First Hit: Although the CGI is great, the whole film felt staged like it was a sequence of scenes strung together to make a story.
I liked Jurassic Park enough to want to see this leap forward film. This story has us, the visitors to the park (world), always wanting something new and different or else we won’t spend the enormous amount of money required to visit the amusement park and make it profitable.
This is the “why” they genetically created this new dinosaur (Indominus – Rex) as an attraction. To bring more people to fund more generic engineering. Then there is the story about the Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) who works at the park but is being neglectful of her nephews Zack and Gray (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins respectively) who come to visit her at the park.
Then there is Own (Chris Pratt) who works at the park and is “training” the Velociraptors to respond to his commands. We’ve got Claire running through the jungle and the film in high heels (although there is a scene where she has flats on). There are a number of misrepresentations during the film, but the fun factor makes it rise above mediocrity, but not by a whole lot.
Pratt is fun in his best interpretation of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. He’s good in this rough and tumble role. Howard is good as the female interest of Pratt’s as well as the key female character in the story – she’s the one from which the story binds. Vincent D’Onofrio as Hoskins the quasi-military oriented guy who wants to use the dinosaurs as a weapon was very formula driven. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver wrote this overly ambitious script. Colin Trevorrow directed this film. Unfortunately, the bigness of the task at hand was beyond his ability to rein in the ideas into a single cohesive story.
Overall: The ambitiousness of the concept and the multitude of stories ran further than the abilities to make this film work.