2) The Setpieces Have the Best Direction…
Indominus rex might be a bit of a prima donna, but it does facilitate much of Jurassic World’s plentiful action. It’s bold to say that director Colin Trevorrow does a better job behind the camera here than Spielberg did with The Lost World, but the challenges each director faced were very different. Where The Lost World saw Spielberg struggling to best himself, Trevorrow has the more difficult task of revitalizing a franchise for audiences trained to expect more excitement, more explosions, more everything out of their summer blockbusters.
Thanks in large part to the more flexible (if sometimes less believable) CG dinosaurs, Trevorrow does an excellent job of staging the action scenes in Jurassic World. Spatial context for the creatures is always firmly established, the pace of the editing gives you enough time to comprehend what you’re seeing, and the movie is lit brightly enough to let you see what’s happening, when it’s happening.
…With the Least Imagination
With the exception of the resort being attacked by pterosaurs (which plays like a sequel to The Birds starring the prequel to birds), every major action sequence in Jurassic World plays out in one way: Indominus rex shows up, things go bad. Yes, these are movies where the driving character motivation is often simply “don’t get eaten,” but the other Jurassic Park sequels made the island itself as perilous as the creatures on it.
A crawl across a rickety, fog-shrouded walkway in Jurassic Park III is tense before any dinosaurs get involved, and the final attack by the Spinosaurus adds a drowning hazard to the mix. The Lost World uses its two T. rexes just to setup what’s maybe the single best action sequence of the franchise, as our heroes have to escape from a camper trailer while it dangles over a cliff. At its most creative, World plays a short game of gyro pinball that, like most of the other action scenes, exists mainly to make Indominus rex seem cooler.