More of Everything: Jurassic World

When I saw the first teaser trailer for Jurassic World, with the notes of John Williams' score that everyone knows so well, I got excited. Super excited. Jurassic Park is a fairly definitive masterpiece in my opinion.

Then I saw the full trailer and my expectations were tempered. This is why trailers are so important - they set the tone for what a movie is going to be. When I saw the trailer, I got the first look of what the movie was going to be about. I guess I thought it was going to be more like the first, but the trailer showed it was going to be a little bit different.

And the movie isn't bad. I just didn't LOVE it. As soon as Vincent D'Onofrio started talking about using the velociraptors for the military, I checked out. That was just ridiculous to me. And it was so obvious he was going to be the bad guy. I was actually surprised he didn't get eaten in the end (he didn't, right? I can't remember now).

This movie has everything Jurassic Park didn't, and that's not a compliment. Huge effects (I like the animatronic dinos). Huge sets (remember how the first one was just a group of people on an island?). A romance (sometimes guys and girls are just friends and/or colleagues). Lots of plot going on (lots of characters, and none of them particularly memorable like Samuel L. Jackson or Newman). Corporate sponsorship (So. Many. Sponsors.). Regular people doing ridiculous things (Dr. Grant was an actual anthropologist who studied dinosaurs, so was Dr. Sattler. Owen and Claire are not, which makes them less believable). I think Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a great example of how you don't  need any of those things to make your movie a summer blockbuster.

Then I wondered if maybe I was missing the point. Maybe the film/director was trying to make a sly commentary on the nature of corporate greed and how we are always wanting things bigger and better, that we are bored easily and will do whatever it takes to keep ourselves intrigued. If that was the case, I think he missed the subtlety.

It's a decent movie, but I would recommend to anyone to just watch Jurassic Park instead.