Last movie watched...

[I, Cosh]

It's probably as good a monster movie as I've seen (apart from the original King Kong) and definitely the most enjoyable JP film.

Each to their own, but I honestly don't know how anyone in their right mind could seriously argue that Jurassic World is on any conceivable level - performances, score, pacing, vfx, writing, directing - superior to Jurassic Park.

I never liked the original Jurassic Park much, even when it came out.

Very much this. Always get a bit surprised when people cite it as a real favourite.

[shaolin_monkey]

It's probably as good a monster movie as I've seen (apart from the original King Kong) and definitely the most enjoyable JP film.

Each to their own, but I honestly don't know how anyone in their right mind could seriously argue that Jurassic World is on any conceivable level - performances, score, pacing, vfx, writing, directing - superior to Jurassic Park.

I never liked the original Jurassic Park much, even when it came out.

Very much this. Always get a bit surprised when people cite it as a real favourite.

Yeah. Saw it in the cinema originally, and on telly a few times since. Besides the T Rex bits, I find it a bit 'meh'. It's all a bit smaltzy.

It may be a generational thing. Folks on my team love it, but they're a lot younger than me - perhaps they were wowed by seeing it as a child, and have carried the love for it since, in much the same way I carry the original Star Wars trilogy?

[radiator]

dropped plotlines (the sick  Triceratops section, for example)

That isn't a dropped plotline, it's a bad omen (note that is happens in the plot at the exact moment that literal stormclouds start to gather), and early confirmation of Ian Malcolm's dire warnings (that Hammond and his scientists don't have a clue what they're doing). It's also a convenient plot way of separating Sadler from Grant and the kids.

As for 'annoying kids', a) they're supposed to be annoying (at least initially), and b) if you think they're genuinely annoying as child actors and movie kids go, you obviously haven't seen very many films.

It may be a generational thing. Folks on my team love it, but they're a lot younger than me - perhaps they were wowed by seeing it as a child, and have carried the love for it since, in much the same way I carry the original Star Wars trilogy?

I think that's a large part of it. Jurassic Park is undoubtedly the Star Wars/Jaws/ET formative cinema experience of my generation.

But come on, even if you don't have that personal connection with it, or (fair enough) feel that it's one of Spielberg's weaker films, you have to concede that - even on a technical filmmaking level - editing, score, pacing - it's simply in a different league to World. The original is a phenomenally well-made and genuinely ground-breaking film - the work of a true master filmmaker, packed with moments of iconic visual storytelling and distilled cinematic magic. World is third-rate, schlocky hack-work - a limp tribute act by comparison, utterly devoid of tension or wonder.

I don't know how anyone could compare the T Rex attack scene from Park and say that any action sequence from World can hold a candle to it - I can't even remember any of the set-pieces from World.

Park has well-defined, memorable characters who behave in a believable way, and properly crafted arcs for each of them - World has improbable stock cardboard cutouts (Chris Pratt's generic, dull Mary Sue etc) who behave in totally illogical ways and have nonsensical or redundant arcs (the pointless divorce plotline, Chris Pratt awkwardly kissing Bryce Dallas Howard in the midst of slaughter because.... reasons?, Bryce Dallas Howard being directly responsible for a lot of the death and mayhem, yet the plot never addresses this fact and suddenly she's the hero?).

Park has a script and plot so tight you could bounce a penny off it and a remarkably small cast of named characters, every single one of whom serves an essential purpose to the plot - World is amateurishly-written  borderline gibberish, and is stuffed with plotholes and extraneous characters that serve little or no purpose to the plot.

Park has witty dialogue and countless quotable lines - World is wall-to-wall clunky dialogue and groan-worthy lines.

I could go on...

This pair of Birth.Movies.Death. articles nail it for me so completely that I want to print them out and frame them:

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/06/25/movies-should-be-good

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/09/03/the-strangely-cruel-and-unusual-death-in-the-lost-world-jurassic-park

If all of the film's dinosaurs had been wireframe animations there's no question everyone would have been calling it a bad film, but when the story and characters are as unfinished and crude as that the problems are handwaved.

[TordelBack]

dropped plotlines (the sick  Triceratops section, for example)

That isn't a dropped plotline, it's a bad omen (note that is happens in the plot at the exact moment that literal stormclouds start to gather), and early confirmation of Ian Malcolm's dire warnings (that Hammond and his scientists don't have a clue what they're doing). It's also a convenient plot way of separating Sadler from Grant and the kids.

Ah but it is a dropped plotline.  We are given (at length) the mystery of the sick triceratops, all the symptoms, but never a resolution. In fact, if I remember the book correctly, the solution is actually cocked up anyway, because Eli doesn't find the berries in the dung (accidentally eaten when the Triceratops renews her gastroliths), which she does in the book.  Yes it serves to split the characters up, and indeed as an omen (although there are plenty of others) and thus serves the bigger plot, but it's surely a subplot that is jettisoned, and it's mildly unsatisfying   Doesn't ruin the film or anything, mind.

[JamesC]

That's a really long, well written post that quite possibly proves that Jurassic Park is, objectively, a better film than Jurassic World.

I still enjoyed 'World' more. It may be junk cinema but sometimes that's okay.

JP never really sat well with me and, to be honest, I've never been much of a Spielberg fan. I know he's an incredibly accomplished film maker, I just don't like many of his films very much.

As for the kids - well, I do have a bit of an aversion to screamy kids in films (which is why I can't bear The Goonies or Honey I Shrunk the Kids) but I do remember the ones from park to be particularly annoying (not as bad as the ones in Spielberg's War of the Worlds though). The kids in 'World' were pretty much okay though. 

[TordelBack]

I don't think there's any question that JP is a better-crafted film than JW, but seeing as it already exists and we watch it several times a year, having JW be distinctly different in approach and tone is a good thing. The necessity for characters to have 'an arc' is by no means a given, especially in films where hubris and nemesis are right there in the concept. Sometimes a tough guy blasting through the jungle with his trained raptor pack is as much fun as a palaeontologist deciding all  kids aren't as ghastly as he suspected.

[radiator]

Ah but it is a dropped plotline.  We are given (at length) the mystery of the sick triceratops, all the symptoms, but never a resolution.

I don't think anyone (except you  ) has ever watched Jurassic Park and came away wondering about the Triceratops. It's a totally incidental thing.

What's key for me is that Jurassic Park had a great premise. The underlying pseudoscience may well be a gimme, but the ambition of John Hammond and the circumstances surrounding the park itself were totally believable. The insipid 'Mr DNA' tour, the rows of branded lunchboxes lining the giftshop shelves, never to be sold. It all adds so much texture.

Jurassic World, on the other hand, operates 100% on laughably stupid B-movie logic, and is based on the premise that someone would think strapping guns to trained velociraptors would have a useful military application. Whether Jurassic World is a good silly B-movie is another matter, though personally I think it's very poor judged even by those standards. I hate to invoke Honest Movie Trailers, but 'the most expensive SyFy original movie ever made' is bang on the money IMHO.

Sometimes a tough guy blasting through the jungle with his trained raptor pack is as much fun as a palaeontologist deciding all kids aren't as ghastly as he suspected.

It all depends on execution though.

Despite seeing Jurassic Park dozens of times and knowing exactly what happens, the key action and tension-building scenes still somehow keep me on the edge of my seat. It's like a magic trick. All of the action in Jurassic World just felt so flat to me. I never felt remotely tense or surprised. And I really don't think that's just nostalgia clouding my judgement (I know even someone as jaded as me can still get that visceral reaction from a big blockbuster thanks to Fury Road).

I think it's partly because the visual effects and how they are shot and staged - to my eyes, even with nostalgia blinkers off - work so much more effectively in the older film, and crucially, the plot and characters are so thin and unengaging in World that I don't really care about anything that happens to them. World has the scale, true, but never once feels like a tangible, real place in the way the park and island in the original do.

I love Chris Pratt but his character JW is a shite protagonist. We are repeatedly told how awesome he is, despite him not actually doing much of consequence in the entire film. Likewise Nick Robinson - great in The Kings of Summer, but such a nonentity in this, with nothing to do except just be a bit smarmy.

[JamesC]

I've never known anyone have so much to say about the virtues of Jurassic Park. I think most of my friends think of it as the first so/so instalment in a franchise that quickly went off the boil (but then, we were old enough to see Ghostbusters and Back to the Future at the cinema so we had high standards  )
It's telling that I only watched JW because my dad happened to have borrowed it off my sister and was going to watch it anyway. I hadn't even added it to my Love Film list.
I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed it and I think most of that has to do with the fact that it was just a big silly monster fest and nothing more.

[TordelBack]

I completely agree that the dinosaur effects in JP are staggeringly effective - we watched it again just last week, and really, the initial T-Rex attack and the raptors in the kitchen are just magic. However, I don't really see Jurassic World as any less believable - there's a lot of implausible stupidity in JP too. That the Ingen operation needs the revenues of 30,000 theme park attendees a day to sustain it, rather than the few hundreds JP seems set up for, and that as a failing business military contracts might be explored by members of the board, seem no dafter than (say) safari park cars with no locks on the doors, or a raptor loading cage that requires a guy to climb on top and manually operate a gate...

If you're looking for a compact movie with scares, tension, and well-drawn characters, JP is the one - but for a big silly disaster movie with genetically engineered monsters and the tourists they feed on, I think JW is fine fare.

[Professor Bear]

Park is as daft a film as World is.  This is a silly line of argument.

[Theblazeuk]

Oh come on now. The starting point of resurrecting dinosaurs from DNA in amber is of course daft. However then creating a 'new, genetically modified dinosaur' is at the very least cubing that initial daftness.

[TordelBack]

Except that all the creatures in JP were new genetic constructs. If you're going to (somehow) 'patch' T-Rex DNA with frog DNA (which is not how a genome works) and inject it into an ostrich egg, why not use Raptor DNA too?  JW just runs with the basic idea to even sillier MORE ARSOM  places.

In some ways Dr Wu's speech on the subject in JW is the most sensible thing said in any of the films.

[Buttonman]

Risible Clive Owen rom-com Words and Pictures.

[Goaty]

[shaolin_monkey]

Jurassic Park ripped that whole 'gene splicing to make dinosaurs to make a theme park' from the Cursed Earth saga anyway (almost word for word - go have a look!) so all arguments are moot.