't follow up much of the story of the original 'Jurassic Park' film and 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park', but I can accept that because I like to hear new ideas and stories. My main complaint here is that the film lacks the dramatic and suspenseful elements of that in typical monster movies. Like in "Jurassic Park', you never got to look at the T-rex during the tour, nor when it was given a goat to feed on, but you finally got a first look at it during the heavy rainstorm and right when the electricity was cut just as they were passing through the T-rex fence on the way back to the visitor centre. Here, it is just a genetically-modified hybrid dinosaur which can camouflage itself from thermal scanners used ONE TIME throughout the entire movie!
For its creature feature, the film works well and it gives you your money's worth of showing you dinosaurs doing collateral damage to park property and personnel with the occasional park visitor being killed for good measure. Throw in Chris Pratt, whose character is a soldier-turned-raptor trainer, and he unleashes his raptor squad to help stop the killer dinosaur. Throw in a human antagonist (Vincent D'Onofrio) for the protagonist to fight with who would blow the whole island up just to destroy this monster and add a human element like two lost children who are related to a employee at this crazy theme park who, by the way, has the hots for our hero and you have the entire plot right there.
The dinosaur effects in this film are probably the best in the series so far and while there are moments of obvious CGI, it really does not distract from how far SFX have come over the years from the first film to this one. In terms of dinosaur carnage, this film comes in a little behind The Lost World in that department but not by much. The body count is higher here than in any of the other films in the series but lacks the tension and showmanship that 'Jurassic Park' and 'The Lost World' had in spades. It's however head & shoulders above what "Jurassic Park 3' had in those departments. Not to mention the fact that while the script for Jurassic World is fairly predictable, it does not overstay it's welcome. Unlike the underwritten 'Jurassic Park 3' with its very unlikeable characters.
It's hard enough to keep a franchise going, especially when you're dealing with dinosaurs walking the earth. You will eventually hit a wall in terms of storytelling if your primary goal is to keep turning these films out with out any care what so ever. We saw that with 'Jurassic Park 3' where all the plot points from the previous two films were abandon for a B-movie creature feature. 'Jurassic World' tries hard to correct that by having the movie be about something a little more and try to connect itself to the first film of the series, and it's a much better film for it but it still ends up a creature feature all the same. To finish off, I will be scoring this monster-of-a-movie a moderate rating of 6.3/10!
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