Jurassic World Never Understood How to Recapture the Heart and Thrills of Jurassic Park

There’s a reason why Jurassic Park is still seen as a classic more than 30 years after it came out, while Jurassic World and its sequels already feel dated, even though they’re much more recent. The difference isn’t just about time or better technology – it’s about really understanding what made the original so special in the first place. Jurassic Park was never just a dinosaur movie franchise; it was a kind of modern fable, mixing sci-fi, adventure, ambition, and real consequences, with strong characters, jaw-dropping dinosaurs, and the perfect balance of wonder and fear – all handled by a director who knew how to respect the audience. Jurassic World tried to tap into that same spirit but ended up turning everything into a loud, empty spectacle.

So where did the new era of the franchise go wrong? It assumed that what people loved about Jurassic Park was just big dinosaurs wrecking stuff – and nothing more. Sure, the 1993 movie had groundbreaking visual effects, but Steven Spielberg knew how to use them. He built suspense, used silence, and made the absence of the dinosaurs as impactful as their presence. In Jurassic World, there’s no breathing room. Dinosaurs show up constantly, roaring non-stop in fast-cut action scenes. The movie doesn’t want you to feel awe or fear – it just wants to impress you. But that feeling fades fast, and the audience’s pulse isn’t racing because they care – it’s simply because they’re being overloaded with meaningless visual noise.

On top of that, a good story needs to make the audience invested – and that means you need solid characters. Jurassic World never really knew what to do with them. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are basically walking clichés: he’s the rugged action guy with a soft side, and she’s the uptight executive who learns to be more human. Neither of them has real depth, layered motivations, or anything close to a compelling arc. Compare that with Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), or Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) – characters who had internal conflicts, sharp dialogue, and choices that genuinely affected the story. The new movies acted like they cared about character development, but every time things started getting interesting, they cut to another chase scene, another explosion, or another dinosaur screaming on screen.

Another big issue is how the newer films treat science. Jurassic Park explored serious questions about the limits of scientific power, the responsibility of creating life, chaos theory, and control. Malcolm’s famous line – “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” – still sticks in people’s minds because it sums up the movie’s whole ethical dilemma. Jurassic World, though, shrugs all of that off. The Indominus Rex – a weird, over-the-top hybrid made to entertain park visitors – ends up being a perfect metaphor for the franchise itself: something built just to grab attention, without thinking about what it actually means. The movie tries to critique turning science into a spectacle, but does it in the most shallow, half-baked way – and ironically, becomes exactly what it’s trying to critique.

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But it gets worse. With Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the franchise tries to take a darker, more serious turn, but gets totally lost in a haunted-house-style story where dinosaurs wander through a mansion like horror-movie monsters. They even throw in a human clone, trying to deepen the ethical debate – but that angle goes nowhere. Then in Jurassic World: Dominion, the series completely blows up, trying to be everything at once: a corporate thriller, a biotech warning, a global action movie with mutant locusts, and somehow also a heartfelt reunion with the original characters. None of it clicks. The script is overstuffed, the direction is all over the place, and in trying to please everyone, the movie ends up pleasing no one.

In the end, these new films fall flat because they just don’t get what Jurassic Park was really about. Spielberg was telling a story about people facing the unknown and coming to terms with their own limitations. It was about wonder, but also about humility. It was a carefully crafted thriller where every dinosaur attack meant something, and where every scene had stakes. Jurassic World and its sequels are part of a kind of factory-made cinema: fast, flashy, packed with effects, and completely uninterested in letting the audience slow down and actually feel something. It’s the kind of entertainment that’s built to be consumed and forgotten – all style and no soul.

Maybe the biggest irony of Jurassic World is that in trying to modernize what Spielberg created in the ’90s, it ended up revealing the decline of storytelling. Instead of trusting the audience’s intelligence, it banks on shallow visual thrills, assuming that’s what mainstream crowds want. Instead of real characters, it gives us generic placeholders there just to move the plot. And instead of any real feeling, it gives us noise and effects that don’t mean anything.

With Jurassic World: Rebirth, that might finally change. The plan this time is to really bring back the spirit of the original trilogy, and there’s a lot riding on it, especially since David Koepp (who wrote the first two movies) is back on script duties. It would be nice if Owen or Claire popped up again down the line in a future sequel (even just for a quick cameo), but if that happens, the important thing is to actually give them a reason to be there. Jurassic World was never a terrible idea from the start. The core idea behind the first movie actually had real potential – it just needed a better touch. In the end, the franchise lost its way because it forgot what made people care in the first place.

The result is movies that may even be successful in some ways, but will quickly be forgotten – the opposite of what Jurassic Park has always stood for. Nostalgia and CGI cannot sustain a story that doesn’t know why it exists. In the end, what remains in Jurassic World is spectacle and a lack of cinema.