Jurassic World

We saw the long-awaited Jurassic World today. It was enjoyable. Some of my thoughts and feels below (spoiler alert)...

I really liked Chris Pratt's character, despite being pretty one-sided and kind of overly masculine and confident. I think I wouldn't have liked his character as much if it had just been played by some heartthrob actor that had always been hunky. I like that he has played both the goofy chubby guy and the hero, and other roles in between. Also, Michael and I got really excited when he was training the raptors with a clicker, since that's what Michael did with our cats. Clickers work, people; even with dinosaurs, apparently. 

I thought it was funny the only person they brought back from the original was Dr. Wu, considering he was such a minor character in the original - practically an extra. 

There was some unnecessary background character development that was unresolved at the end of the film, so they could have just left it out altogether. For example, there was a few minute scene with the kids talking about how their parents might get divorced. It was totally irrelevant to the plot. Same with showing the audience the teenager has a girlfriend he doesn't really care about. It doesn't influence his actions or feelings at all throughout the movie. We see him looking at other teenage girls in the park, but he never talks to any of them. He doesn't get reunited with the girlfriend or break-up with her. Why have her in the one scene at the beginning at all? Also, there was no reason to make two boys that aren't even old enough to drive good at fixing cars. I liked that they went to the old park, but there could have just been a jeep there that worked. Having them fix a car did nothing for the plot. 

As compared to the original, the kid actors in this movie were not as good. Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards were so good portraying a wide range of kid/adolescent emotions in Jurassic Park. I was indifferent to the two boys in Jurassic World, whatever their names were. Speaking of the actors, I think they also tried too hard to have the same types of roles in this film. The two kids, the couple, the scientist, the guy in the control room, the guy who wants to play god with science. Try to have some new character dynamics, Jurassic. I hadn't seen the second and third sequels as many times as the first; I know their dynamics were a little different. Then again, they were also the less popular movies, so maybe I'm wrong.

The other thing that I thought was really good in the original was the building of suspense at certain times, one example being in the scene where the two kids are hiding from the raptors in the kitchen. The flow of this one was very different because they just had so many shock moments, and everything escalated to insane action sequences. For example, At the end when the raptors were fighting with the indominus rex and one gets thrown into a restaurant window and bursts into flames. Presumably it landed on a grill, but the amount of fire was quite unnecessary, as were some of the other pyrotechnics during that big fight. There were less scenes where there are one or two people dealing with one or two dinosaurs, like in the original, and I think the entertainment value of those scenes went overlooked because the director tried so hard to put in so many "wow" moments. 

Also, the scene with the flying dinosaurs attacking everyone was pretty insane and then left unresolved. We know that eventually those people that survived made it to the evacuation site and then left the island, but the heroes just essentially had bigger fish to fry and left all the guests to continue to be attacked until I guess the flying dinos were just done. We don't know because we didn't see the end of it. We just saw that same area later when it was empty. I kind of just wish they had shown one peripheral character at least doing something to divert those dinosaurs or get people to safety or something while everyone else left to deal with the bigger dinosaur. 

Wow, I didn't plan on writing this much about an action movie. Anyway, overall it was entertaining and fun to see on the big screen. There were also some little allusions to the first film that were fun to spot, like Mr. DNA in the visitors' center. There were a few satisfying moments where characters and some dinosaurs get their comeuppance. 3 out of 5 stars.