By Scott Tibbs, March 28, 2016
The entire premise of Jurassic World is absurd. After this went very badly the last three times, they would NEVER be allowed to operate another park. The U.S. government would be like this:
"No. You had a Tyrannosaurus Rex go on a rampage through San Diego. You are NOT going to create more dinosaurs, especially genetically engineered dinosaurs that are bigger and more powerful than the others. We are going to nuke the island and incinerate everything on it."
Even if the park was somehow allowed to operate, no tourist would ever go there. You certainly could not fill up the park with people after multiple disasters and all of the people that were killed and eaten. Tourists would never be clamoring for bigger, more powerful and more dangerous genetically engineered dinosaurs that will create havoc and massacre people like they did the last three times.
Beyond the absurd premise, we get an overused movie trope. Twenty minutes in we already have some military guy wanting to use the velociraptors as bio-weapons. I am sure this will end well. Of course it does not end well.
I understand Jurassic World does not necessarily take place in the same world as other movies where this very sort of thing backfired, but one would think that in this universe they have movies and books and video games where we create bio-weapons that turn on us. As soon as the stereotypical "military industrial complex" guy started blabbing about using the raptors as weapons I knew the raptors would turn on the humans. Just how stupid are these people?
Better yet, just how lazy are these writers?
I can suspend disbelief for the idea of cloning dinosaurs, but you need to have people behave like normal people would behave in that world. The most important question to ask yourself when writing characters for a movie is this: "If this were real, would these characters be behaving this way? Would I behave this way?" Characters are not believable when they act in ways that only an evil, stupid or certifiably insane person would behave. This is just lazy.
Normally, I do not like reboots but this is one case where a reboot would have been far better than a sequel. That way, you are not carrying the baggage of three dinosaur rampages that would doom any chance for this park to even exist, much less draw more than a handful of insane and suicidal tourists.
As stupid and nonsensical as the movie was, it was entertaining. The writers know what this is and they went straight to the main attraction: A dinosaur rampage. It is too bad that the path to getting to that rampage was so poorly written that it would be better as a parody than as an action movie.
Final Grade: C+
