Fish and Cherries Productions

Jurassic World had a lot of interesting concepts about playing god, letting science get away from us, the divide between work and family, and the need to militarize everything… but it doesn’t have the intelligence to handle them all. A lot of complex themes become almost childish in their simplicity and offering no real substance to the debate. I could have forgiven a lot of this if the characters were more engaging, but apart from Chris Pratt’s character, I didn’t care about a single one of them. The two children that share the protagonist spotlight with Pratt are particularly insufferable, one for being kind of a bad actor and the other for being one of the most unlikable twerps to land on the silver screen in a long time. A good chunk of the problems are his fault – he tries to make eyes with girls other than his girlfriend, and he has one of the most unrealistic and insulting speeches about his parents getting a divorce ever. By the way, that divorce topic? Comes right out nowhere, has no bearing on the plot, and is never mentioned again.

I’ve heard a lot of people defend this movie as a fun popcorn flick. Okay, fair enough; the scenes with the dinosaurs were impressive to look at. But Pacific Rim was also a popcorn flick and it pulled everything off and got me invested in characters that I knew nothing about, and that goes double for Mad Max: Fury Road. Here, characters are so inconsistent, inorganic, obnoxious, and in some cases, such complete idiots that it’s hard to form a connection with them. When a side character is savaged by pterodactyls and a gigantic aquatic beast for a solid minute, I find myself bored because I didn’t care about her in the first place. On the flipside, when two kids outrun and survive a genetically altered dinosaur that wiped out a group of fully prepared adults, I lose interest in the story because it’s clear that some characters have plot armor. I may see it on video for Chris Pratt and some of the dinosaur scenes, but I’ll definitely have the fast forward button handy. I get that Jurassic Park is very nostalgic for people and that the moviemakers realized they could continue the series with more active CGI dinosaurs. But to quote one Ian Malcolm, they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop and think if they should.