Thus, Jurassic World has an inherent novelty in that we finally get to see what that vision might look like, and it is quite the spectacle. Part Disney World, part safari adventure, part SeaWorld, the bigger-is-better sprawl of the film’s dino destination makes the original film’s concept of a dinosaur zoo feel like a dinky county fair (it’s no small leap to go from a “park” to a “world”). Now we have massive water tanks that allow visitors to watch the gargantuan Mosasauraus leap for bait (a Great White shark—nudge, nudge, wink, wink, Spielberg) and swim below the water, open savannas where you can roll around in clear hover balls while dinosaurs parade around you, a massive aviary housing dozens of Pteranodons, and, of course, a futuristic-looking main street featuring all manner of corporate restaurants and shopping centers. The film suggests that Jurassic World has been growing and thriving for years, attracting more than 20,000 tourists at a time and always looking for new ways to embolden the experience.

Which, of course, is the problem in stories of this sort. Big dreams lead to big catastrophes, and the mayhem unleashed in Jurassic World is nothing short of epic. “The key to a happy life is to accept you’re never in control,” says inGen CEO and Hammond successor Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), a sentiment that flies in the face of everything the park stands for. With its massive walls, computerized security systems, and tightly controlled environments, everything about it is an exercise in control that, like the previous films, is destined to fail. The greatest purveyor of control is Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park’s rigid, hyper-organized director who believes in profitability and growth above all else, values that all but ensure disaster in such an enterprise. Claire’s two nephews, geeky 11-year-old Gray (Ty Simpkins) and randy 16-year-old Zach (Nick Robinson), have come to visit her, mainly so the film can follow the Spielbergian formula of upping any sense of danger by inflicting it on children and adolescents (they are also the children of an impending divorce, yet another allusion to the Spielberg oeuvre).

Unlike the previous Jurassic films, Jurassic World has an outright, uber-macho hero in Owen (Chris Pratt), who one character describes rather redundantly late in the film as a “badass.” A far cry from the paleontologists and theoretical mathematicians who previously headlined these films, Owen is a former Navy SEAL who works at the park training velociraptors to follow commands, a practice that warmongering private security contractor Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) is dying to employ for warfare. The idea of weaponized velociraptors is one of the film’s sillier conceits, but it just about works, if only because we’re so familiar with the raptors and their keen intelligence. Pratt, who last summer headlined the massive hit Guardians of the Galaxy and is the much rumored successor to Harrison Ford’s fedora when Disney decides to revamp the Indiana Jones franchise, is almost a parody of alpha male awesomeness, from his sculpted biceps, to his carefully maintained five o’clock shadow, to his mix of charm and level-headed seriousness. He never takes a wrong step, which makes him decidedly less interesting than the typically flawed Spielbergian everyman hero (even Indiana Jones was made to look ridiculous at least two or three times in each of his films).

The original Jurassic Park was, in addition to a brilliantly engineered thrill ride, a cogent critique of the dangers of science without guiding principles, and World carries that theme forward, even bringing back Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), the smug geneticist who helped engineer the original dinosaurs and is here turned into an outright villain. The simple idea of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction was a questionable move in the original film that resulted in disaster. Now that dinosaurs have become familiar to the point of banality, pushing the envelope involves not just resurrecting dead species, but creating new ones, in this case a colossal beast known as Indominus rex, which is bigger, meaner, and has more teeth than any dinosaur we’ve seen so far. It’s also a product of intensive market research, suggesting that we the people typically want what isn’t good for us, a message that isn’t at all lost on a fourth entry in a blockbuster series that clearly wants to be, like the Indominus rex, bigger, badder, and toothier than its predecessors.

In fact, Jurassic World is perhaps most interesting and entertaining as meta commentary on the nature of contemporary blockbuster franchise filmmaking, which is only enhanced by the fact that the film and the theme park within the film share the same name. Everything that is said about Jurassic World the theme park applies equally to Jurassic World the film, and the prominence and insistence with which the two are intertwined makes it almost impossible to ignore. The cynic in me suspects that this is a case of jumping potential criticism by acknowledging the film’s repetitive, bigger-is-better, profit-generating nature upfront, but it’s integrated so well into the flow of the story and its characters that it’s hard to discount out of hand. Thus, virtually everything Claire says in her official position as park director could be taken as double-speak for not just the movie, but virtually any entry in a big-budget franchise: “Corporate felt genetic modification would up the ‘wow’ factor.” “Every time we unveiled a new attraction, attendance has spiked.” “Consumers want them louder, bigger, more teeth.” And that, of course, is exactly what we get, both literally and metaphorically, as Jurassic World is louder, bigger, and features many more teeth than all the previous Jurassic Park films.

That’s usually not a good thing, as bigger is rarely better in the summer movie marketplace, just more bloated. However, under the director of Colin Trevorrow, who previously helmed the smart, low-key sci-fi head-scratcher Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), Jurassic World works much more often than it doesn’t. The “wow factor” has definitely been increased, but Trevorrow also borrows a few notable plays from the Spielberg playbook, particularly a willingness to hold out, at least for a little while, before springing the mayhem. There is notable buildup in the film, and the eventual payoff is worth it. Working from a script credited to four screenwriters including himself, Trevorrow also wisely plays up nostalgia for the original film, best seen in an extensive sequence set in the ruins of the original film’s Visitor’s Center and a quirky character named Lowery (Jake Johnson) who works in the control room and wears a ragged “Jurassic Park” T-shirt he bought off eBay. The strains of John Williams’ original theme music is present throughout the film, which creates an enhanced sense of continuity between past and present, suggesting that Jurassic World—the park and the movie—is not so much another bloated sequel as it is the fruition of dreams deferred in the previous films. Too bad the genre dictates that those dreams are once again destined for disaster.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Universal Pictures