The big reason this movie failed for me was that it used the hackneyed "it's a stupid premise so why try at all" excuse so the filmmakers can bloat out their two hour running time with CGI out the ass and paper thin characters and plotting, both of which are common to the generic summer blockbuster fare we've been getting for the past decade. However, here's the thing: the original Jurassic Park was NOT a stupid Michael Bay piece of junk. Obviously, it had dinosaurs tearing the island a new one and chasing people, but there was meaning to it. It raised interesting questions about the nature of science and our own ignorance of the consequences of progress. Jurassic World, on the other hand, uses the EXACT same theme from the first movie and since it's a sequel there's no fucking reason why anyone would try to build a park a second time! They even have a meta moment where one of the characters brings this same problem up themselves and it's just brushed off as winking fourth wall fan service.

Another big reason this movie doesn't work is how dull and generic the characters are. Chris Pratt's character, Owen Grady, is basically doing his best Han Solo/Indiana Jones impression, but about 10X douchier and with a slight sense of misogyny. The filmmakers paint him as this heroic "man's-man", perfect in every way cliche action hero so you think that he's going to have some major flaw that screws him over...AND THEN HE DOESN'T! He literally is right about everything that happens in this movie and never undergoes a character arc of his own. He's the exact same douche he was at the beginning of the movie, except now he's got a hot girlfriend and no job. Speaking of his girlfriend, Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing's character is as underwritten as anything else happening in this movie. The character is supposed to be this apathetic, career devoted businesswoman who cares little for family or ever settling down and it's obvious that the filmmakers are going to set her up for an arc where she learns to care for other people. However, there's no pivotal point in the story where she suddenly starts caring about her nephews or Owen. She's just cold and removed one minute and the next she's as overprotective as a mother grizzly bear. The romance between her Owen is shoehorned in for the sake of it's own existence and I never for one minute bought that these two people would ever fall in love with each other nor would the sequence of events in the film cause them to since there's never a slow moment where the two share an intimate moment that would show the slightest shred of chemistry. She just shoots a pterodactyl in the head and that somehow gives the two the hots for each other? True love, I guess?

The movie also suffers from the modern genre cinema trope of the overuse of Easter eggs and punch you in the face references that are cute the first time, but quickly become painfully trite when you realize this crap is actually driving the plot along! The two boys discover the remains of the visitor center from the original Jurassic Park and somehow hotwire a jeep that hasn't been used in twenty years to escape from the jungle, even though the motor as probably rusted by then due to constant rain. The worst instance of this, however, is the climax when the Indominus Rex as attacking the protagonists near the front of the park. Claire releases the T-Rex from it's paddock to fight the monster and it basically turns into the shitty Rex vs Spino fight from JP III all over again. Even worse, suddenly velociraptors are working WITH the T-Rex as if they're somehow buddies now, complete with the raptor running into the battle in a slow motion zoom straight out of a bad early 2000's action flick. They even share a glance of approval after the fight like they were rivals in a Fast and the Furious movie or something! It's obvious the movie is trying to buy my love off my nostalgia for the ending to the first movie where the T-Rex saves the people by attacking the raptors, but this ending is nothing more than a brainless dinosaur brawl with no tension or weight. In the original movie, you never knew what character might survive to the end of the movie since the movie was never sold on the popularity of the actors as the main attraction to come see the movie. In Jurassic World's case, all the advertising has advertised the hell out of Pratt and Howard's presences so we know they would never die in the movie so there's no reason to care what happens in the plot since any scene where they are in danger is meaningless. The filmmakers don't have the balls to kill off a rising star like Pratt so there's no sense of dread when the dinosaurs attack since we know he'll never die. It's tedious and boring.To add insult to injury, the Mososaurus is the only reason the Indominus Rex is even killed, since it bursts out of the water and eats the monster in the last minute, which makes the T-Rex and raptors superfluous since if the I-Rex had just wandered close enough to the dock it would have gotten eaten anyway!

Even as it's own story, this movie is, at best, generic and mediocre. There's nothing original or interesting happening anywhere in this movie. It's like a mix of Friday the 13th and the 1998 American Godzilla movie. The Indominus Rex's "killing for the sake of killing" behavior basically turns the dinosaur into a slasher movie villain, which misses the point entirely. These are animals, NOT people. The reason they killed in the original movie was for food or to protect their territory/young. It made sense in that context since that's how animals in the wild would behave. Furthermore, it brings the theme back of the movie back into focus since it underscores why these animals should have stayed extinct since they would become the top of the food chain once again.

I've seen a lot of people who like this film tell naysayers that they should "view it as it's own film" instead of comparing it to the original Jurassic Park.However, this movie doesn't get to pull the "view it as its own story" card when it goes out of its way to insert winking fan service at every opportunity it gets. Hell, fanservice even becomes a plot point at several times in the movie (i.e. the boys finding the original visitor center and hot wiring a jeep to escape). This movie reeks of the same out of place fanservice that plagued the Abrams helmed Star Trek movies, thinking that trying to give the audience a nostalgia rush is a substitute for good writing. Instead, this movie constantly relies on cheap callbacks to a movie's legacy that it neither fully understands or respects.This movie fails to understand why the original was so successful. Instead of aiming for restraint and focus on proper storytelling, the entire movie is nothing more than a giant set piece for rampant destruction porn and death.