As usual, this is just a brief overview.

I thought it was really really good. There are definitely things I really didn't like but it was the first time in a long time that I wanted to go re-watch it immediately. A lot of that is due to the wonderful production values that there's so much to notice but I'll get on to that later.

I'll start with the bad. I hated the Vincent D'Onofrio story-line. He is a great actor sure, but he's so artificially one dimensional.They use him as a catalyst to move the story along and it just feels forced and pretty unappealing and with all the movie does right, I felt this stood out. They could have come up with something much more clever.

The first half of the movie feels way too preachy. How many times do we have to be given the speech about how dinosaurs don't belong bla bla bla. They covered it in one scene in Jurassic Park I feel like every 5 minutes they rehashed the scene.

Finally, it's a modern summer movie. Movies are made a certain way these days. I've learned to go ahead and except it. There are great things about modern movies but there's also some unfortunate things and this movie does hold true to those guidelines. Awkward humor and the search for the perfect one-liner. Too much CGI sure. The story-line with the raptors and the T-Rex-Raptor team-up at the end is without a doubt silly, but I will give them credit, they did the best they could with some of those ideas. I bought it.

Now to the good things.

It was wonderful seeing the park in action. Absolutely wonderful. They did a much better job with that than I would have believed. Sure, the trailers revealed too much but it was still really cool. Jurassic World is a park I'd love to visit.

Chris Pratt is awesome as usual, and I honestly believe he is growing as an actor. I thought he had a strong, commanding presence that frankly was missing in Guardians of the Galaxy.

I was pleasantly surprised by the child actors. Some of their story-line felt generic and the younger one was a little annoying but I thought the older one actually did a very good job.

Howard got better as the movie went along. After the first two scenes with her, I was rolling my eyes, but by the end of it, I definitely think she did a good job.

I thought the way the two story-lines developed in the first half of the movie was great.

Again, production value was top notch and the world felt lived in and I feel that it matched Jurassic Park in that and that's a major reason I loved Jurassic Park.

I loved the speech Wu gave that felt right out of the novel about how if they made the dinosaurs how they really were, they'd look different, act different, and confuse people.

Final thought, the finale could have been a little bit more involved. There are 9 carnivorous dinosaurs on Isla Nublar. We only really see 4/5 of them. We some of the same herbivore dinosaurs over and over again too instead of seeing some of the others. It would have been cool to see a bit more of them in the finale in some capacity. Looking back at it, there really was no overwhelming threat. The tourists were pretty safe. The 4 main characters could have escaped if they weren't busy watching the fight. I don't know what I would have done differently but it'd be really cool to see a scene like in the Jurassic Park novel where the raptors are all over the hotel and they're chewing through the bars to get to the people inside and it was a race against time. Something like that.