So, I saw it last night with about eight other people. These are the highlights of our animated discussion on the subway home:

Spoiler:
All of the human characters were pretty lame, incompetent, or both. I don't think I knew anyone's name except for Aunt Claire, Chris Pratt, and the computer guy, Larry. Then I got on Wikipedia when I got home and his name is actually Barry. Oh well. But that's okay because this movie was all about the dinosaurs, the people didn't really serve any purpose except as window dressing to fight scenes. Which was alright. Jurassic World was not an exceptionally smart or clever movie. Smarter than Jurassic Park III, but less so than the other two. Which, again, was fine because I came to see reptiles go at it, and go at it they did.

All of the human deaths were really superficial. They had a high body count, but not a lot of named characters died, a sharp contrast to the first movie where almost the entire cast gets wiped out. Civilians and soldier casualties abound, but if you are in the movie for more than three minutes, you're probably safe. The best death, I thought, was the British lady who gets picked up by the flying dinosaurs, dropped, picked up again, brought into a water tank, waterboarded by them, and then they all get eaten by "Moses-saurus" or whatever it was called. The worst death was when the guy advocating for military usage died after his monologue was interrupted.

I was really interested in hearing what he had to say because he seemed like the only character in this movie to have an actual plan for using these dinosaurs. The CEO just wanted to keep a park running, but this was a park that was losing money and had to introduce, and later create, new animals just to maintain a constant level of customer satisfaction "in the low-nineties". They talk about stegosauruses being as mundane as elephants, so they have to spend $363 million dollars creating the Oedipus Rex or whatever it's called in order to maintain their flow of customers. Throw in the cost of building the enclosure and the technology to keep it in line, and the fact that they made two and had one get eaten, and that is a lot of money thrown away to essentially tread water. Not the most economically feasible idea ever, especially in comparison to the idea of using raptors, or the Indomitus, for military purposes. Militaries will spend a lot of money, even on untested far-out projects. So, the "bad guy" was right on that level, he was just kind of a jerk when presenting his argument.

I thought that the dinosaurs looked alright, especially the Indomitus, but they weren't as up to snuff as in the first movie. We nicknamed the dying Brontosaurus "Hotdogsaurus" or "Bratasaurus" because of how weird it looked, and the raptors looked fine, but lacked the sense of menace and quick movement that they had enjoyed in the first movie.

Ultimately, there was no sense of menace to Jurassic World. Part of this stemmed from the fact that it was pretty obvious that no one really important would die, but a lot of it came from the cinematography itself. For example, there was a lot of gore, but there was no suspense. Actions were practically broadcast before they happened. The raptors in Jurassic Park could terrify me because they were fast-moving, stealthy, and were hardly on the screen for more than a few seconds at a time, at least until the finale. They tried to make the raptors seem cool, but sacrificed a lot of the mystery and awe factor by having them in so much of the movie, and having Chris Pratt calling them goofy names. The Indomitus tried to stay in the shadows for a bit, but when it did show up I was more impressed with how cool the spine-y things on its back looked than scared.

I loved the movie, I honestly did. It was a rip-roaring good time of dinosaur fights. But after seeing the Social Network the night before it and remembering the first movie, I wish that it had been a little smarter and not as "blockbuster-y", but I still thought my fourteen dollars were well-spent. I could go on about missed opportunities, conspiracy theories, and my vision of the sequel(s), but I'll end on my favorite part of the whole movie: when the raptors have turned on their handlers and are killing them, Chris Pratt makes eye contact with one and they seem to be having a moment when BOOM an RPG blows the hell out of the dinosaur. Our whole group burst out into laughter at how ridiculous and unexpected it was.