Thanks, I Hate It: Jurassic World (Patreon)

This movie was the Hydrox to Jurassic Park's Oreo, a dry and unsatisfying store-brand knockoff with no more relation to the original than the fact that they're both circles. It drops the its predecessor's ball in every conceivable way, trading the sense of wonder and terror that made Spielberg's movie an instant classic for cheap wisecracks and unappealing CGI. In Chris Pratt it finds the worst and most forgettable kind of leading man, smug and boyish, devoid of sex appeal, while in Bryce Dallas Howard we get a snooty, mincing suit we can enjoy watching get cut down to size by her smirking costar.

It's the dinosaurs where the movie really loses the thread. Where Jurassic Park made us wait before giving us a series of unexpected and distinctly emotional introductions -- first the awestruck faces of its characters as they first glimpse a towering brachiosaur, then Dr. Grant's innocent joy at touching a triceratops, his favorite dinosaur since childhood, then the raw terror of the tyrannosaurus's surprise appearance --  Jurassic World flings dinosaurs at you right out of the gate and with precious little thought as to how they're framed. It trades concrete and easily parsed horror like the t. rex chasing the jeep for big, broad, bloodless set pieces. No gore, no scares. Certainly nothing that compares to the infamous kitchen scene.

Its decision to introduce genetically modified dinosaurs is both poorly executed and deeply odd. With a bottomless fossil record of bizarre and terrifying creatures to pull from, why create an x-treme tyrannosaurus? To be charitable I suppose the indominus rex's long, spindly fingers are at least conceptually frightening, but really the thing looks like a Todd McFarlane action figure, so conspicuously attempting to be cool and adult that it overshoots and lands in embarrassing self-consciousness. The CGI does it no favors. Where Spielberg's 1993 movie made judicious use of animatronics, darkness, and rain to obscure the shortcomings of computer generated imagery at the time, Colin Trevorrow's pastes its monsters right out in the open, much to their detriment.

The whole thing is a cool guy action fantasy in a way Spielberg's original -- and, hell, even Crichton's novel -- never was.  There's a motorcycle chase with trained raptors in tow, a conspiracy to sell dinosaurs to the military, and a slew of other ideas straight out of the Tom Clancy playbook. The movie has no respect for the animals it capitalizes on. It's as slickly corporate and unmemorable as the massive theme park in which it takes place, a Jurassic Park-themed skin tugged over the generic frame of any other modern Disney Monopoly-era summer blockbuster. It deserves to be forgotten.