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Jurassic World is a film about dinosaurs. Sadly, that’s all it’s a film about.

I saw the first Jurassic Park film twenty years ago; I remember well the anticipation, the excitement, that surrounded the original film. And it was good. I watched it again, last week; it was still reasonably good, but it didn’t, it has to be said, hold up terribly well. But it had characters, and a story, and enough to keep the audience engaged that the film has been remembered fondly, perhaps more fondly than it entirely deserved.

Jurassic World: good, but not at all good enough

But Jurassic World simply lacks what gave the original film its warmth. It has the rudiments of a story — two young brothers visit the incredibly popular and successful Jurassic World park, built on the site of Jurassic Park, on Isla Nubar in Costa Rica, some dinosaurs escape, dinosaurs fight humans and each other. The story, though, is simplistic at best, and it lacks characters of any great interest to propel it along. Chris Pratt plays Owen, the manly man’s man who trains velociraptors for a living, and tinkers with motorbikes for fun. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Claire, the brothers’ aunt who is supposed to show them around but who is too busy with her very important job to look after them. These characters, though, are hard to engage with or care about. They’re one-dimensional characters played with an almost absolute lack of warmth or depth, partly because they were written with entirely no warmth or depth. In the 1995 original, John Hammond, Dickie Attenborough’s kindly old uncle with the hopelessly adrift accent, at least had a little bit of warmth and roundedness to his character; Pratt’s Owen scowls and swaggers his way through the film in little more than a monotone. Howard looks, at times, like she wants nothing more than to be Taylor Swift, but instead has to plough through a script that presents her character as an object lesson in anti-feminism — a woman really, really shouldn’t devote herself too much to her job, lest she forget how to nurture children — in a strange turnaround from the learning-to-love-children arc of Sam Neill’s Dr. Grant in the original film

It’s the bit characters that manage to go some very small way toward redeeming the film. Jake Johnson, as Lowery, the nerd at the control desk, has a handful of decent lines, and a pleasing way of interacting with Lauren Lapkus, who really needs to put distance between herself and this and get herself back to Orange Is The New Black. BD Wong, the only member of the 1995 cast to make an appearance here, is interesting but underused as a moderately evil scientist. Omar Sy treads dangerously close to Magical Black Friend territory. And Vincent d’Onofrio is the nearest the film has to a villain that we can hope gets eaten, but even he isn’t able to get truly nasty.

And since we’re mentioning characters who could have redeemed the film, where was Jeff Goldblum? There has been speculation that he might, at the very least, have shown up in a cameo, but if he did, it was a very, very short appearance, and certainly not one that I noticed. Ian Malcolm would have helped enormously. But despite Goldblum’s absence, the original park does make a cameo appearance; Johson’s Lowery also makes a few references to Jurassic Park, even wearing  t-shirt with the T-rex logo, telling Claire “That park was legit.”

The new park is, it must be said, a little less legit. Product placement abounds; in the very Disneyland-esque plaza leading to the Samsung Visitor Centre (honest), Brookstone and Starbucks and Margaritaville signs are clear and prominent above shopfronts. And, since Samsung clearly sponsor Jurassic World — the film and its fictional setting — nobody has an iPhone.

In the end, then, this is a film about dinosaurs. It’s not about people, their interactions, their problems, their challenges. It’s about huge, impressive, spectacular CGI dinosaurs roaring and thundering and eating their way across a small Costa Rican island. Nobody stops to ask why they’re there, after Hammond, at the end of Jurassic Park, essentially announces that there will be no dinosaur park. And there are no baddies, not even a slightly sappy lawyer — there’s nobody, really (well, maybe one, but even that’s highly debatable) that you simply have to see getting eaten by a tyrannosaur. Jurassic World, the park, is, simply, a huge success; the issue of how it was resurrected is simply ignored, so that instead we get, essentially, more of the same spectacular dinosaur roaring that made the first film the hit it was. But there’s little new in this film, little to break new ground. Indeed, if anything, absent the characters, the meaningful story arc, and, most importantly, Dr. Ian Malcolm, the dinosaurs are left to carry the film themselves. They’re very impressive, but they’re not enough to carry over two hours of otherwise really rather hollow and empty film.