Is Jurassic World Any Good?

 A Whole New World. With Dinosaurs. 

Jurassic World - Film Review By Nathan Brooks

And they thought the Smiler was bad.

Jurassic Park isn't the most consistent franchise. The first film, as well as being groundbreaking, was a very tense and entertaining film, mostly thanks to its ability to make you care about the characters. The second does at least have some effort put into it, but ultimately doesn't make you care as well as the first. Then you get to the third. Did anything even happen in that film? Anyway, after 14 years of no more dinosaurs, Jurassic World was finally released, but is it the sequel Jurassic Park deserved?

Story

Jurassic World did what the franchise should've done long ago and based the story around a now successful Jurassic Park, or Jurassic World, as they're calling it. The idea is is that people have gotten used to the whole dinosaur thing and a bit bored of it too. This meaning that to keep people interested, the park's had to come up with a brand new dinosaur, which obviously is a terrible idea. This excellently sets up a lot of things they could do with this idea, and gives the film that slight bit of inventiveness that puts Jurassic World above the rest of the sequels.

The camouflaging Indominus Rex.
Yes, camouflaging.

So that's the basis of the story and is also pretty much the entire story, as it really isn't the main focus of the film. It's clearly just there to set up the dinosaurs and because of that, not much does change from beginning to end, apart from the intactness of the park and the alive-ness of some of the people. Some more things do happen in the film and there's a decent sub-plot surrounding Owen's (Chris Pratt) raptor training but all in all it's very basic and certainly not something you're going to get particularly engaged with.

6.5/10

Characters

Here's a list of clichés;

Does this look familiar to you?

- Eccentric billionaire owner.

- Parent/Carer who's bad with kids.

- Quirky ladies man.

- Grumpy teenager.

- Overexcited kid.

Those are the main characters of this film. A list of clichés, and not even well done clichés. There's some character developments that the film dedicates and entire scene to and then never follows them up, meaning those scenes could've been wiped from the film completely and it wouldn't have made a single difference. In other words, the characters are pretty terrible and the only redeeming factor is that the quirky ladies man is played by Chris Pratt.

3/10

Looks

Dinasours! Great big massive dinosaurs with big teeth and tails and claws and they eat people and they're great big massive dinosaurs!

There's always a bigger fish.

Incase you can't tell, I loved the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were amazing. They were huge, they were fast, they were vicious and they were huge! Every time there's a dinosaur on screen the film becomes so much more fun. The only real problem is that it never feels tense, this is mostly down to the characters that you just can't care about at all, but also partially down to the predictability of the 'scary scenes'. In fact, they're so predictable that when I was watching it, my friend lent over to me and said, "There's going to be a jump sc-" and then there was a jump scare. 

In the case of Jurassic World the dinosaurs are more fun and less scary. The big chases and the dinosaur on dinosaur fights are entertaining and exciting, but don't leave you on the edge of your seat like the first one did so well.

8/10

Music

Don't worry, there aren't any giant
hamsters.

I'm just going to copy and paste the Super 8 music section into here, because it's exactly the same.

Super 8's Jurassic World's music seems to be trying desperately to be John Williams, but never quite being John Williams. The reason being, is that it isn't John Williams, it's someone else and because of that, it's not so memorable. It's not awful either, it does do what it's supposed to do and works perfectly fine, it just isn't quite what it clearly wants to be.

7.5/10

Final Thoughts

Your ability to enjoy Jurassic World will be entirely based on your ability to overlook the simplicity of the story and the downright awfulness of the characters. For the most part, I was entertained enough by the dinosaurs eating things, but I never got the same feeling I had when I first watched the original. Jurassic World has the huge dinosaurs and crazy chases to keep you entertained, but doesn't have a good enough story and deep enough characters to keep you engaged.

Overall: 6.3/10

Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt investigate an accident.
 I wonder what could've caused it?