Franchises: Jurassic Park. Jurassic World (2015)

If you're a fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, then you know that there were talks about a fourth film for many, many years after Jurassic Park III's release in 2001. Not being someone who really gets into the thick of movie news unless it's something I'm really, really interested in, I never followed the development of the fourth film that closely but I always heard rumors that there was going to be another one at some point. Even as late as 2006 or 2007, I knew it was still in the cards, as I saw a short interview with Steven Spielberg around the time of the Oscars where he, after dodging questions about the long-rumored fourth Indiana Jones movie, said that there would definitely be a Jurassic Park IV. Even though I didn't think much of the third movie when I first saw it (to date, it's the only one I haven't seen in the theater), I was more than welcome to the idea of another one, given the deep childhood connection I've always had to this series, particularly the first film. But, after not hearing anything else about it following that short interview, and then seeing an announcement in late 2008 where it was said that some were viewing Michael Crichton's death that year as a possible sign that there shouldn't be any more, I kind of wrote it off. It wasn't until I got the special edition Blu-Ray set of the first three movies for Christmas in 2011 that I got the hint that the fourth movie was still on, as they somewhat teased it, while also acknowledging that the loss of both Crichton and Stan Winston had been a major blow to the series. And then again, I didn't hear much of anything else about it until the year before it was released. I don't remember at all when it was that I learned the movie was most definitely coming but I can remember my reaction when I heard that the title was going to be Jurassic World: "Great! The dinosaurs have finally gotten off the island and are going to be taking over the Earth! I've been waiting for this for so long." That's what I thought the "world" part of the title was alluding to but, nope, not quite (and not even a possibility until the ending of Fallen Kingdom, which is a story for another day). But, regardless, it was another Jurassic Park movie, so I was most definitely game.

The movie turned out to be a godsend for me personally because, the week after it was released, my paternal grandparents' house burned down. They both got out safely but that house, which I had been to countless times ever since I was a tot and which I had many fond memories of, was completely destroyed. That happened the day before my birthday, no less, and my grandparents had to move in with us until they figured out what to do. In short, my personal life had been turned complete upside-down and so, when I finally went to see Jurassic World that Sunday, I was more than ready for some escapism. As a result, I had an absolute blast. I had heard some negative reviews beforehand and while I did agree with some of the complaints, like the lack of originality and the characters not being the best, I found the movie to be so unabashedly entertaining that I didn't care. Looking at it now, I still kind of feel the same way. Yes, again, I can't deny that there is a large feeling of, "Been here, done that," and the characters are kind of two-dimensional, but because this movie gets so much else down pat, like the spectacle and wonder, the special effects, and the adventure, I'm more than willing to forgive it. In fact, if I were to rank this franchise, while the original Jurassic Park will always be at the top, I think I would put Jurassic World right below it. I've always had an odd relationship with The Lost World in that I liked it as a kid, and still do, but it never completely grabbed me the way the first one did, and Jurassic Park III, despite having some entertainment value and being a nice popcorn movie, always felt like nothing more than a rushed cash grab, especially given its short running time. You could argue that this is every bit as much of a cash grab but, for me, this is the sequel that's come the closest to capturing what I love about the original so much.

Zach and Gray Mitchell, two brothers from a slightly shaky family, are sent off on a trip to Jurassic World, a theme park featuring genetically recreated dinosaurs on the island of Isla Nublar, site of the original Jurassic Park. Upon arrival, they're supposed to meet up with their aunt, Claire Dearing, the park's operations manager, but as she's swamped with work and has to act as a tour guide for some possible sponsors, she makes her assistant, Zara Young, look after them instead; Claire, however, does give the boys VIP passes to all the rides and attractions. In an effort to keep up with ever-changing customer demands and the public having long become blase over the notion of cloned dinosaurs, the park's owner, Simon Masrani, has recently approved the creation of a creature that is 100% genetically-engineered rather than cloned from the DNA of a real dinosaur. The creature, dubbed the Indominus Rex, has been isolated in a relatively small enclosure her entire life and tends to hide within the foliage. Getting only a brief look at the pale-colored but very frightening beast, Masrani decides to have Owen Grady, a Navy veteran and trainer of the park's four Velociraptors, inspect the enclosure to be extra safe. Grady, meanwhile, is having to deal with Vic Hoskins, the head of InGen security, who's so impressed with his ability to make the raptors listen to and obey him that he intends to weaponize them, despite his objections. When Grady inspects the Indominus' enclosure, he's concerned about the creature's being raised completely in captivity and isolation, with no social skills, which has potentially made her unpredictably dangerous. His concerns are soon justified when they enter the enclosure when it appears that the Indominus has escaped, only to find out that she's intelligent enough to trick them into thinking she has so she can make her way out of the enclosure and into the island's interior. She goes on a bloodthirsty rampage, killing security units who attempt recapture her, other dinosaurs simply for sport, and ends up releasing numerous Pterosaurs and Dimorphodons from their aviary, which wreak havoc on the park. Now, Owen and Claire must do what they can to find Zack and Gray within the chaos and try to restore order to the park, unaware that Hoskins is planning to take advantage of the situation and use it as an impromptu field test for what he plans to do with the Velociraptors.

When you look at the history of the long road to what ultimately became Jurassic World, you can see that this film was stuck in a development hell the likes of which hadn't been seen since Freddy vs. Jason: numerous false start dates, a myriad of possible story ideas, constant script rewriting, hiring of and losing key personnel, possible director candidates, etc. In regards to the latter, over the years there were rumors and speculation about whether Steven Spielberg might get back in the director's chair on one of these movies for the first time since The Lost World or if Jurassic Park III-director Joe Johnston would return, which is what I was kind of expecting to happen (I vaguely remember reading somewhere that that would probably be the case), but, as we all know, the job ultimately went to Colin Trevorrow. Going with him seemed like an unusual choice, given that he'd only directed one theatrical film beforehand, the 2012 film, Safety Not Guaranteed, and had written another, 2003's Making Revolution; otherwise, he'd only written and directed a short, a documentary, and a TV movie. Initially, I thought that hiring him was a move by Legendary Pictures, since they're known for putting fairly inexperienced directors on big, blockbuster movies, like Gareth Edwards on Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts on Kong: Skull Island, but he was already on the movie by the time they agreed to co-finance it and it was Spielberg and producer Frank Marshall who decided to bring him on after the latter had, along with Kathleen Kennedy, seen Safety Not Guaranteed. Once he had the job, Trevorrow and his writing partner, Derek Connolly, completely rewrote the script that they already had by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, incorporating a few key ideas from Spielberg; it was also Trevorrow's idea to rename the film Jurassic World rather than Jurassic Park IV, as it had been called before. Since the movie's enormous success, Trevorrow has directed The Book of Henry, which didn't make much of an impression (at least, not a positive one), and was infamously supposed to direct Star Wars Episode IX but quit after the script he and Connolly wrote was rewritten, as well as because he didn't like what Rian Johnson was doing with Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (of course, he was far from the only one). The two of them also wrote Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which Trevorrow was a producer on, and at this point, he's scheduled to come back and direct the third film in this new Jurassic Park trilogy.

When it comes to the spectacle, I feel that Trevorrow knows how to deliver, but when it comes to writing characters, he falls flat, both here and in Fallen Kingdom (again, for another day). In some cases here, he's lucky enough to have some truly charismatic actors to make up for the shallow writing but not so much in others. One example of the former is Chris Pratt as Owen Grady, the badass Velociraptor expert. He's like if you took the character of Robert Muldoon from the first movie, who was already pretty cool, and cranked all of his qualities up tenfold while adding in some new ones. He may not be that deep of a character, and I do not buy his chemistry with Claire Dearing or care about their relationship at all, but Pratt makes it work with his natural charisma and likability. In his introductory scene, where he's working with the Velociraptors, you can tell that he's worked with them long enough to know exactly how to get them to cooperate and do what he needs them to, while also knowing that they could slaughter him in an instant if he stopped being the alpha and showed any kind of weakness, in spite of the fact that he imprinted on them from the moment they were born. This complex relationship is shown when he runs into the paddock in order to rescue a guy who ended up falling in and really has to work to keep the raptors from attacking, just barely managing to make it out with his life. Because of their unpredictability, as well as because he sees them as living, thinking beings rather than just assets, Owen is completely against Vic Hoskins' idea of using the raptors as weapons, just as he is the concept of genetically modifying them to keep customers interested. His seeing them as wild animals that deserve respect is also one of the reasons why his and Claire's attempt at a relationship never got off the ground (that, and because Claire is such an uptight narc of a woman but more on that in a bit).

In spite of his critical viewpoint of some of the park's activities, because of his expertise on the animals, Simon Masrani arranges for Owen to inspect the Indominous Rex's enclosure and when he does, he immediately sees a problem in keeping the creature so isolated, as she's developed no social skills. His warning about the potential danger, coupled with the creature's vast intelligence, proves to be very valid when she tricks them into thinking she's escaped so she can break out for real. When she begins to go on a killing spree in the island interior, Owen tries to tell the higher-ups that the Indominous needs to be destroyed and is frustrated when they refuse to listen to him, citing her dollar value, and basically kick him out of the control room. But, as things continue to go south and Claire's nephews, Zach and Gray, end up lost in the park and on the run from the Indominous, she teams up with Owen to save them. Using his knowledge of animal behavior and his Navy skills, he proves to be the type of guy you want on your side in such a dangerous place, as they try to track down the boys and witness the carnage the Indominous is wreaking first hand. He becomes absolutely enraged when Hoskins takes advantage of the situation to use the raptors to hunt down the Indominous as a field test and initially slugs him over it but, when it becomes clear there's no other way, he goes along with it as long as he's in command, which he's allowed to be. That's when you get the now iconic scene of Owen riding a ATV through the jungle amongst the raptors, looking like the badass that he is. Problems arise when the raptors start looking to the Indominous as their new alpha due to her own raptor DNA and turn on Owen and Hoskins' men but he's able to evade them and eventually reestablish his bond with them, including his personal favorite, Blue. Of course, when the T-Rex is unleashed to help kill the Indominous, Owen and the others take a backseat to the big dinosaur fight that breaks out, but before that, he continues to help Claire and the boys to safety throughout the destroyed visitor's center and lab. After the crisis is over and everyone's going home, Owen tells Claire that they should now, "Stick together... for survival." (Again, don't care, and if you've seen the sequel, you know it ended up not mattering anyway.)

I am not a fan of Bryce Dallas Howard. I don't mind her as Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3 (although, until recently, I didn't know that was her because of the blonde hair) but she brought nothing to the table as John Connor's wife in Terminator: Salvation and she makes her role of Claire Dearing here really hard to like. Claire is the archetypal person whose life is centered completely around her job as Jurassic World's operations manager, with a mindset and personality that's so corporate and controlling that it ensured she and Owen Grady never had another date. She's also so obsessed with her job that she doesn't even ask for some downtime in order to be with her nephews, Zach and Gray, whom she hasn't seen in many years, during their visit to the park, instead handing them over to her assistant, Zara Young, to look after. And like a lot of the people who work there, she often refers to the dinosaurs as "assets," seeing them more as figures on a mapscreen and as attractions rather than living animals (which also caused friction between her and Owen). Despite her strained relationship with Owen, she has him inspect the Indominous Rex's paddock, as Simon Masrani wanted, but when the thing gets loose and starts running amok, instead of listening to Owen about how dangerous the situation is, given the Indominous' apparent intelligence, Claire irritatingly yells at him, "You are not in control here!" Even worse, she later tells him to leave if he's not going to be part of the solution, more concerned about the park never reopening if it's closed and the island evacuated, which he suggests they do, and instead closing off everything north of the resort and relocating the tourists back to it (which later proves to have been a big mistake). Once she realizes that her nephews are out in the island's interior, she talks Owen into helping her find them, and when they see that they've escaped into the jungle on foot, she insists on accompanying him in finding them, despite the danger. When he comments on how she's hardly dressed for a search in the jungle, she rolls up her sleeves, unbuttons her blouse, and ties its tail over her stomach, which is meant to indicate to him that she's ready to go. I suspect it's also meant to make her come across as endearing and spunky but instead, it makes her comes across as annoying, which is how she's already been coming across.

There's a moment where Claire and Owen come across an Apatosaurus that's been fatally mauled by the Indominous and as she watches the poor thing's life slowly give out, Claire is clearly touched by this and it's meant to show you exactly when she stops looking at the dinosaurs as nothing but assets. While I like the scene and find it to be genuinely moving, I feel that way because of the sadness over the Apatosaurus slowly expiring as it lays there and Owen's trying to calm it; I couldn't care less about the effect it has on Claire's character because at this point, I've decided I don't like her. Besides coming across as unlikable, stupid, annoying, and an overwritten archetype, her constantly blank face and expressions emit a feeling of superiority that makes me feel like this woman needs to get the stick out of her ass (seriously, something about that look on her face in that second image makes me want to punch her). They also try to bulk up her sex appeal by having her running around in just a tank-top by the end of the movie, her skin all shiny from sweat, but it doesn't do much for me. Anyway, from that moment on, she's little more than along for the ride, doing little more than tranquing a dinosaur or two, driving the van during the escape when the attempt to sic the Velociraptors on the Indominous goes south, and screaming. She does get the idea to let loose the T-Rex to battle the Indominous during the climax but other than that, Claire does nothing that elevates my low opinion of her and, as I've said before, when she and Owen decide to stick together before heading home, I couldn't care less.

Speaking of archetypes, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins) can most definitely be described as such. Gray is a very enthusiastic and excitable little brainiac of a kid, who's more than happy to be at Jurassic World and experience everything that the park has to offer, while Zach is a typical teenager who'd rather be back home, is annoyed by his brother's exuberance, often ignoring him, and is constantly on his phone, sending texts to his girlfriend. Of the two of them, Gray is more likable because of eagerness and interest in everything around him, as well as his sensitivity and worry about his parents' relationship, which he knows is on the rocks and is heading for divorce. He's also very disappointed that his Aunt Claire doesn't join them as they explore the park. Zach, on the other hand, is a douche. Even though he has a girlfriend back home, he's constantly checking out other girls around him; he's completely disinterested in a park that features real dinosaurs (I know that's one of the movie's major themes but, seriously, dude?!); and he has no sympathy whatsoever for how upset his brother is over the prospect of their parents divorcing. First of all, when Gray tells him how he knows for sure that they are heading for divorce court (which is very telling evidence, by the way), Zach's attitude is basically "whatever," given how a lot of his friends' parents are divorced, and when Gray starts to cry about it, he admonishes him for it. Granted, he does briefly try to get him to look on the bright side, saying that they'll now get two of everything for birthdays and Christmas, but otherwise, he's completely unsympathetic, even going as far as to say that he's not going to be around in a couple of years anyway! Shortly afterward, when they're in a gyrosphere ride that allows them to explore a field full of dinosaurs, Zach's decision to go exploring off the beaten path through a section of gate that's been smashed open nearly gets them killed when they run into the Indominous Rex. Like most of the other characters, they spend the rest of the movie trying to avoid being eaten, and while they do reconcile the rift between them, it's not in a very satisfying way. It simply comes about when Zach promises Gray that he'll protect him as long as he's around, Gray reminds him what he said about not always being around, and the two of them have some unspoken resolution that I don't care about. (I seem to be saying that a lot in regards to these characters, don't I?)

As cliched as a concept as using movie monsters as weapons is, Jurassic World is, interestingly, the first of this series where the dinosaurs are considered for it, having been seen as just good for park business and other corporate potentials before. The man behind this notion is Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), the head of InGen Security, an obnoxious, overbearing loudmouth whom Owen Grady clearly does not like at all. From his first scene, you know that Hoskins is not somebody you're meant to like, as he sees nothing in the Velociraptors except as lethal military weapons, superior to drones in every way, and completely shirks off Owen's warnings that they cannot be tamed to the point where this is possible, as well as that they don't always obey him, regardless of their bond. This interest in using deadly animals as weapons apparently stems from something that happened to him when he was younger, when he formed a bond with a wolf pup he rescued that was so strong that the thing violently defended him from his wife when she attacked him. He tells Owen that war is completely natural and that this is going to happen, with or without him. When the Indominous Rex escapes and begins her rampage, Hoskins takes the opportunity to put the raptors through a field test by having them hunt her down and assumes command of the park's operations when Simon Masrani is killed in the chaos. Although Owen objects to this to the point where he slugs Hoskins right in the face, he makes him realize that he has no other alternative and they go ahead with the plan... which quickly goes south when the raptors begin looking to the Indominous as a new alpha. However, as the film draws to a close, it's revealed that Dr. Henry Wu, the park's chief geneticist, is working with him to create genetically-modified dinosaur hybrids as possible weapons in a side project for the company, one of which was the Indominous. She's what Hoskins really intends to weaponize, meaning that Claire Dearing's earlier accusing him of expecting the Indominous to eventually escape and that this was a field test for her was right all along. While Wu and some of the genetically altered embryos are evacuated to Costa Rica, Hoskins himself ends up getting killed by the Velociraptor called Delta, who mauls him when he stupidly tries to placate her with Owen's hand signals and says that he's on her side (I also like how when she bursts in, she cuts short a pretentious monologue Hoskins is saying at that point).

Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) is basically this film's version of the late John Hammond, having been bequeathed the company of InGen following his predecessor's death. Like Hammond, Masrani is portrayed as a very intelligent businessman who's also keenly invested in giving his customers a feeling of wonder and awe with the genetically recreated dinosaurs. He's more interested in knowing whether or not the tourists and the dinosaurs are happy than the statistics that Claire Dearing reads off to him, and this childlike intent on joy applies to his flying the helicopter he uses to reach the Indominous Rex's paddock, at one point telling Claire to stop worrying about all the statistics and enjoy the flight. He's also a bit more safety-conscious than Hammond was; while Hammond saw the inspection of Jurassic Park's security measures in the first film as a nuisance, Masrani takes it upon himself to make sure that Owen Grady inspects the Indominous' enclosure to make sure that it is safe. When the Indominous escapes, Masrani is initially intent on not causing a panic and recapturing rather than killing her, given how she represents a $26 million investment, but when she slaughters the men who are dispatched to do so, he begins to rethink his stance. He confronts Dr. Wu about it, accusing him of having created a hideous, deadly monster rather than after he's told of the genetic material they used to fill in the DNA gaps, which led to the Indominous' deadly characteristics, but is simply reminded that he asked for something bigger, scarier, and with "more teeth." Regardless, he orders Wu and his team to cease everything they're doing. When things really go haywire, Masrani takes it upon himself to protect his park and the tourists by piloting the armed helicopter they use to try to kill the Indominous, but he unfortunately dies when the Pterosaurs she lets loose during her rampage causes him to crash.

While he's a major character in the original Michael Crichton novel, Dr. Henry Wu is in only one small scene in the first film and is not seen or mentioned at all in the first two sequels, so when I heard that not only was Wu going to be back in Jurassic World but he was going to have more screentime and would be played again by B.D. Wong, I was interested. Wu still doesn't have much of a role here, all things considered, but he certainly has more of a character and is gradually revealed to be a very immoral person. He was already shown to be quite proud of the work he and his team had done in the first film and here, it's developed into a kind of megalomania, as he tells Simon Masrani at one point that Jurassic World exists solely because of him, adding, "If I don't innovate, somebody else will." He's particularly proud of the Indominous Rex, the DNA combination of which he refuses to reveal the specifics of, and he's more impressed and in awe of her intelligence and how adeptly she's using her unique abilities rather than concerned, writing off the deaths she's caused as merely "unfortunate." Masrani then tries to lecture him about the dangerous implications of creating such an animal but Wu reminds him that he was the one who asked for something bigger and badder to keep up with customer demands, adding, "You are acting like we are engaged in some kind of mad science, but we are doing what we have done from the beginning. Nothing in Jurassic World is natural. We have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals, and if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different. But you didn't ask for reality, you asked for more teeth." And when Masrani accuses him of having created a monster, Wu simply says, "'Monster' is a relative term. To a canary, a cat is a monster. We're just used to being the cat." You later learn just how immoral of a person Wu is when it's revealed that the Indominous is actually a creature that he developed under Vic Hoskins' orders in order to be weaponized and, unlike his employer, he ends up getting away scot-free, being evacuated to Costa Rica along with some of his hybrid embryos.

Rounding out the supporting cast is Barry (Omar Sy), Owen's friend and assistant who helps care for the Velociraptors, who understands them as much as he does, and who shares his disgust towards Vic Hoskins' desire to turn them into weapons, as well as the idea of creating genetic hybrids. He's the first one to see what Hoskins is doing when things go south and he tries to warn Owen about it but he's preoccupied at the time. Another thing he has in common with Owen is that he is a bit of a badass when the situation calls for it, riding right behind Owen on an ATV when they let the raptors loose to find the Indominous Rex. When the raptors turn on the men, there's a moment where Blue traps Barry inside a hollow log and it looks like he's going to be ripped to pieces, even after he calls her name and momentarily gets her to stop. Fortunately, Owen is able to distract Blue and, by the end of the movie, you see that Barry did survive.

Of the people in the park's central control room, two of them who stand out are Lowery Cruthers (Jake Johnson) and Vivian Krill (Lauren Lapkus). The former, who serves as the park's operations overseer, is a fan of the original Jurassic Park concept, to the point where he wears an old T-shirt that he bought off of eBay, and is another person who's not a fan of genetically-modified dinosaurs, feeling that cloned dinosaurs themselves are cool enough. He also calls Claire on her seeing the dinosaurs as mere "assets." Vivian, on the other hand, doesn't have much of a character to her but she and Lowery do seem to be rather close, and she's particularly hard hit by Simon Masrani's death during the chaos. When Vic Hoskins takes command afterward and relieves everyone else of duty, Lowery decides to stay there and continue his job, despite being opposed to the plan to use the Velociraptors to find the Indominous Rex (which he warns Claire of), and has to endure Hoskins' constantly breathing down his neck with his abrasiveness. Once the plan fails, everybody is evacuated to Costa Rica, including Vivian, but Lowery again decides to stay... and he then tries to kiss her, thinking said declaration makes him look all suave and tough, but she stops him, telling him that she has a boyfriend (that moment feels like something that belongs in the deleted scenes section on the Blu-Ray). As the last person in the control room, Lowery is the one who lets loose the T-Rex per Claire's instructions so they can use him against the Indominous and, once that monster has been killed and the crisis averted, Lowery shuts down the control room and simply walks out with a dinosaur toy, which actually does make him look cool.

Zara Young (Katie McGrath) is Claire's rather stuck-up and disinterested personal assistant who's assigned to act as a chaperone for Zach and Gray during their stay at Jurassic World. She makes it very clear that she'd rather be doing anything else (although, I think I'd be acting the same way in her shoes) and spends most of her time talking on her cellphone rather than watching them, which allows them to slip away to explore the park by themselves. Zara does find them during the scene where the Pteranodons and the Dimorphodons get loose and attack the park visitors at the central but gets carried off by one Pteranodon, dropped into the park's Mosasaurus lagoon, picked up by another Pteranodon, and the two of them are then swallowed whole by the enormous Mosasaurus, making for the film's most memorable death by far. Finally, you have Karen (Judy Greer) and Scott Mitchell (Andy Buckley), Zach and Gray's parents who are in the process of getting a divorce, much to Gray's chagrin. Karen gets the most development of the two, hoping to give her sons a family-oriented to Jurassic World where they can spend time with their aunt, only to be driven to tears when she learns that Claire isn't with them. She's also upset because she knows what a douche Zach can be Gray and wants someone around to keep him in check. Scott, however, has nothing to him whatsoever, as you see him only at the beginning and at the end, when he and Karen are reunited with their sons after Jurassic World has been evacuated.

After all the stuff I've just said about many of the characters, you're probably wondering if I do like this movie. Trust me, I do. The characters may be a severe weak point but everything else in this movie works for me, chief among them the core concept and setting. While I was initially disappointed that the title didn't mean what I originally thought it did, as I'd felt that setting these movies on an island had been played out after the third one, I was interested when I learned that the setting was a fully functional dinosaur-oriented theme park; in short, John Hammond's original dream come to fruition. I felt that was a good way to give the movie a taste of the original film, as well as come the closest to capturing that movie's magic than the other sequels by actually building on its foundation, and then go on to the logical next step of things going haywire with the dinosaurs when the park is crammed full of tourists. I will say, I don't think it quite reached its full potential, aside from the sequence with Zach and Gray in the gyrosphere and the Pteranodons and Dimorphodons attacking the main hub of the park (it would have been nice to see the bigger and more dangerous dinosaurs rampage through their, stomping or attacking and eating people) but I like being able to see the place up and running, feeling like a dinosaur version of Disney's Animal Kingdom, and a huge success on top of it. Who wouldn't want to go to a place where you can see real, living, breathing dinosaurs, even if it has been around long enough to where the idea of genetically recreated prehistoric animals isn't that big of a deal anymore? That's why I get annoyed when Zach is walking around the park, completely uninterested. There are dinosaurs around you, dude! Yeah, it may not be that big of a shock anymore but I just can't see how anybody, no matter how old, who's never been there before and seen them up close wouldn't be as amazed and in awe as Gray is. Maybe that's just the dinosaur-loving kid in me but still. And that's another thing: I feel that this movie is able to really show people, especially kids, experiencing the sense of wonder that Hammond wanted them to when he was trying to get Jurassic Park up and running in the first film. It does eventually go south, of course, but seeing their faces when they go through the main gate on the monorail, see the whole place for the first time, and finally come face-to-face with the dinosaurs builds nicely upon the same feelings that Dr. Grant and Ellie Sattler felt when they first arrived at Jurassic Park years before.

I feel that Jurassic World itself has a very appealing look to it, with the main section of it being this huge, expansive hub right on the shore of a lovely lagoon, with shops, diners, and a cone-shaped visitor's center in the middle, with attractions on either side, a building on a hillside behind the visitor's center that serves as a helipad, and a lush, foliage-covered mountain looming over it all. The inside of the visitor's center is enormous, with several different levels, and it's full of big, interactive holograms, spots where kids can dig up fake dinosaur bones, and other cool-looking, educational devices; there's a petting zoo where the little kids can interact and have fun with baby dinosaurs, including riding a baby Triceratops (even as an adult, I think I'd go there just to touch a dinosaur); a big, open field where you can take a gyrosphere out to see big dinosaurs like Brachiosaurs, Triceratops, Galliminus, and others up close (the spot that you go through to get there is shaped like a couple of Brachiosaurs, which I never noticed before until recently); another field where you can go on a dinosaur safari; a spot in the jungle where you can take river rides and observe more dinosaurs on the shore; a big lagoon where the Mosasaurus is kept and where you can see her come up and chomp a great white shark, before being lowered down in front of a large window looking into the lagoon to see her up close (even Zach is impressed with that); and a place where you can watch the Tyrannosaurus Rex come in and eat a goat inside of his paddock (I like how there's an announcement that such a thing may be disturbing to young kids and yet, when it happens, there are a bunch of kids looking through the observation window, cheering the T-Rex as he chows down on this poor goat).

The T-Rex paddock is akin to where the Velociraptors are kept, which is this open enclosure with a walkway trailing across it up above where Owen Grady can command and feed them from a safe distance. When they're not having exercise, the raptors are kept in these small, holding spots where their heads are placed in these muzzle-like contraptions to keep them from biting. Maybe that's how they rest and sleep but it doesn't look that comfortable to me. The Indominous Rex is kept in a similar enclosure, which is still under construction until she's ready to be exhibited, and is reminiscent of the pit in the first film where the Velociraptors were kept. It's also similarly menacing in that it's full of ferns, shrubs, and other plants that obscure the Indominous, as she lurks within them, peering out with her creepy, yellow eyes, and the sheer size of the place and the fact that they're still constructing it hints at what a frightening beast she is. The central control room of the park is a darkly-lit, large room with a very advanced, big computer screen up front front that allows everyone to keep tabs on what's going on, but more interesting to me is the laboratory where Dr. Wu and his team create the dinosaurs. I always find these kind of environments in movies cool to look at anyway, with how they have that white-colored, cold, clinical feel to them, and I liked seeing all of that lab equipment here, as well as the spot where the dinosaur eggs are kept (again, reminding me of that scene in the first movie where the baby raptor hatches) and the DNA sequence readouts on the computer screens on the wall, but even more interesting is this spot that Owen and the others come across during the third act. They find this room filled with dinosaur spines and embryos in big test tubes and little tanks with bizarre, little hybrids, where they've merged DNA with animals like snakes and lizards, as well as a computer readout for the Indominous Rex and what she's made from on a screen, and it gives you a taste of the very immoral experiments they've been conducting.

As good as Patrick Crowley's production design for a lot of these environments is, and it's no doubt often enhanced by digital effects, just as nice to look at are the scenes shot in real, natural locations in Hawaii and New Orleans, specifically those that take place in those big, lovely fields, those huge landscapes when Simon Masrani and the InGen team are flying in their helicopters (it's obvious from that one sequence that they shot in some of the same areas as the first Jurassic Park) and in the jungles. I know some of those were actually done either on sound-stages or enhanced digitally, such as when Owen rides his ATV through the jungle with the Velociraptors, but you can tell that a lot of those environments, which also include the exteriors of the park and Owen's little shack in the island interior, were shot in real places and they look very good. One of my favorite places in the film is the visitor's center from the first film, which Zach and Gray find out in the jungle after they've escaped the Indominous Rex, now completely overgrown and covered in plants, moss, and vines, both outside and in. I like it both for the sense of nostalgia and just for the way it looks, as they really managed to create a sense of atmosphere with how they filmed it and the way everything was left there, completely abandoned. That brings me to the film's look, which is also one of its highlights, as it's a very gorgeous and well-shot movie. As Steven Spielberg continues to do even in this day and age, Colin Trevorrow shot Jurassic World on actual film rather than digitally, which I appreciate, and he and cinematographer John Schwartzman give it a bright, colorful, and warm look. It never gets too dark (even during the third act, which is at night and often has a cool-looking, blue hue to it; in fact, the darkest it ever gets is in the old visitor's center), it manages to evoke the warm, humid atmosphere of the tropics, and it always looks nice and glossy, with the budget right up there on the screen. In addition, you get something you've never gotten before in the Jurassic Park series, which is a brief bit in a snowy area at the beginning when Zach and Gray are leaving home and that, along with the similarly cold-feeling, muted-colored laboratories, as just as nice to look at as everything else in the movie. In short, it's a real feast for the eyes.

There are probably more dinosaurs in this film than there are in any other Jurassic Park movie. Like before, there are a select few that become dominant in the story, while others merely have one scene appearances or are little more than elements for the environments. Some of the latter include Stegosaurs and Triceratops, which mainly appear in the gyrosphere sequence, the jungle river shot, or, in the case of the latter, as babies for kids at the petting zoo to ride on (the Triceratops really needs a major scene in one of these movies, besides the one in the first film that was nearly comatose because she was sick), as well as Parasaurolophus and Pachycephalosaurs (in the first scene in the control room, your hear that one of the latter is roaming around outside of his sector). You also see a herd of running Gallimimus that's being observed by some people who are on a safari type of tour in a large vehicle and there's a moment in the third act where the Dilophosaurus from the original film appears as a hologram in the visitor's center and temporarily distracts one of the Velociraptors. Of the dinosaurs with these type of "extra" roles, two of them get to have major moments. The Ankylosaurus, which has never had a really big scene in this series, appears in the gyrosphere sequence and one of them battles the Indominous Rex in the jungle, with Zach and Gray caught in the middle of it. This particular Ankylosaur is able to hold her own with the Indominous for a bit but she ultimately gets flipped over on her back, leaving her defenseless, with the Indominous finishing her off by snapping her neck with her powerful jaws. Then, there are the Apatosaurs, which you also see during the gyrosphere sequence but one individual is at the center of a very emotional see where Owen and Claire come across one that's been fatally injured by the Indominous and stay with her until her life gives out. It's a very touching moment, as Owen tries to comfort and calm the suffering creature (one of the most prominent uses of animatronics in the film) and there's a brief moment where she tries to get up but collapses and finally expires. The two of them then see that there are dead Apatosaurs all over the field, making Owen realize the Indominous is simply killing for the sport of it.

Even though they'd been sold as toys since the original movie, the Pteranodons didn't have their first major appearance in the franchise until Jurassic Park III, but Jurassic World marks the first time that Dimorphodons, another type of prehistoric flying reptile, with a long tail and depicted here as having a more raptor-like head, show up at all. Both of these types of creatures are kept in a large, dome-shaped aviary outside of the main park and are let loose when the Indominous Rex breaks in while being chased by Simon Masrani in the armed helicopter. When they scatter out of the dome in a panic, they inadvertently kill Masrani when they barrage the helicopter and cause it to crash, and they then proceed to attack the main hub of the park, swooping down on people, scratching, biting, and pecking them, and in some cases, trying to fly off with them. Zara Young ends up meeting her maker when a Pteranodon attempts to fly off with her, drops her into the Mosasaurus lagoon, and then another pulls her out and attempts to take her with him, only for them both to be eaten by the Mosasaurus; a Dimorphodon also manages to straddle Owen on the ground and claw and snap at him, but Claire puts a stop to that when she pumps him full of tranq darts. There's another moment where, as the InGen Security team that Vic Hoskins calls in is approaching the island, one of the soldiers spots a Dimorphodon flying parallel to them and he promptly shoots it out of the air. Going back to the Mosasaurus, which is another newcomer to the series, she may not have much screentime but she definitely leaves an impression. Her design is really cool, for one, as she's more or less an enormous, whale-shaped crocodile, with big flippers for limps and a long, narrow snout full of teeth, and her first appearance, when she jumps out of her lagoon to eat a great white shark they have dangling above the water, followed by the amazed audience getting a look at her through a lower level with a glass window, is jaw-dropping. She's part of the movie's most memorable death scene, when she swallows both that Pteranodon and Zara whole, and she's also the one that finishes off the Indominous, when she explodes out of her lagoon, grabs her, and pulls her back in.

The dinosaurs that have the most screentime, aside from the Indominous, are the four Velociraptors that Owen Grady trains and works with. Like before, the raptors are portrayed as being fast, agile, ferocious, and quite intelligent, and, in order to keep continuity with the previous films, they still have the now proven scientifically inaccurate, Deinonychus-based design, which I know irritated a lot of paleontologists. What's notable about them is that, while they're still very lethal creatures that could rip you to pieces without a second thought, they're also depicted as having a bond with Owen, having imprinted on them when they were hatched and looking to him as their alpha. However, this bond is far from concrete, as seen when the raptors still act threatening towards both him and the employee who ends up falling into their paddock, charging and snarling at them when they run for the door, as well as making threatening sounds when someone approaches while they're in their muzzles. When they let them loose to find the Indominous, it's clear that the only reason why they're not turning around and attacking the people is because they've been taught to lock onto a scent and stay with it, like trained dogs, and when the half-raptor Indominous manages to communicate with them, they immediately become an added threat to the team. However, when he gets a chance, Owen is able to reestablish his bond with the raptors, particularly Blue, whom he's especially close to and fond of. Once he does, the raptors begin defending Owen and the others from the Indominous, with Blue and the T-Rex battling together to take her down after the other raptors have been killed. While they all have names, Blue is the only one of the raptors I can point out as an individual onscreen because, being the beta, she's the most prominent one and also because of the signature blue streaks on either of her sides; I can't tell the other three (Charlie, Delta, and Echo) apart, except for maybe Delta, and I only know her because she's the one who took an instant dislike towards Vic Hoskins and ultimately mauls him to death in the laboratory.

While he's been pretty much the major star of this franchise from the beginning (save for when the Spinosaurus killed him in Jurassic Park III), the Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn't enter the story until the climax and is actually kept offscreen until then, as the view of him during the feeding demonstration is blocked by the tourists looking out the window. But when Claire has Lowery let him loose to help fight the Indominous, boy, is it a grand entrance! When I saw the movie in the theater, I was so tempted to get up and cheer, because I'd been waiting to see the Jurassic Park T-Rex again for a long time. In fact, while they don't outright say it in the film, Colin Trevorrow has said that this is meant to be the same T-Rex that was in the first film, now over twenty years older and with a lot of mileage on him in the form of scars, which I believe since it looks like the same exact design and skin color scheme, only faded. It also explains why the Indominous proves to be enough of a challenge for him to where he needs the help of Blue and even the Mosasaurus to take her down. I know some may find the sort of tag-team brawl Blue and the T-Rex have against the Indominous to be silly, and it definitely is, but I find that battle, as short as it is, to be so entertaining that I couldn't care less. I also like how, when the fights over, the T-Rex looks down at Blue, as if he's about to have a go at her next, but is then like, "I'm getting too old for this shit," and walks away. And when the movie ended with the T-Rex standing on the helipad, overlooking the now evacuated park and roaring, I couldn't help but smile and think, "You're still the king in my book, man." (I said this before and I'll say it again: I know that, given how it was explicitly stated in the first film that all of the dinosaurs are female, this T-Rex is technically a "she," but I always referred to it as a male when I was a kid and it just stuck, so I'm going to continue doing so.)

When talking about the creatures that were created by InGen during a lecture he gives in Jurassic Park III, Dr. Alan Grant describes them not as dinosaurs but as, "Theme park monsters, nothing more and nothing less." Grant had no idea at that time that they hadn't even begun to create monsters, because the Indominous Rex most definitely fits that description. A genetically-engineered hybrid, created by combining the genes of various creatures, most notably those of a T-Rex and a Velociraptor, the Indominous is revealed to have been raised to be nothing less than the ultimate killing machine. Having spent her entire life isolated in her enclosure, without developing any social skills and only having a connection with the mechanism they use to feed her, the Indominous spends her first scene hiding within the brush of her paddock, peeking out from behind them to peer at Claire Dearing and Simon Masrani as they watch from the observation booth. During this scene, we learn from Claire that she's already caused a lot of problems by attacking handlers and actually killing the sibling they bred in case she didn't survive. She soon proves to be dangerously intelligent and cunning, leaving clawmarks on the wall of her paddock and then using her ability to lower her body temperature (a trait she got from the DNA of tree-frogs within her) to make it look as if she's escaped and then ambush Owen and the guards when they enter the enclosure. Once she's escaped, she claws out the small tracking beacon implanted within her that they use to keep track of the dinosaurs (as well as prevent them from getting near the perimeter fences), and, thanks to the cuttlefish genes within her, proves to be able to camouflage herself in order to effectively attack the ACU team sent out to recapture her (they had to have been inspired by the arcade game of The Lost World, which had a dinosaur boss that could camouflage). As she explores this new world that she's never seen before, she, as Owen explains it, seems to realize how deadly and unstoppable she is, going on a killing spree throughout the park, slaughtering other dinosaurs simply for sport rather than food. She very nearly kills Zach and Gray when they run into her in the gyrosphere, causes Masrani's death when she breaks into the Pterosaur aviary, which leads to a lot of the tourists getting attacked by the Pterosaurs, and even when they sic the Velociraptors on her, she manages to turn the tables by communicating with the raptors and becoming their new alpha. Once Owen is able to reestablish his bond with Blue, it still takes the combined forces of her, the T-Rex, and, at the last minute, the Mosasaurus to finally bring the Indominous down.

Having been made from the genes of various dinosaurs and other creatures, the Indominous' design incorporates the best traits of all of them. Her overall body design and shape are that of a T-Rex but she has long, powerful arms with big claws that she can use to grab and throw things, a head that's vaguely shaped like that of a Velociraptor, a mouth that can open wide enough to where it almost completely envelops the gyrosphere Zach and Gray are riding in (hinting that there may be some snake DNA in there too, especially given how she can also sense thermal radiation from anything around her), thorn-like spikes along her back that are similar to those of a Carnotaurus, and the ability to walk on all fours if she needs to and then use her arms to push herself back into the normal theropod stance. You can definitely see why they created her to be used as a weapon, as she has the capabilities of a lethal killing machine and proves that she knows how to use them very, very effectively. Plus, as big as she is, she's not even full-grown yet, as Dr. Wu says that when she is, she'll be bigger than a T-Rex at about fifty feet long. But, in regards to her genetic makeup, let's be honest: were you all that surprised when it's revealed that she has raptor DNA within her? They try to make it this big mystery as to what genes she's made up of in addition to that of the T-Rex but, speaking for myself, I kind of called it very early on.

Besides being the chief antagonist, the Indominous is also the embodiment of a central theme of the movie, as well as the series a whole: dinosaurs as a means for commercialism. In the first film, you had the notion that science has advanced to the point where they've performed the miracle of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead via genetic engineering and yet, they're used for nothing more than as a way to make money at Jurassic Park, with the lawyer character, Donald Gennaro, going from being concerned about the impending safety inspection to realizing its lucrative potential when he sees the Brachiosaurus. This continued into the second film, where InGen's new owners attempted to bring the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna to San Diego and create a new park there, and by the time you get to this film, Jurassic World has become the fulfillment of these corporate ambitions: a park with living dinosaurs that's been up and running for many years and is a big success. However, it's been around for so long that people are no longer blown away by the concept of dinosaurs themselves and, to keep them interested, the company has been investing in the creation of dinosaurs that are unnatural, genetic hybrids, creatures that are bigger, faster, and meaner, as determined by corporate focus groups (kind of like how movie studios tend to operate nowadays, and it's ironic that such a commentary would come in a movie that itself is seen as just such a response to a very successful franchise). The Indominous' potential sponsor is Verizon Wireless, no less, confirming her to be a complete corporate product.

The idea of a dinosaur being created purely through genetic tinkering rather than being cloned from the existing DNA of a creature that actually lived is an idea that's always been a kind of inherent inevitability lurking in the back of this series' core concept, as well as the notion of them being created for the sole purpose of living weapons, and it is interesting how they expand on those original ideas of dinosaurs as commercialism and the age-old one of man doing things with science that they shouldn't. That said, though, does the notion of people becoming blase about living dinosaurs strike anyone as hard to swallow. I know that, in this day and age, it doesn't take long for something to lose its freshness but this is not like everyday technology that's continually refined, a played out trend or movie genre, or even a zoo with animals that are the rarest of the rare; this is a place where you can see and touch real dinosaurs! I might be saying this because we haven't gotten to this in reality yet but, while I can see Jurassic World itself and other such parks becoming an accepted part of the world, I find it really hard to believe that people would get jaded about a place where creatures that have been extinct for millions of years live again, especially when you constantly have newcomers and little kids visiting it. Again, this could be just the naive, wide-eyed child in me who wishes this was real talking, but I kind of agree with Owen and Lowery that dinosaurs themselves are more than enough to keep the public interested.

Jurassic Park is a franchise that's well-renowned for its groundbreaking and realistic effects work, especially when it comes to the original film, and for me, Jurassic World more than holds up that tradition. Aside from a few hiccups here and there, where something looks overly synthetic, more often than not, I believe that these dinosaurs are real living, breathing creatures, with amazing detail in their individual designs, and are right there in the real environments, with the real actors (the same goes for all those holograms in the visitor's center too). Seriously, Phil Tippett's studio and ILM need to stay on this series as long as it goes on, as they seem to be the only ones who can make computer-generated dinosaurs look believable. A big innovation in this film is that they used motion-capture for all of the dinosaurs, whereas before, it had mainly been used for human-like creatures like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies, King Kong in Peter Jackson's film, and Caesar in the modern Planet of the Apes films. While I personally didn't see much of difference between the way the dinosaurs moved in this film as opposed to the previous ones, I still thought that was a cool idea and it no doubt further aided in their feeling like real animals. I also have to really compliment the use of digital work to enhance the environments and make them feel more than they already were. One of the best examples of this is the scene where Owen rides his ATV through the jungle amongst the Velociraptors; not only are the raptors digital but so is the jungle around them, as they actually filmed Chris Pratt driving on a dirt road and added the foliage later and it looks really good. Though, if I have to be honest, while I do think the CGI in this film is top notch, I would have liked some more practical effects thrown in there, as had been done before. Yeah, you do get the animatronic Apatosaurus head and neck for that one that's been fatally injured and practical raptor heads for when they're in their muzzles, which look good, but it would've been nice to have some bigger scale effects, like maybe some full body ones for the T-Rex and Indominous when they're facing off, which they did for some of the fight between the T-Rex and the Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III. They had Legacy Effects doing the animatronics and a lot of the people there worked for Stan Winston, so they were obviously up to the task. A real missed opportunity, in my opinion.

If I could point out another major problem with the movie, besides the rather weaksauce characters, it would be, the interesting concepts, setting, and themes aside, there isn't much here that hasn't already been done in the previous movies. We're on an island again, we have people running away from and getting slaughtered by dinosaurs again, and, really, the story is more or less that of the original Jurassic Park, except that the park is up and running rather than about to open. I personally don't care if something isn't 100% original, as long as it's entertaining, but, as much as I enjoy it, I can understand why a number of critics were a bit annoyed at the lack of anything truly new.

The film opens on the eerie visage of a dinosaur egg cracking open in a laboratory, the camera pulling back as a small, clawed hand works its way out of the shell, panning around another egg that's hatching, and then zooming back into the hole in the egg, within which you can now see the gray flesh and orange-colored of the creature within (it's the newly born Indominous Rex). The screen does a fade to white, accompanied by a dinosaur snarl, as it transitions to what appears to be a dinosaur-like foot crashing down on some snow... but as the camera pulls back, it reveals that it's actually nothing more than a bird hopping around. It takes off into the sky and the camera pulls to reveal the Mitchell household. After we're introduced to Zach and Gray, as they're sent off by their parents to visit Jurassic World, we see them arrive in Costa Rica via plane and board the fancy boat that takes the tourists to Isla Nublar. Once they arrive, they meet up with Zara Young, with Gray being confused that their Aunt Claire isn't meeting them, and the camera pans up to reveal that the long line of people they're walking with is heading up the stairs to a monorail. They're then shown riding said monorail, with Zach disinterestedly listening to his music, while Gray excitedly runs up to the front of the train to see the Jurassic World gates, based on those of the original Jurassic Park. It then cuts to him running excitedly into the lobby of the hotel they're staying at, followed along by Zach and Zara, and they then make it up to their really nice-looking room, as Zara tells them that Claire has given them VIP access to all of the rides and attractions. In spite of this, Gray can't wait and runs out onto the balcony of the room, as the camera goes past him to reveal our first look at the expanse of the park and zooms up towards the visitor's center and then to the helipad behind it, all while John Williams' original theme swells (I swear, I still get goosebumps when I hear that music).

After the scene where Claire Dearing is introduced as she gives some potential sponsors a tour of the laboratories, showing them the DNA sequence for the Indominous Rex on a computer screen, and where Dr. Wu makes his appearance, explaining that the Indominous was designed rather than bred, we go back to the park, where Gray and Zach are entering the very impressive visitor's center. If possible, Gray becomes even more excited when he sees everything around in the enormous building, such as a big hologram of a Brachiosaurus in the middle of the room, kids digging up fake dinosaur bones, other kids watching films about the extinction of the dinosaurs or a holographic projection telling them facts about various species. Gray runs to a console where you can create your own DNA strand, and as Zach runs up to him and tells him not to run off, Mr. DNA, the animated character from the original Jurassic Park, pops up on the screen (you can't really hear his voice but, regardless, he's actually voiced by Colin Trevorrow himself). That's when they meet up with their aunt, only to then learn that she's not going to be joining them in touring the park. Following the introductory scene of the park's control center, we're introduced to Simon Masrani as he arrives at the helipad, actually flying the helicopter himself, with his instructor sitting in the copilot seat. Claire meets him there, climbing into the helicopter, and they take off, with small complications at first, to see the Indominous at her enclosure deep within the island interior. They land on the graveled spot outside the paddock, with Masrani's instructor promptly running into the bushes and throwing up, as he and Claire walk to the enclosure, her telling him that the Indominous is bigger than they expected. Entering the observation platform, Claire tells them of the problems they've had with the Indominous, as she's started to anticipate where the food comes from, nearly ripping off a handler's arm at one point, and when Masrani notices some large cracks in the window, Claire explains that she tried to break the glass. They then watch the shrubbery inside the enclosure moving and they get brief glimpses of the Indominous as she lurks around in the foliage, growling. Masrani sees enough of her to realize that she's a white-like color and when Claire asks if she'll scare the kids, the clearly shaken Masrani answers, "The kids? This'll give the parents nightmares." He notes that she appears to be watching them from where she's hiding and Claire then tells him that she actually killed the sibling that was created in case she didn't survive. Concerned about the safety of the paddock, Masrani then suggests to Claire that Owen Grady should be brought in to inspect it.

The film cuts to a sunlit, jungle area, as a squealing pig runs across a trail on the ground, with something hot on its heels. The pig reaches the edge of the foliage and heads toward the wall of an enclosure, as a man's voice yells, "Ho!," stopping its pursuer and allowing it to run to the safety of a small thatch in the wall. The camera pans up from the chaser's feet to reveal it to be the Velociraptor, Blue, who's joined by the other three raptors, forming a circle. They then look up when they hear, "Hey!" and the camera shows Owen Grady standing on a walkway above the paddock, holding his right hand out, clicking a training device with his left, and telling the raptors, "Eyes on me." He has to yell at Blue and click some more to get her attention, telling her to watch it as she looks up at him with a snarl. Charlie snarls as well, with Owen telling her to settle down, and tells the same to Delta when she gets a little fresh. All four of them are now looking up at him and he moves across the walkway, continuing to click the device as they follow him, snapping at each other again. He yells, "Ho!" again and they stop, continuing to look up at him, which he tells them is, "Damn good." As they watch, he reaches into a bucket and throws each of them a dead white rat as their prize, ending on Blue and paying special attention to her, showing her the prize before tossing it to her. He then yells, "Hold!", adding, "Eyes up!", which they all obey by peering up at him, and he then yells, "Go!" while giving a hand signal, allowing them to run off through their enclosure. Owen and Barry then give each other happy slaps on the back, when Vic Hoskins shows up, congratulating him on how well he's doing with the raptors as well, and talks to him about a possible field test with them. As they walk around the paddock, Hoskins goes on about how the raptors are the best possible candidates for weapons, unlike hackable drones, while Owen tries to tell him that it's not a good idea. Pointing at the raptors as they mill around on the ground, Hoskins declares that they've got millions of years of instinct that can be programmed and when he announces that they'll exterminate any rogues, Barry just laughs him off. Hoskins follows Owen down to the grounds as he walks into a small section behind the paddock's actual gate, going on about how Masrani is squandering an opportunity by making the dinosaurs the center of a theme park and yammers on about how war is a part of a nature and that it breeds greatness, to which Owen responds, "Do you hear yourself when you talk?"

Owen then hears the sound of a pig squealing and a guy yelling, "Pig loose!" He turns to see a guy running across the walkway, carrying a long rod with a noose at the end of it and attempting to catch the stray pig. Right as he catches the pig, one of the raptors scoops it up in her jaws and runs off with it. The force of this yanks the man over the railing and he falls into the paddock. This immediately catches the attention of the raptors and Owen watches as they begin to converge on him. He quickly hits the button that opens up the gate and crawls under the door as it slowly rises up, putting himself between the guy and the raptors. Several men with rifles aim at them on the walkway but Owen tells them to hold their fire, as he runs up and stops the raptors with his hand signals; Barry, meanwhile, stops the gate when it's about halfway up and quickly pulls the would-be victim to safety. Owen tells Blue to stand down but she's not too keen on listening to him, screeching and snapping at him. He then sees Delta trying to sneak up on him from the left and he tells her to back up. The raptors are somewhat compliant, no longer lunging at him but continue to move in on him and hiss as he backs away towards the open gate behind him; all the while, Hoskins is watching from the outside with a big, shit-eating grin. Owen tells Barry to close the gate, which he's, understandably, hesitant to do, but he tells him to trust him and so, he hits the button, causing it to slowly shut. He waits until it's just about closed and then quickly rolls underneath it, the raptors immediately charging but slamming into the metal bars when it closes down. With their catch out of reach, the raptors then disperse, as Owen asks the one guy, who's a newbie, if he ever wondered why there was a job opening. He then tells him to never turn his back to his cage, and as Owen walks away, the guy turns around upon hearing a snarl and sees one of the raptors looking at him through the bars, with her snout and claws poking through them as far as she can reach. Hoskins walks away with the same, smugly satisfied look on his face, as the camera pans back to show the paddock as it sits near the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

Back at the park, kids at the petting zoo are having fun interacting with baby dinosaurs, be it by riding some Triceratops, touching a Gallimimus a handler is holding, chasing some others on the ground, or, as one kid does, full on embraces a baby Apatosaurus. As usual, Gray is excited, trying to see around the people who've gathered around, while Zach would rather be anywhere else, and when he sees that Zara is preoccupied with talking on her cellphone, he tells Gray to run for it and they head off into the park by themselves, running past some little girls who are feeding another baby Apatosaur. Ending up in the midst of the crowd, Gray hears an announcement that the next T-Rex feeding will begin soon and he excitedly yells for Zach to come on, as they head through the gate. Inside an observation platform shaped like a huge log in the middle of a wooded enclosure, a bunch of spectators watch through the window as a flare is dropped down in front of a defenseless goat that's chained up on the ground. Because of all the people, Gray has a hard time seeing as the T-Rex comes stomping into the clearing and promptly chomps down on the goat, while all the kids actually chant, "T-Rex! T-Rex!", before yelling a bunch of, "Ews," when they see how sick it actually is. (By the way, since when did goat become the T-Rex's main source of food? Yeah, it happened all the way back in the first movie, but in these newer ones, it seems like that's all he eats, as another goat is gobbled up in Fallen Kingdom as well.) At the same time, Zach gets a call from his mom and that's when she finds out that Claire isn't with them.

While Claire drives out to Owen's bungalow in the island interior to talk him into taking a look at the Indominous Rex's paddock, Zach and Gray are the lagoon where the Mosasaurus is kept, as a woman tells the crowd about the creature, which is currently hiding underwater. Following her explanation, the woman presses a button that moves a dead great white shark hanging by a hook out over the water, seeing if the Mosasaurus is still hungry, and telling them that she's a little shy and to give her a big hand when she comes out. Gray tries to get Zach, who's looking at a photo of his girlfriend on his phone, to look up and he does just as the Mosasaurus explodes out of the water with a loud roar, grabs the shark in one snap of her huge snout, and pulls it down into the water, thoroughly soaking those sitting in front of her, including Zach and Gray, with a big wave as she splashes down. Even Zach can't help but be amazed and laugh at how amazing that was, as the bleachers all descend down a level to a large window that allows the cheering crowd to peer into the lagoon for a better look at the Mosasaurus, as she comes around and gobbles up what's left of the shark. Zach then asks Gray if he wants to do something else cool and Gray yells, "Yeah!"

Owen and Claire arrive at the Indominous' paddock and as they walk up the stairs to observation platform's door, Claire tells him of the park's need for a new attraction every few years to keep up the "wow" factor. Walking up to the window and looking out at the shrubbery inside the enclosure, Claire tells Owen that all she knows is that the Indominous' basic genome is that of a T-Rex but everything else its DNA is culled from is classified. With no sign of the creature, Claire asks the guard to lower a slab of meat into the paddock to draw her out, and as he watches the hook lower the meat down, Owen expresses concern when he learns that the Indominous has been kept in the enclosure her whole life, with her only meaningful interaction being with the hook. He explains to Claire that, while his Velociraptors were also born and raised in captivity, they've had each other to learn social skills, as well as him being their alpha. When the Indominous still doesn't appear, Claire taps on the glass, trying to attract her, as Owen asks if there's another level to the paddock he's not seeing. She taps on the control panel and several  video monitors on the wall display the troubling words, NO THERMAL SIGNATURE DETECTED. The guard is perplexed, saying that the paddock's doors haven't been opened in weeks, when Owen points out some claw marks on a wall on the opposite side. Horrified at the suggestion that the Indominous may have escaped, Claire heads outside, telling Owen that they can pinpoint her location via the implant within her, while he keeps looking at the claw marks.

Driving down the dirt road away from the paddock, Claire gets on the phone, saying that the ACU (Asset Containment Unit) needs to be put on alert, and then calls Lowery in the control room, telling him to give her the Indominous' location (if you look on his desk, you can just make out a book that has a picture of Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm on the back of it). He does so as Masrani enters the room, while back at the paddock, Owen and the security guard enter the enclosure and join an engineer in examining the claw marks on the wall next to the main gate. The three of them look up to the top of the wall, the one guard wondering if the Indominous really could have climbed over something that's forty feet high; Owen adds that it depends on what kind of dinosaur she is. In the control room, Lowery finds that the Indominous' signal is coming from inside the enclosure, like it should be. As they argue about it, Masrani sees on the big screen's video feed that there are people inside the paddock as well. When Lowery asks Claire why there are people inside, she realizes that the Indominous is in there with them and tells Lowery and Vivian Krill to warn them to get out. Vivian quickly tries to contact the guard to warn them but her voice comes through garbled, although they do hear it and the guard asks her what's going on. She yells that the Indominous is in there with them and, hearing that, the three of them run for the back entrance. Seeing the shrubbery moving, the guard decides to get out through the main gate, while Owen and the engineer end up getting cut off when the Indominous steps out right in front of them. She chases them back to the main gate and manages to grab the engineer in her hand, with those in the control room and Claire hearing the sounds of his screams and then, a sickening crunch, over the radio. Opening the gate, the guard sees the Indominous ripping the engineer apart and chewing on what's left, prompting him to run out. In the control room, Masrani tells them to close the gate, but when Lowery refuses to, he hits the button himself. Owen runs for the closing door, the Indominous hot on his heels, and just manages to get through the crack of it. However, as the work crew scatters, the Indominous is able to lunge through the opening and tear her way out. Owen ducks underneath a parked car and watches the Indominous stomp around the parking lot, ending up on the other side of another parked vehicle. The guard, scared out of his mind, is sitting in front of the truck, and when he looks around the corner of its front, he sees the Indominous' tail disappear around it. She then knocks the truck away, exposing him, while it crashes down in front of where Owen is lying on the ground. He and the completely defenseless man look at each other before the Indominous snaps him up in her jaws. Owen quickly rolls onto his back and cuts his vehicle's fuel line, soaking himself in gasoline in order to reduce his scent. The Indominous approaches his hiding spot and, getting down on all fours, attempts to see if anyone else is there. Unable to get low enough to see Owen, and smelling nothing but the gasoline, she lets out a roar before walking off, allowing Owen to breathe a sigh of relief.

Walking into the control room, Claire quickly senses the very serious and tense tone that's permeating the room and she tells everyone to remain calm, saying that the Indominous' implant will shock her if she gets too close to a perimeter fence. Vivian is just about to issue a park-wide alert but Masrani quickly stops her, ordering that the ACU recapture the Indominous as quietly as possible, that the very security of the park depends on it. Claire remains confident, given that the Indominous paddock is four miles from the nearest attraction, and says that ACU can handle this situation; at that moment, the members of the team, arming themselves with non-lethal containment weapons, begin moving out. We then cut to the Velociraptor paddock, where Barry is calming down the muzzled Blue by speaking softly to her and stroking her head and neck. Hoskins then shows up, asking how fast they can run and if they've ever really let them loose, when he's startled by a loud huffing sound Blue lets out. This only encourages him, though, as he tells Barry about the bond he had with the wolf pup he adopted when he was younger (Blue snarling at him as he walks past her) and likens it to the bond Barry has with the raptor named Delta. Hoskins asks if he can pet Delta and Barry allows it, although Delta herself clearly isn't crazy about it, as she growls and shakes in her muzzle, with Barry having to calm her. Barry's phone then beeps and, looking at it, he warns everyone else there that it's a Code 19, which means, "Asset out of containment." He walks away, growling that the people who work at the park never learn, but Hoskins says to himself, "They're gonna learn all kinds of things about their new asset, now," as he makes a call on his own cellphone, telling whoever is on the line that they may have an "opportunity." Everyone else, meanwhile, continues enjoying the park, while Gray, as he rides the monorail with Zach, and after a moment where he breaks down, knowing that their parents are heading for a divorce, sees a couple of out-of-place vehicles driving down a dirt road nearby. The vehicles happen to be the ones carrying the ACU team, as they head into the jungle to confront the Indominous.

In the control room, everyone is monitoring the ACU's progress (the video feed of what they're seeing and their vital signs on the screen have to be a nod to how the Colonial Marines were monitored in Aliens), when Owen enters via the elevator, ignoring the security guard who tries to stop him, and demands to know what happened. Claire tries to write off the lack of thermal imaging as a technical malfunction but Owen tells her that the Indominous deliberately made it looks as if she escaped so she actually could. Everyone's attention is then drawn to the big screen, as the team is now 400 meters from the beacon and they're then shown parking their vehicles on the muddy road, disembarking, and entering the jungle with their stun rifles fully charged, along with other non-lethal weapons. Seeing that this is the case, Owen warns that the team is going to die but his insistence to call the mission off fall on deaf ears. As the men walk through the jungle, their stun rifles at the ready, their leader, Hamada, follows the beacon's signal on a special wristband he's wearing, the beeping getting louder when they walk through a shallow creek. Hamada spies something at the base of a large rock and, motioning for his team to stay back, he picks it up to reveal it to be a clump of flesh, with beeping implant underneath it. Seeing this on the screen in the control room, Owen tells them that the Indominous clawed her implant out, adding that she was able to remember where they put it in. Back in the field, as he continues looking at the flesh, Hamada notices a couple of specks of blood drip onto his arm and looks up to see that it's coming from some blood-soaked leaves up above. He turns to his team, who all then hear the sounds of brush popping and he looks behind him to see the shrubbery moving, the Indominous suddenly materializing out of it. Hamada yells that the creature can camouflage herself and tries to run, only to get grabbed and hoisted up. His team fire their amps at the Indominous but it does nothing but enrage her, as she throws Hamada down into the water and steps on him, killing him instantly. The team all converge on her, trying to zap her, but one gets sent flying with a whip of her tail and another is grabbed and flung backwards into some tree branches.

As everyone in the control room watches the team getting slaughtered, one man shoots a net that ensnares the Indominous' snout but, in her struggle with it, she knocks over a tree that crushes one man before grabbing another. She manages to rip the net off of her snout, letting out an angry snarl, and sends two more men flying with her tail before grabbing another in her mouth, lifting him up, and crunching him. Now retreating, with two of them pulling one of their injured colleagues along the ground, one guy faces the Indominous down, firing blank after blank into her, but she then charges at him and crunches him in her mouth. Back in the control room, with almost all of the ACU team wiped out, Owen tells Claire that they must evacuate the island, and when she says that it would mean the end of Jurassic World, he tries to make her and everyone else see the gravity of the situation, that the Indominous, now fully unleashed after being in captivity her whole life, will kill everything that she sees. Knowing that Asset Containment will use live ammunition in an emergency, Owens suggests they use the M-134 they have in their armory and take the Indominous out from a chopper. Claire, stupidly, says that she's not going to turn the park into a warzone and tells Owen that if he's not going to "help," he might as well not be in there, prompting him to angrily knock all of the dinosaur toys off of Lowery's desk (this is where I'd be about ready to smack her myself). On his way out, Owen suggests to Masrani that he talk to his scientists, adding, "That thing out there? That's no dinosaur." After he exits through the elevator, Claire, looking up at the screen and seeing all of the families and children in the park (21,216 individual tourists, according to a counter), unaware of the possible danger they're in, decides to close everything north of the resort and orders that everyone be brought in.

One of the attractions north of the resort is the gyrosphere, which Zach and Gray happen to be waiting in line for and they board it and ride off in it right before the guy operating it gets the call the shut it down. He then tells those still waiting that the ride's closed and they have to head to the monorail; unable to tell them why, he, needless to say, has to deal with a lot of unhappy tourists as a result. Following the scene where Masrani confronts Dr. Wu, Zach and Gray are shown exploring a big, open field in the gyrosphere. Initially, there are no dinosaurs to be seen, much to Gray's chagrin, and neither of them are impressed with the little skit that Jimmy Fallon is performing on the small screen in the sphere. However, as they round a corner, they enter a clearing that's filled with all sorts of large dinosaurs, like Triceratops, Apatosaurs, Stegosaurs, and Ankylosaurs. They roll past a couple of grazing Apatosaurs and some Triceratops, when a message comes on the small video screen telling them that the ride is closed due to "technical difficulties" and they must return to the resort. However, Zach is sure they can stay out for a couple of more minutes, citing their VIP passes. He then revs the sphere up a little more, causing it to roll faster and prompting the dinosaurs to run alongside it. Elsewhere, Claire finally thinks to check on her nephews and calls Zara to tell her to take them back to the hotel, only to learn that they got away from her. She then calls Zach's cellphone, who answers her call, but when she tries to tell him what's going on, the signal gets garbled because of the gyrosphere and he's unable to hear her. Realizing that her nephews are in the one gyrosphere that's still out, she tells Vivian to send out some rangers to bring them in but they learn that the rangers have their hands full elsewhere. Frustrated, Claire decides to do it herself and becomes hopeful when she sees on the big screen that Owen is in the visitor's center. Back in the field, Zach and Gray come across a gate door on the perimeter fence that's open and, despite Gray's objections, decides to go off-road, while Claire meets up with Owen and tells him that she needs his help in finding her nephews.

At this point, Zach and Gray are now deep in the jungle, the latter now sure that they're going to be in deep trouble for this, rambling about being arrested, having their heads shaved, and making root beer in the toilet. They round a bend and come across a small clearing where a herd of Ankylosaurs is resting. Zach tells Gray that they've managed to get up close and personal with them, when Gray says he's wrong in that there are five dinosaurs rather than four, as he says. Thinking Gray isn't as smart as everyone thinks he is, Zach counts down the four Ankylosaurs, when Gray points at the vague, transparent image of another dinosaur, which they realize is a reflection on the gyrosphere's glass. They both turn around to see the Indominous, which promptly roars at them. Gray frantically tells Zach to go but before he can, the Indominous charges at the Ankylosaurs, sending the gyrosphere bouncing with her foot. The sphere bounces between the retreating Ankylosaurs before finally coming to a stop, Zach trying to calm Gray down, only for them to see that they're about to get caught up in a fight between the Indominous and one Ankylosaur that decides to stand her ground. Zach tries to maneuver them out of the way but the Ankylosaur swings her club tail, unintentionally hitting the sphere, cracking the glass, and sending it rolling backwards before it comes up to rest against a tree, with Zach and Gray now stuck upside down. As Zach tries to operate the damaged vehicle, the Ankylosaur whacks the Indominous in the face with her tail, whirling around as the monster bites and grabs at her hard back shell. However, she manages to slice the Ankylosaur on her back left leg, injuring her enough to where she's able to turn her over, grab her head with her mouth, and snap her neck, much to Gray and Zach's horror. Gray asks Zach if they're safe inside the gyrosphere and Zach assures them that they are, when they hear the humming of Zach's cellphone, which is lying on what is now the floor of the sphere, vibrating from Claire trying to call them.

Zach reaches for the phone and almost has it, when Gray begins trying to get his attention. When he gets him to look, Zach sees the Indominous' amber-colored eye looking right at them. Knowing that they're completely helpless, she rolls the gyrosphere around to where they're looking up at her and puts her claw through the glass. Looking down at them, she opens her huge maw and comes down on the sphere with it as they scream in terror. Almost completely enveloping the sphere with her jaws, she picks it up and slams it up and down, attempting to shatter the glass. Zach quickly grabs the lever that opens the emergency hatch and he and Gray tumble out to the ground. They have to brace themselves as the Indominous slams the sphere down again, though the open hatch keeps them from being injured, and they run for it. The Indominous finishes demolishing the sphere and roars at them as they run out of the jungle and into a sunlit clearing. Hot on their trail, she rips out of the trees behind them and chases them to the top of a relatively small but still daunting waterfall. With the Indominous closing in on them, Zach has to convince Gray to jump down and when they do, they just barely manage to avoid being bitten in half. They plunge down into the water below, the Indominous standing and watching to see if they come up, but when they don't, she lets out a roar and stomps off. Little does she know that they tricked her, as they then come up and swim for shore.

Elsewhere, Claire and Owen come across some more of the Indominous' handiwork when they find a fatally injured Apatosaurus lying at the top of a hill near a large, open plain. Owen walks up to the head of the suffering, dying creature and does what he can to calm her and ease her pain. Claire, whom he told to stay in the van they've been driving, gets out and walks over to where Owen is, putting her hand on the base of the Apatosaur's head (no doubt the first time she's ever actually touched one of the dinosaurs), clearly touched by what she's seeing. The Apatosaur lifts her head and neck up, as if attempting to stand, but she slumps back down and, as Claire touches her jowl, slowly expires, moving Claire to tears. The two of them then see that the field over the rise is full of dead Apatosaurs, which Owen notes were simply killed rather than eaten. Meanwhile, Hoskins is meeting up with a team of InGen troops who are arriving via boat, as he waits for the green-light to deploy the Velociraptors against the Indominous. Unbeknownst to them, Barry is watching from nearby and tries to contact Owen but gets no response. At this point, Owen and Claire have found the destroyed gyrosphere in the jungle, Owen extracting a broken tooth from the Indominous out of the wreckage and Claire becoming distraught when she finds Zach's smashed cellphone. Owen then sees the boys' footprints in the mud and they follow them to the head of the waterfall, where they realize that they jumped. Owen has to quiet Claire down when she makes the mistake of yelling for them and tries to get her to go back while he looks for the boys but she's insistent about staying with him. He makes it clear, though, that he's in charge and tells her, "It's just like taking a stroll through the woods... 65 million years ago." They then head out, with Owen taking one last look at the Indominous' enormous footprint in the mud.

Zach and Gray, meanwhile, while trekking through the jungle, come across a cracked, blood-splattered hardhat that turns out to be near a demolished vehicle. They seen see the door of an old, overgrown building, the visitor's center from the original park, and walk inside to find it moist and full of plants, with the window up in the ceiling cracked, allowing sunlight in. Grabbing a large stick and wrapping an old banner they find around it, they create a makeshift torch with some matches that Gray has on him and explore the place further, finding the iconic mural with dinosaurs on it. In the back, they find a kind of storage room (Gray, at one point, finds the night-vision goggles that Tim used in the original film) and garage, with a few of the old gas-powered jeeps with the Jurassic Park logo on their sides. Looking at them, Zach reminds Gray of when they fixed up their grandfather's old Malibu. Back at the control center, Lowery, Vivian, and Masrani, looking at the Indominous' current position on the big board, realize that she's heading towards the resort because she can sense the thermal radiation from all of the tourists being confined there. Hoskins shows up and suggests that they use the Velociraptors to hunt down and kill the Indominous, but Masrani is staunchly against that idea, although he does tell Hoskins that he intends to personally look into his project to determine if it's viable within the moral principles of the company. In the meantime, though, he does what Owen suggested earlier: get their M-134 and use it to take the Indominous down from the air; what's more, with no one else around who can fly, Masrani decides to pilot the helicopter himself. Back at the old visitor's center, Zach and Gray manage to get one of the jeeps up and running and, with Zach behind the wheel, they take off.

Nearby, Owen and Claire hear the sound of the jeep's engine and, running to the source of it, find the garage. Owen is impressed that they managed to get one of the jeeps started, while Claire is happy that they're driving on a road that will lead them straight back to the park. As he tries to find some way to get the other jeep there up and running, they suddenly hear heavy footfalls and crouch down in front of the jeep. Looking around the corner, Owen realized he left his rifle standing up against the side of the jeep but before he can reach for it, the Indominous' foot comes down outside the garage. They both try to stay as still and quiet as possible, as she sticks her big head in, sniffing and growling. She nudges against the jeep and appears to try to lift it up but drops it back down and pulls out. Once she's gone, Owen reaches around and grabs his rifle, but just when they're breathing a sigh of relief, she comes crashing through the roof and roars at them. They run out into the visitor's center, Owen almost getting crushed when she slams the jeep forward against the wall, and out the door and into the jungle. The Indominous smashes her way into the center of the building but is distracted by the sound of a helicopter overhead and heads back out the way she came. As she and Owen run through the jungle, Claire calls Lowery, tells him where the Indominous is, and to send ACU there with real guns. Lowery, in turn, tells her that ACU is airborne in the helicopter, and when she asks who's flying it, the film cuts to show Masrani in the pilot seat, wearing one of their helmets along with his dark sunglasses. He asks the men in their with him if they ever served in the Armed Forces, and when one says that he was in Afghanistan, he asks, "Did your general ever fly into battle with you?" Like he did before, Masrani has a bit of trouble in keeping the helicopter steady but quickly manages to correct it and, when Vivian tells them of the Indominous' current position over the radio, he tells the men to look alive.

Owen and Claire run out of the jungle and onto a ridge overlooking the park's huge, dome-shaped aviary, as the helicopter flies over them and approaches it. Spotting the Indominous nearby, the soldier operating the M-134 opens fire on her, tearing up the trees branches and the ground but just missing her by inches. Desperate to escape the gunfire, she crashes through the wall of the aviary, which those in the control room see, prompting Hoskins to comment, "Looks like the fox got in the hen-house." Roaring at the Pteranodons and Dimorphodons around her, the Indominous gets them stirred up and they take to the air, escaping out the hole in the wall as she snaps at them. The helicopter ends up in the Pterosaurs' path and Masrani tries to pull up out of the way, as the gunner fires on some of them, but he's not quick enough. One of them hitting the helicopter causes the gunner to lurch forward and fall out; he grabs onto the barrel of the gun but ends up getting grabbed by one of them. As Masrani tries to regain control, another Pteranodon flies right at the windshield and bursts her beak through it, fatally stabbing the copilot in the torso before pulling out. Masrani continues trying to fly to safety but more Pterosaurs barrage the craft and ultimately send it spinning out of control towards the aviary, crashing through the roof and exploding on the ground inside, the Indominous charging out of the dome away from it. In the control, Lowery and Vivian are horrified and devastated by what's happened, while Hoskins stands behind them with a stoic look on his face. The remaining Pterosaurs take advantage of the huge hole in the roof and fly out, heading right for Owen and Claire, forcing them to run into the trees and duck down for cover.

Zach and Gray are still driving back to the park, crashing through a gate, and Zach believes that they're safe, when Gray, seeing something in the rear-view mirror, turns around and sees that the sky behind them is filled with Pterosaurs. He tells Zach to gun it and he does when he sees them. They then reach the road heading to one of the park's main gates and, as they approach, they yell for the two guards to let them in. At first merely perplexed by what they're seeing, the guards then look up to see the swarm of Pterosaurs coming at them. Elsewhere, Owen and Claire make it back to the outskirts of the park, which is full of commotion, when Claire gets a call from Zara telling her that the boys have been spotted at the west gate; Claire then agrees to meet up with them there. Owen grabs an ATV and the two of them ride off on it. In the center of the crowded resort, the bored and hot guests are hear a PA announcement telling them that, due to a "containment anomaly," they must take shelter. They quickly learn what said anomaly is when a warning siren begins blaring and the Pterosaurs descend on them. All hell breaks loose as people scramble everywhere try to find shelter, are bombed at or picked up by the Pterosaurs, the creatures crash through restaurant windows, smash through the tops of buildings, and trap people on the ground and bite and peck at them. As those in the control room watch the chaos on the big screen, the Pterosaurs attack the petting zoo, with one trying to carry off a baby Triceratops before ultimately dropping her, and sending the guests and other baby dinosaurs running. Owen and Claire continue heading for the midst of the pandemonium, the former grabbing a tranquilizer rifle, while at the command center, Hoskins runs to helipad on the roof and actually smiles as he watches what's happening. At this point, Zach and Gray have found themselves caught up in the madness too, and are chased down by a frustrated Zara, only for her to get grabbed and carried off into the sky by a Pteranodon. The creature is then assaulted by another one, which makes it drop Zara and then grab her for itself. This Pteranodon loses its grip on her over the Mosasaurus lagoon and she drops down into the water, followed by several other Pteranodons who dive down after her. Despite some trouble due to her struggling, one of them manages to grab her in its bill and then with its feet, but when it tries to carry her off, the Mosasaurus explodes out of the water below them and grabs them in her large snout before going back under. Seeing this, Zach and Gray to find some shelter.

Owen and Claire run into the center of the resort, joining tranq-rifle-toting ACU members and begin firing on the Pterosaurs, while Claire climbs atop an overturned food vendor and tries to find her nephews. The boys hear her calls and run to the source of them, when Owen is tagged from behind by a Dimorphodon, which pins him to the ground, while Zach and Gray are nearly grabbed by an enormous Pteranodon that comes in for crashing landing them, the tip of its bill stopping just short of them when they take cover up against a display. Owen struggles with the marauding Dimorphodon, rolling on his back and trying to keep its snapping jaws away from his heads, when Claire knocks it off him with the butt of a rifle and promptly sedates it with a handful of darts. Needless to say, Zach and Gray are astonished when they watch this from nearby, and even more so when she helps Owen up and he kisses her square on the mouth. Seeing the boys, Claire runs up to them, relieved that they're okay, and when asked about Owen, she simply says that they work together; the four of them then try to find some shelter. Meanwhile, Hoskins and his team stroll into the command center and take command, as an InGen helicopter with more armed men heads for the island, one of said men shooting down a Dimorphodon flying parallel to them. As the group heads back to operations, Claire talks to Lowery, who tells them of what's happened, that the company board has signed emergency operations to InGen Security and tells her of Hoskins' plan to use the Velociraptors; needless to say, Owen is not pleased when he hears this, and then sees the helicopter fly directly over them. He tells Claire to take the boys somewhere safe, when the security gate breaks open from the mass of people being chased by the remaining Pterosaurs. They commandeer a van, with Owen driving backwards away from the crazed crowd until he finds a safe alcove to park in; seeing the chaos, the boys make it clear that they'd much rather stay with Owen.

Come nightfall, Hoskins' team has gathered at the Velociraptor paddock, where the creatures are being equipped with remote, night-vision cameras that are strapped to their heads. Hoskins walks over to Blue and, seeing the feed on one technician's tablet, gets her to look right at him... when Barry tells him that she looks at whatever she wants, which is usually what she wants to eat. Hearing a vehicle pull up, Hoskins walks out to meet Owen and Claire as they step out of their van, when Owen decks him right in the face before demanding that he and his men leave; Claire then accuses him of wanting the Indominous to escape and wreak havoc like this. Hoskins, however, shakes it off and tells him that the mission is to help save all the tourists who are on the island and that it will be covered on the news, giving the raptors all kinds of good publicity. As Owen begins to contemplate it, Barry reminds him that the raptors have never been out of containment but Hoskins again tells him that this is happening, with or without him. In the next cut, Owen is discussing the plan with Hoskins' men, intending to use a scent trail he's done with the raptors many times to track down the Indominous and tells them to wait to fire until they've managed to corner her. After that, Owen is trying to calm down Blue and then, when Zach and Gray appear at the pen's gate, he introduces them to the raptors one by one, introducing Blue as the beta of the group, while he's the alpha. For safety, Claire puts Zach and Gray in the back of a large convoy vehicle, while she climbs into the driver's seat; in the back, the boys have a brotherly moment, with Zach telling Gray that he'll protect him and that brothers always come back to each other.

Using the piece of the Indominous' flesh with the homing beacon in it and his clicker, Owen gets the raptors trained in on the creatures' scent, while Hoskins watches from the control center. Next, Owen and Barry are sitting on an idling motorcycle and ATV respectively, in front of a large, InGen command car, and once everyone's set, the former gives the signal for the raptors to be let loose. The employee who almost became their meal earlier presses the button and the four dinosaurs charge out of their holdings and into the jungle, followed by the team. The raptors screech through the jungle, running like the dinosaur equivalent of cheetahs, while back at the paddock, Claire uses a large tablet to monitor their and the team's progress, with Zach and Gray watching through the hatch on the cab's back wall. Owen manages to catch up with them and drive in the midst of them, clearly enjoying how well they're doing in homing in on the scent; watching this, Zach tells Claire that her "boyfriend" is a badass. Elsewhere, as he watches in the control room, Hoskins comments, "Imagine if we had these puppies in Tora Bora," before reaching over and taking a sip from Lowery's soda on the desk. In the jungle, Owen and Barry see that the raptors are slowing down and Owen tells the team that they've picked up on something. As they come across a clear spot before another patch of jungle, Owen motions for the vehicle behind them to stop and the team disembarks, armed and ready, approaching the edge of the jungle; seeing this, Claire decides to close the latch on the boys, deciding they don't need to see what's about to happen. Taking cover, with their weapons trained, the men hear the sound of the Indominous approaching and watch as she emerges from the jungle to confront the raptors. However, something unexpected happens, when she begins communicating with the raptors, and as they watch, Owen quickly realizes that the Indominous herself is part raptor. All four of the raptors then turn around and look at the men, when in the control room, Hoskins impatiently tells the team to start shooting. They open fire on the Indominous and she begins to retreat back into the jungle, with the raptors scattering as well. One of the men fires a bazooka and manages to hit close enough to where the Indominous is blown off her feet but she's able to get back up and retreat into the jungle before they can inflict any real damage. The team heads into the jungle after, Owen telling them to watch their six, as the raptors now have a new alpha.

Moving in, the team can hear the raptors screeching and hissing in the distance, and it soon becomes clear as they move into some thick weeds that they're now the ones being hunted. Immediately, one man gets jumped and his feed goes dead, followed by another as his comrades try to shoot the raptors. Three more of them fall prey to the raptors and, in the control center, Hoskins sees the room upon seeing what's going on on the big screen. Owen moves through the weeds, when Charlie pokes her up out of them nearby and looks at him. The two of them appear to reestablish their bond, when Charlie is suddenly blown to bits by a bazooka shot from behind, which blows Owen backwards. He gets up when he hears the sounds of men yelling and raptors screeching, while elsewhere, Barry runs and ducks down beside a hollow log, when he sees that the remaining men have decided to run for it and abandon him and Owen. He ducks inside the log, when Blue sees him and jumps on top of it, furiously clawing her way through the rotten wood in order to get at him. Hearing Barry yelling from nearby, Owen jumps on his motorcycle, while Barry is able to make Blue stop for a bit when he yells her name. Owen then takes the opportunity to rev his motorcycle, getting Blue's attention, and then whistles as he rides off, prompting her to chase after him, while Barry breathes a sigh of relief inside the log. At the paddock, Gray asks Claire if everyone's dead and she immediately lies, claiming that everyone's fine. Zach calls her on this but she says that it's alright to lie because Gray's scared (Claire, never have children). Claire then keeps on trying to comfort Gray, when one of the fatally injured InGen Security men puts his bloody hand on the window and tells Claire that they need to get out of there before slipping down to the ground. As she tries to start the van, another man tries to climb into the back with the boys, only get to jumped on and mauled by one of the raptors. Claire takes off and both of them fall out of the back, as Zach and Gray can't take their eyes off of what they just saw. Claire yells for them to hang on, when another raptor jumps and smashes her head through the window, snapping at the screaming Claire. The raptor then loses her grip and falls on the ground, when one of her siblings charges after the van on down the road.

Zach and Gray watch the raptor run after them through the still-open back doors, very quickly catching up to them, and she's then joined by her sister. Zach stands up, grabs a nearby tank of compressed air, and tosses it out the back, but it misses the raptors. Seeing one of the raptors approaching from the truck's side-view mirror, Claire manages to swerve into her and knock her off the road, while the other still manages to keep up with them. Grabbing a cattle-prod in the back, Gray gives it to Zach and the two of them struggle to figure out how to activate it, when the raptor gives a jump and grabs onto the edge of the van's open doorway. As she tries to pull herself in, the boys get the prod working, and after she sits up and snaps at them, they zap her, causing her to fall back out and tumble along the road. The two of them are elated at what they just did, with Gray telling Claire that he can't wait to tell his mother, although Claire begs him not to do so. Owen then catches up with them on his motorcycle and, driving up front, tells Claire to follow him to where they can get safely indoors; Claire calls Lowery and tells him to call in a chopper for them. However, little do they know that the raptors are still after them and they cut through the jungle in order to intercept them. Following a scene where, as he's supervising the evacuation of the lab, Dr. Wu gets a call from Hoskins, telling him that the park's going to be doomed from all of this and that their "side-project" is about to get a shot in the arm, another where the control room is evacuated, with Lowery staying behind, and Wu being evacuated to the mainland with some of his research, the group arrives in the now abandoned resort. They drive up to the visitor's center and run through it, frantically heading for the control room. When they reach the lab, they find that it's been evacuated and walk inside to find the full extent of the "research" Wu and his team have been doing, with dinosaur spines in large test tubes and bizarre-looking reptile specimens in small tanks.

Seeing some men placing samples into a cold-storage container, Claire asks what's going on, when Hoskins walks in and tells her that she isn't allowed to know. He also reveals that Wu works for them and, when Gray sees a readout about the Indominous and says that she's not a real dinosaur, Hoskins says that he's right but it will ensure InGen's future and will be a living weapon unlike no other. He starts to go on one of his long, pretentious speeches, when Delta enters the room and, ignoring the others, backs Hoskins up until he has no where else to go. Hoskins tries to talk her down and puts his hand up, trying to do what Owen did earlier. It seems to work, as Delta curiously sniffs his hand, but then, she chomps down on it and, as the others run for it, rends him to bits, splashing blood on the glass behind her. Claire tries to lead them out a back entrance, away from the visitor's center main lobby, but Delta crashes through the glass and ends up in the hallway in front of them, forcing them to head for the lobby. With Delta right behind them, Gray presses a button on one of the holographic hubs in the lobby, activating a hologram of a Dilophosaurus that distracts Delta. She screeches a challenge at it and, as the others head through the door, she charges at it, only to pass right through it, much to her confusion. The group head down the steps of the visitor's center, only to be cut off by Blue. Delta then comes through the door and moves in, while Echo appears to their left. As the raptors close in, Owen drops his rifle when Blue gets close and, as she growls and snaps at him, he reaches out, unstraps and removes the camera still attached to her head. This act appears to make her more docile, when the Indominous arrives and, walking up to them, lets out a roar. She tries to continue her communication with the raptors but, when Blue turns and looks at Owen again, it's clear that she's bonded back with him. She spins around and screeches at the Indominous, which then lets out an angry roar and swipes at Blue, sending her flying through the air and slamming up against the side of a nearby building. The Indominous begins moving in to kill them herself, when Delta and Echo screech in defiance and, upon hearing Owen whistle, charge at her, jumping on her and biting at her neck, as the group runs for cover past her.

While Claire and the boys duck through the broken window of a nearby store, Owen tries to help his raptors by firing on the Indominous as she struggles with them, but his rifle shots do nothing to her and he has watch her whipping tail when he gets close. Stopping to change his round, he sees one of the raptors skid along the ground after she gets flung off, while Gray tells Claire that they need "more teeth" in order to stand a chance of beating the Indominous. She grabs a flare and a walkie-talkie from nearby and tells the boys to stay where they are before running. The dinosaur battle continues, with the raptors still jumping on and biting at the Indominous, with Owen firing at her, when she grabs a raptor with her mouth and flings her into a nearby restaurant grill, where she's immediately burned alive. Owen is then forced to flee his hiding spot when the Indominous' tail shatters it as she grabs the other raptor and throws her as well. Ducking in with the boys, Owen motions for them to be quiet and the three of them stay still as the Indominous' head appears behind them. However, she obviously knows that they're there, as she smashes the side of her head into the window's frame, trying to angle her head so she can get and chomp at them, while smashing her arm through the side wall, forcing them to take cover in a corner amongst a bunch of Jurassic World T-shirts. The Indominous' claws are scraping along the floor just mere inches from where her would-be prey is, while Claire, running to wherever she's heading, contacts Lowery and tells him to open Paddock 9. When he realizes what paddock it is, he's hesitant to do so, but when Claire reaches its gate and hears the Indominous roaring nearby, she hits Lowery with a low blow by telling him to be a man for once, which succeeds in getting him to open the paddock. Watching the security camera feed of her at the paddock on the big screen, Lowery hits the button and, as the gate slowly opens, Claire lights her flare. Some loud, thudding footsteps are heard approaching and, once the gate is completely open, the T-Rex emerges from the darkness, attracted by the light of the flare. She then takes off running as fast as she can, with the T-Rex right behind her.

Reaching in again, the Indominous manages to snag the rim of Gray's shorts with her claw and attempts to pull him out. Zach and Owen manage to grab him and hold him, the Indominous' hold finally snapping, just as Claire manages to enter the resort square, the T-Rex still following her, and throws the flare at the Indominous. The Indominous looks and roars as the T-Rex smashes his way through a display dinosaur skeleton in the plaza, letting out a roar himself. The two dinosaurs roar challenges and face off, with the humans watching as they then charge at each other. The T-Rex manages to grab the Indominous on the back of the neck and the two of them struggle, with the Indominous biting at him and forcing him to let go. He manages to snip and bite her again, when she slashes him on the left side of his neck and the right side of his face before grabbing his head and throwing him to the ground. She bites at the T-Rex's neck, as Claire runs for cover, and then, grabbing his neck with her jaws, drags him and slams his head into the side of the shop Owen and the boys are taking cover in, forcing them to abandon their hiding spot and just barely manage to avoid the T-Rex's snapping jaws. Claire yells for them to run and they manage to get out through a gap in the wall, while the Indominous smashes the T-Rex down through the side of the building's roof, seriously injuring him. The T-Rex virtually collapses and the Indominous comes in for the kill, pinning the T-Rex's head down and preparing to snap his neck, when she hears the sound of a raptor barking. Everyone watches as Blue comes charging in, hops on the T-Rex, and jumps up onto the Indominous, climbing to where she can't reach her with her jaws and scratching and biting at her. The Indominous tries to shake Blue off, when the T-Rex comes in, grabs her by the neck, and shoves her across the plaza, right into the side of a building, destroying it. Blue jumped onto the T-Rex's back to avoid the collision and, when he grabs the Indominous' neck again, she jumps back on her, as the group runs for it down below. Running through the shops, they come close to colliding with Blue when she gets smashed through the window, only for her to charge back out, and they then run outside to see the T-Rex slam the Indominous through the awning of a building, causing the thing to collapse, before grabbing her by the neck and slamming her back down. Blue jumps onto her snout and bites and scratches at her, as the T-Rex grabs her neck and wrestles with her after Blue gets flung off, before using his head to head-butt and push her into the railing around the lagoon. As injured as she is, the Indominous still gets back up and prepares to attack the T-Rex and Blue again, when the Mosasaurus suddenly explodes out of the water behind her, grabs her by the neck, gets a firm grip on her as she struggles, and drags her down into the water, with the only sound being that of the Mosasaurus roaring down below.

With the Indominous finally dead, the T-Rex glances down at Blue, who steps back a bit, defensively, but he ultimately decides he's had enough and walks away. Blue then looks over at Owen and, after a few seconds, he shakes his head at her and she runs off into the midst of the destroyed plaza, as they watch. In the control room, Lowery picks up one of his small dinosaur figures and shuts everything off before heading out the door. The next morning, all of the tourists have been evacuated to Costa Rica and are receiving medical attention in a large warehouse. Barry is among them, helping out, while Karen and Scott Mitchell arrive and are reunited with their sons, with Claire having a tearful meeting with her sister. She and Owen then reunite and head out after deciding that they should stick together "for survival." The movie's final shot is back on Isla Nublar, with the T-Rex stomping across the helipad and letting out a mighty roar as he looks over the now completely abandoned Jurassic World.

Michael Giacchino did the music score and he not only came up with some great, original pieces of music but he also managed to make them sound very much in the same style as John Williams' original Jurassic Park scores. Sometimes, when a new composer comes in to add onto previous scores that have been firmly established as the sound of a particular film series, you may get good music but it also might not fit with what's come before; here, though, this music feels very much at home with what Williams did in the first two movies. The signature piece of the score is the Indominous Rex's theme, which is this low, horn bit with a signature melody to it, is the first music you hear when the film begins, and is heard many, many times throughout the movie, not only when the Indominous is onscreen but also to signify her presence or when the characters are talking about her. Another memorable part of the score is a big, charging, heroic theme that's meant to accentuate the badassery of both Owen Gray and his Velociraptors, with the prime example of its use being when they're hunting down the Indominous. You also have plenty of thrilling action music for the big setpieces, a piece that's made up of haunting vocalizations to make the climactic battle really feel epic, and music that captures the wonder of the park and the dinosaurs in the same way that Williams managed to before. Speaking of which, of course, you do hear some of Williams' original music, be it that wondrous main theme when you get your first look at the expanse of Jurassic World, the other iconic theme for when Claire lures the T-Rex out of his paddock, and what sounds like a bit of his music for The Lost World when Blue joins in the battle against the Indominous. Giacchino also does some tweaks here and there on those themes, like a differently-orchestrated finale for the one theme when Simon Masrani lands outside the Indominous' paddock, a very subtle, slight piano version of the other theme for when Zach and Gray find the old visitor's center, and this really ethereal, magical version of it over the first part of the ending credits. All in all, the score is another of this film's true strong points.

Jurassic World is a very enjoyable, entertaining film and the true definition of a big, summer blockbuster. It's far from perfect, as its characters, save for a scant few, are either bland, annoying, or unlikable, with their personal dramas not being developed enough to care about them; the core idea of a fully functioning theme park with living dinosaurs going awry doesn't quite reach its full potential, there could have been more practical effects, some of the core thematic elements don't quite hold true, and the story, overall, doesn't have much that hasn't been seen before, but what it gets right, it gets really right. It's a fast-paced, entertaining two hours, with plenty of exciting action sequences, it's extremely well-made and looks really good, the park itself makes for a great, well-designed setting, the dinosaurs are just as realistic and convincingly brought to life as ever and you get a nice variety of them, with many managing to get at least one stand out moment, there are some interesting ideas woven into the story, and the music score gives you the best of both worlds, using the classic original themes as well as coming up with some very memorable new ones of its own. Nothing will ever top the first Jurassic Park but, for me, this is the follow-up that, despite its flaws, has come the closest to doing so and I feel is very worthy of being a part of this franchise.