Mostly because the characters are *so* undeveloped. Jurassic Park had, like, ten fully developed characters. Lost World carried over one of those great characters and added a few more fully developed characters (no one in this film comes close to Julianne Moore... or Pete Postlethwaite... or even Vince Vaughn). This movie is insanely indifferent to character, with the exception of Jake Johnson, who subsequently waltzes away with the film. Guys who come across well in the film, like Pratt and Khan, do so exclusively on their own natural charisma-- the script does them no favors. It replaces any amount of necessary character building with its endless meta commentary on blockbuster filmmaking. Which makes the film funny and enjoyable on the whole... but so damn disposable. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: a film about the vain attempt to artificially create something bigger that vainly attempts to artificially create thrills.

Trevorrow and his cinematographer don't remotely have the eye of Spielberg, Cundey, and Kaminski for iconography... not by a longshot. So nothing feels as gripping as anything from the first film, or the RV scene or the raptor attack from the second film. Maybe it's not the lack of developed characters that matters, now that I think about it-- maybe it's just the technical prowess of those at the helm. These guys are good... but their original predecessor set a ridiculously high bar.

They do a good job with the chaos in the last half hour, though. That really saves the film. The flying dinosaur stuff and the big final battle-- if you end a film well, no one will ultimately care about anything else (even though the final moment of this film is asshole-clenchingly embarrassing). So I sit here, knowing I enjoyed the film on the whole, mostly due to the last half hour, but somewhat disappointed that, despite playing off of our nostalgia for the first and lifting entire beats of the original film, it still feels so far from the original that we all loved. Is the movie right? Have we really all lost the ability to be blown away by seeing big monsters?

I'm sure I'll change my feelings on this movie another time or two after I inevitably see it on cable.