'Jurassic World' Review: When Nostalgia Goes Wrong

"Jurassic World" is a reboot of a franchise, so naturally there are a number of "meta" moments that aim to wink and nod at the audience. One of them is particularly meta: the new park's owner talks about how people have lost interest in dinosaurs, that it takes bigger and scarier ones to impress people these days.

The scene is a fairly obvious nod to the audience, and an acknowledgement of the problems that "Jurassic World faces. The original "Jurassic Park" was mind-blowing in that it was one of the first movies to use CGI to such a realistic level, but these days special effects have become so honed and so commonplace that seeing a dinosaur on screen isn't even close to awe-inspiring.

Thus, "Jurassic World" has to get by on the old fallbacks of story, character, dialogue and action. In three of those four categories, it fails pretty miserably.

In this reboot, it's been a few decades since the failed attempt of the first Jurassic Park. Jurassic World, the park's new iteration, has been open and operating sucessfully for a while with no major hiccups.

That changes when the park's new owner, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) works with scientist Dr. Wu and park coordinator Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) to create a new species of dinosaur that's bigger and more terrifying than a T-Rex. Of course, the new dino escapes and what's worse, Claire's two nephews (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) are visiting the park and happen to be wandering about when the crisis happens.

It's all a very basic setup, similar to the original Jurassic Park but with a more lethal dino to deal with. Unfortunately, it's where the movie tries to innovate that things start getting a bit silly.

We have Chris Pratt's character, an ex-Marine named Owen, who has trained four velociraptors to follow his commands. That's a campy but acceptable development in this world, but when Owen's colleague Hoskins (Vincent D'onofrio) tries to convince him to use the velociraptors as a "weapon" in actual wars, we have to raise an eyebrow at the movie's logic and our characters' motivations.

There's also the fact that Claire and the other higher-ups at the park refuse to kill the new dino at first, citing costs, when clearly it is costing them more to suffer many other dino deaths...and the inevitable human ones, too. There are other developments that we won't mention due to spoilers, but it all ends up being a little unbelievable, which is saying a lot in a movie about a theme park filled with cloned dinosaurs.

"Jurassic World" clearly tries to skirt a fine line between pleasing die-hard "Jurassic Park" fans and bringing in a new crowd of kids and adults alike, and that might be the problem. There are some nice nods to the original movies for fans, but they're ultimately a little unsatisfying, and the rest of the movie just isn't quite good enough to keep you engaged, much less caring about the fates of the characters.

Unless you're a big fan of the series and feel like you can't wait, you should probably avoid seeing this one in theaters.

Rating: 5/10