Friday Night my plans for the night fell through and after a pleasant evening spent with my sweetie-wife I went to the theater and watched the newest installment in the ‘Jurassic‘ franchise. Of the previous three films I have seen two of them in the theater and Jurassic Park III I watched on blu-ray when I picked up the boxed set at a decent price. So I am a fan but not a particularly hard core one. I was not determined the watch this installment on the big screen, but the chance arose and I do believe that a film is best viewed in a proper theater.

Short review: I enjoyed it but I did not love it.

The film is set twenty years after the original Jurassic Park. Jurassic World is a going concern having made real Hammond’s vision of a zoo/theme park with living biological attractions. The story borrows and lifts from previous franchise themes and characters, but in a simplified manner reducing all the people to stock characters with little to inject life into them. Protagonists Corporate characters are cold business people who have a change of heart learning what is really important in life. Child characters are siblings living under the threat of a family dissolution. Scientist characters are haughty in their arrogance in the face of nature and disrespectful of their creations. (There’s an argument to be made that the I-Rex is really a new version of the Frankenstein tale.) Villainous military characters see only the potential for war and death, though the concept of V. Raptors replacing soldiers or drones ranks for stupidity right up their with the company’s weapons division obsession w the Zeta Reticulian parasite in Alien. Chris Pratt’s character is the wise uber-competent hero who is rarely wrong and needs no life lessons to learn.

All that said, and these are real flaws, the films was fun in a theme park kind of way. (I was also amused just how much the set of Jurassic World looked like the theme park Universal Studios.) the film pretty much jumps to action with just minimal set-up and once the action starts, it runs at full speed, pausing occasionally for nods and camera-winks to the original film, and then right back to the scientifically implausible I-Rex and her need for violence.

If you like films with lots of action, and you can tune down your disbelief enough this film is enjoyable, but not one worthy of repeated viewings.