Well, the one benefit of sixteen hour flights is that you get to spend a lot of time catching up on recent media you may have otherwise missed. I’m assuming I’m paying a premium in seat prices for access to summer blockbusters that I couldn’t be motivated to actually head to a cinema to view. I’m certainly not paying for the leg room!

And what greater movie opened this summer that I’ve been quiet about than Jurassic World? No, seriously, was there a bigger movie released this summer? I don’t follow releases and I don’t know what came out. I’m assuming there’s a Marvel movie or three. I know I put Ant-Man on my list of what to watch below Magic Mike XXL.

Thankfully, it seems Air Canada was determined to run a Jurassic Park marathon instead. Seeing in the list Jurassic World sent my heart a-flutter. Finally, I can watch that which I was never going to bother with and I wouldn’t have to spend anything extra! I could see what the fuss (or non-fuss was because, really, I heard no one talking about this one) was about.

So what were my thoughts? Well, it wasn’t completely awful. But it’s a far cry from good. It’s better than the other Jurassic Park sequels but that’s like praising a movie for having comparatively more eloquent writing than The Room. It shouldn’t really be a compliment that you can scratch together something more graceful than, “I don’t want to talk about my business. It’s too personal. So tell me about your sex life!”

By the way, if you haven’t seen Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, you really should. Go to one of those little indie theatres that has the special showings. It’s a treat. Spoooooooon!

Where was I? Right, Jurassic World. Let’s get down to brass tacks here. What did it do well? It’s pretty. Improvements and refinements to CGI continues to do these fantastical movies service. That said, I had the luxury of watching the original after it and, honestly, the dinosaurs aren’t that much worse in the original. No, the real improvement is in sound stage design. Granted, to overcome this, older director’s had to do more on location shooting. And there’s something archaically authentic of Jurassic Park’s vistas. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly. Perhaps it’s the cheap looking line of track running through actual overgrowth that adds something. Jurassic World appears more complete, however. And it’s zoo/theme park design is really top notch. The art director deserves some credit for really bringing to life and making quite believable this incredibly fantastical attraction.

There’s lots of money in dollying up Jurassic World; it’s a pity that the poor girl has no substance behind her. This brings us to the other thing that Jurassic World does better than it’s sequel predecessors. It follows the original’s release far more closely. This is both it’s strength when compared to, say, The Lost World but ultimately a weakness when compared to Jurassic Park itself. Because, let’s be honest, everything Jurassic World does, Jurassic Park does better.

The children are far more engaging in Jurassic Park. The narrative flow is far more gripping. There’s tension. There’s character complexity. There’s sharp plotting. It’s the sort of story that very clearly derived from a very strong base. I’ve read Michael Crichton’s novel and, truthfully, I’m uncertain whether I like the movie or book better. Somewhere along the line, the film found the essence of the novel and made some notable improvements with far less time to explore them. Specifically, I much prefer the film’s John Hammond and not solely due to Richard Attenborough’s phenomenal portrayal. I found the tragic change in his character as he realizes his life’s work an utter failure more compelling than the staunch and (albeit) rather silly end he reaches in the book.

That said, Jurassic Park is filled with excellent performances. No one can forget Jeff Goldblum’s smarmy chaostician. Sam Neill’s Grant is a wonderful ornery Indiana Jones. Wayne Knight’s slimy Nedry is as wonderfully unlike-able as you can get and Samuel L. Jackson’s Ray Arnold is lamentably underused.

Who does Jurassic World have? Chris Pratt is very obviously pushed as a hybrid Grant-Muldoon but never comes across as being as capable in either roles. While Muldoon essentially only gets eaten in Jurassic Park, the way he commands people in the control room during the crisis lends far greater gravitas than Pratt’s running around and eschewing direct orders. While Pratt may control his raptors like chickens, it feels like Muldoon had a far better understanding of the creatures. Bryce Dallas Howard has some fleeting moments as the under pressure operation’s manager but she drops this role to run around the jungle with Pratt trying to extol the virtues of modern feminism while completely failing in the bad-ass female role compared to her predecessor Laura Dern as Dr. Sattler. Whose left of the cast? Vincent D’onofrio, as security chief Hoskins, sucks up time putzing around the screen doing… something. He’s clearly meant to be some sort of villain but he doesn’t do anything. Even when his “special ops” (emphasis on special here) take over the control, it’s still Dearing’s staff that are doing any work. Outside of being obnoxious, he doesn’t add anything. The children are worse than Jurassic Park’s primary because they’re there to primary take up space. See, the children in Jurassic Park served a vital role in the personal story of Dr. Grant. This exact same character development is shifted onto Howard’s Aunt Dearing but there’s no establishment that Aunt Dearing is so detached from her family and this is a personal failing outside of a few throw-away lines. As such, there’s no real investment in those familial stakes. In fact, you never really get a sense that she’s not absolutely worried over her children solely because it’s just irresponsible for losing them in her park.

There was something about an imminent divorce but this–to me–came out of nowhere and went back there just as quickly to make it such an inconsequential moment in the brother’s lives. There was no story around them other than they were typical kids in a park that got lost.

Perhaps the only character that I liked in the film was B. D. Wong’s reprisal of Dr. Wu who at least had the decency to lampshade some of the nonsense surrounding the series and this movie in particular.

Now, let’s get to the bad. And yes, that entire rant on pointless characters wasn’t even addressing the movie’s flaws!

The plot is awful. It’s the sort of plot that moves forward with its own inexplicable logic, requiring the poor decision making of its characters and throwing any sort of internal consistency out the window in order to succeed. Indomitus Rex, as a concept, is silly. The creators seemed rather aware of this and tried their hardest to explain this but the thing is just dumb. It’s really glaring too. Jurassic Park presents its dinosaurs as monsters and treats them like real animals. Jurassic World presents them as real animals but treats them like monsters.

What do I mean by this? Jurassic World goes through a lot of character dialogue establishing that the dinosaurs are just any other animal. Pretty much all of Pratt’s work speeches is spent demystifying them. He controls his velociraptors through standard behaviour imprinting and training. Indominus Rex’s motivations are framed as poor socialization through isolation and automatic feeding. And yet, the tail end of the movie revolves around Indominus killing just because and one hilariously stupid moment where the stupid animal squawks at a pack of raptors to convince them to its side (despite, you know, it already established that the pack was only working because Pratt had–since their birth–been socializing and raising them). But no, these animals just mystically decided to work with Indominus despite the creature being raised in isolation with no contact with any other creature (so how does it communicate with a different species of dinosaur in the first place?) and it only being several months old (even if this simplistic and inaccurate representation of pack mentality were true does anyone truly think that a pup would ever convince a pack that’s all older than it to follow it?).

And what the hell was up with the pterosaur rampage? These creatures are theorized to be fish eaters so they clearly had no reason to hunt the park goers (and their attempts to do so in the film demonstrate how ill-fitted their beaks are for such a task) and furthermore, what the hell even attracted them to the park in the first place when they were released from the aviary at the far northern end of the island? Why wouldn’t they just disperse all over the place?

Well, that’s because we need some really contrived moment where the park is attacked by animals but since we’ve spent so much time with Indominus in the middle of nowhere, we have no damn good explanation for it.

And this is the kicker. The rampage in Jurassic Park didn’t just sort of happen. There were a lot of culminating factors that built up to Grant, Sattler and children running through air ducts as raptors trying to eat them alive. Jurassic Park spends quite a chunk of time setting up its perfect storm of conditions for the entire enterprise to collapse. Nedry is disabling all the high-tech security so he can steal the embryos for a rival corporation. A massive tropical storm comes through to fully knock-out the hacked systems (which Nedry could theoretically plan around to maximize chances of him performing his corporate espionage without getting caught). The island itself is running on a skeleton screw: partly because it hasn’t opened yet and partly because nearly everyone was evacuated (whether because of the storm or because staff don’t actually stay on the park is never made clear). Thus, between human treachery, natural destruction and abandonment of resources, the first Jurassic Park fails.

Now look at Jurassic World. Indominus Rex escapes its pen because it has magical control over heat sensors (never explained but the assumption is a gene-wizard did it). Indominus Rex gets to rampage because Dearing not only issues that the containment squad solely try to restrain the creature instead of kill it (because it’s too costly an asset to lose, she claims, despite the cost a lawsuit should a single park goer get injured or killed from its escape grossly outweighs any production cost and the fact that they’d now have the embryo to re-clone anyway. Oddly, this is already mentioned in Jurassic Park when that one handler who gets injured or killed by the velociraptor in the opening scene costs Hammond and his investors over 20 million dollars). Then, instead of deploying all their security to now capture the creature that’s eluded the first containment squad (which we know since D’onofrio’s special ops come swooping in later and there’s a bunch of inept security running around during the pterosaur attack), Dearing simply enlists Pratt to wander into the jungle while the owner decides to fly a single helicopter with one mounted gun to try and shoot it down (and gets foiled by the aforementioned magical pterosaurs). I’ve mentioned the third attempt to stop the Indominus when the raptor hunting party magically turns against Pratt and the third containment squad sent after it.

And then, of course, the only thing that stops Indominus is an equally baffling and unexplained alliance between a Tyrannosaurs Rex, the last surviving member of the velociraptor squad and the water bound Mesasaur. All we needed was a really lame line like, “There’s always a bigger fish” to tie the whole package up in it’s indescribable camp and stupidity. And then the T-Rex and raptor basically respect head-nod each other out of the scene.

And here’s the frustrating thing: people will forgive these incredibly awful plot moments because “it’s a movie and you’re suppose to turn your brain off.” And yet, what made Jurassic Park so great was that you didn’t have to. Was it perfect? Of course not but it certainly wasn’t this stupid either.

And at the end of the day, we’re not looking for a re-master of Jurassic Park in the first place. It’s a fantastic movie that, if anyone wants to watch it, should just watch it and not go through the hassle of this crap. What Jurassic World should have done was tried to chart it’s own course instead of relying on the prior successes as a crutch. Especially when it can’t even use that crutch to keep it hobbling down its broken course. What would I have liked to see from Jurassic World? For it to tell it’s own story. Figure out what the hell you’re actually looking at. Jurassic Park isn’t coy about its themes. Every single scientist in the movie questions the ethics of returning to life a species that was extinct for the sole purpose to print tickets and sell merchandise. It posits that the value of life is more than how much you can charge someone to come and see it. The roar of T-Rex at the end isn’t a roar of some wild animal claiming it’s status as the apex predator. It’s the roar of life itself, reminding the viewer that artificial constraints can not bend or break it.

And the roar of Jurassic World is nothing more than a mew for attention.

Edit: Apparently, the Indominus’ original escape is somehow arranged by Wu and chief security officer Hoskins? At least there’s lampshading if the original complaint about it not making any sense still stands–considering if that was the case, why didn’t they open the door instead of relying upon the Indominus using it’s chameleon skills to lure a dopey security officer into the pen who is too slow to make it to the employee exit but fast enough to open the massive pen’s door?