Movie Review: Jurassic World

In 1993 Stephen Spielberg directed Jurassic Park, an instant hit and never-aging classic, based on a novel by Michael Crichton. With all its success, Hollywood asked for sequels (go figure), and then came Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Jurassic Park III, and now Jurassic World. And as sequels trend, each installment gets less about story and increasingly about more dinosaurs, bigger dinosaurs, and cooler scenes. Jurassic World tries hard to revive the series' original theme of man playing God with science, and to bring back a compelling story. And trust me: you can tell. From blatant debates between characters, to forced emotional scenes (never created by characters depth or motivation, but only by relatable moments, dramatic music, and lots of crying), everything is so as obvious a narrator might as well have paused the movie, walked on screen, and said, "Pay attention, now, for this is where we talk about our message," or "Now you are supposed to feel sad." And when I said the sequels are about bigger dinosaurs, I meant that quite literally for this latest installment. This new dinosaur is so big and so scary the writers did not even know what to make it. But thankfully they resolved this by simply making him everything. Every time he does something terrifying, the scientists blame it on some peculiar strand of DNA they put in him. The dinosaur can camouflage, and so they reveal, "We gave him chameleon DNA." He can talk to other dinosaurs, and so they reveal, "We gave him velociraptor DNA." I was waiting for him to jump really high and for the shamed scientists to admit, "We gave him frog DNA..." The acting is equally awful.  But at least it looks pretty?