I saw it and it was pretty good. You have to suspend disbelief, but you ALWAYS have to suspend disbelief on summer blockbusters.
Spoiler-filled commentary:
The genetic engineering of a new, never-before-seen apex predator is so plainly a bad idea that it takes the most effort to skip over. But this is a sci-fi action flick about dinosaurs eating people, not a primer on ethical science and theme park management. For those who haven’t seen (and who clearly don’t mind spoilers): the park has created the “Dominus Rex” (sponsored by Verizon ™) to look as scary as possible, because running the park is expensive, there are only so many people will to fly to Costa Rica and lay down thousands to see dinosaurs, and the normal dinosaurs just aren’t cutting it anymore. When it gets out and they ask B.D. Wong, “why is this so dangerous,” his response is, “you can’t genetically engineer something to look like a scary predators without actually making it a scary predator.”
But on the plus side: it does a good job of showing what a working Jurassic Park would be like – T-shirts, Starbucks, lines, the most adorable petting zoo ever – and the younger kid, Gray, actually looks genuinely thrilled beyond belief to see real dinosaurs. That excitement is something the middle two films in the franchise never even tried to capture.
There are some emotional misses – putting Owen on a cycle near raptors, the lone raptor at the end coming out of the smoke to save the day at the climax, etc – but overall it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do: show some exciting dinosaurs and have them eat people.
