While I mostly agree with the review...

My problem with that scene, is the music is supposed to evoke majesty and feel like they're revealing something impressive. In a film called "Jurassic Park/World" you would THINK that would be dinosaurs. Instead, as the theme began playing, I could not help but note that all we were seeing were resort and ride scenes. Even the pulling up to gates wasn't the same, because you had the voice-over telling the passengers that they were the actual gates from the original park. Then, the crescendo of the theme is the kid throwing open his widows to see...a resort. No dinosaurs yet, sorry. WTF?

Now, I get they were saving that for a surprise in the first film, so it was a little different, but dinosaurs have been running around on screen for more than 20 years now. We're not going to be stunned by the novelty, so there is no reason to be coy about it.

As the film went on, and we had the scene of Jake Johnson being a lone voice of dino-lover, among all the corporate and technical babble, I thought they were going for a subversive approach during the entrance, showing how Jurassic World was too much about the resort/park and not respecting the dinosaurs enough, that by wasting the theme on background bullshit, they were giving foreshadowing of the tragic flaw of the staff. But as it turned out, I really don't think so. I think they just screwed up, or the filmmakers have their heads as far up their asses as Claire & co, missing the important stuff for the supporting details. Even things like the train voice telling the passengers that the gates are from the original park - why would they do that IN the movie, and why would the filmmakers put that in there? To the movie characters, Jurassic Park means almost nothing, since half a dozen people got to see it before it got trashed. It's a footnote in the history of the attraction, like if Disneyworld made a showcase of their first attempts at rides, which didn't work right and had to be replaced with the ones people are currently coming to ride. Within the story, Jurassic Park is a badly-conceived project that killed two-thirds of the people who set foot in it. There's no reason the general public would care that they are seeing the same gates, and less reason for the PR folks to want to remotely remind them of the original park. Hence the name change. And the movie audience gets pulled out of the scene by a trivial detail that I can't imagine anyone caring about, since they almost certainly did not use the same props to film that gate.

Whatever the strength of the movie, I thought they really bungled that scene.

Regarding the homage to the original films, they really jettisoned that "life finds a way" theme, IMO. As of this movie, they really seem to have gotten a handle on Life, with all the dinosaurs that kept escaping and breeding swept under the rug, the park being allowed to go on with no mention of any repercussions of a tyrannosaur loose in San Diego, or compys chopping Kathy, or the pterodactyls who seemed to be making a run for it at the end of 3. All the bad stuff in this was not people arrogantly thinking they had accounted for nature and contained it, rather it was them going too far and creating unnatural horrors. The antagonist dinosaur was both unnatural, and not behaving naturally, in both cases, thanks to human screw-ups. And then it lost to the natural dinosaurs.

This worked a lot better as a follow-up to the novel, with Wu having a some of the same conversations he had with Hammond in that one.

I would watch the hell out of a sitcom set immediately after this, about the tyrannosaur and surviving raptor as a couple of wacky roommates setting up in the now-abandoned park, and occasionally having to team up to put their various dino-neighbors in their places. The opening credits could feature them looking at each other, dubbing over Pratt's & Howard's final dialogue "I think we should team up...for survival!"

I think, in hindsight, in the name of truth in advertising, they should have just called this franchise "Velociraptor Park".

The kids were not nearly as annoying as kids usually are. They walked right along the edge of "too much attention on human problems, at the expense of dino-peril" without actually getting in violation. I'm glad they jettisoned the usual approach of big-sister-little-brother, which pretty much has me rolling my eyes at how that's the way every family in Hollywood goes. It seems on the rare occasions when they make the teen sibling a boy, he tends to be more competent than only child sons, and less screamy than girls. Anyway, they found some things the kids could plausibly do, without having them unrealistically save the day. I'm looking at Lex operating a complex park control system and FUCKING GYMNASTICS, original trilogy.

Something or other near the end reminded my of Jeff Goldblum's original line about how if Disneyland breaks down "The Pirates of the Caribbean don't eat the customers." Remember back in those innocent times when Pirates of the Caribbean ONLY meant a ride? Who would have predicted then that franchise would hit four movies before Jurassic Park?!