Walking out of the theater where I had just watched Jurassic World, I tried to figure out what, exactly, the movie wanted to be. In its marketing, everybody involved tried to stress that this was the true sequel to Jurassic Park, the first to fully capture the spirit of that initial film. This claim did not gel with the movie I saw, which seemed to have little to no understanding of what made that first film truly special.

First of all, the sense of wonder instilled in the original Jurassic Park is completely gone here. Dinosaurs often litter the landscape, or show up as holograms in visitor information centers, but the camera seems wholly unimpressed with them.  This admittedly mirrors the feelings of many of the characters in the world, who have known dinosaurs to exist for over twenty years now, but it is jarring in a film so hellbent on recreating the splendor of the initial film.

When Jurassic World DOES go for a sense of wonder, it’s misdirected and heavy handed. The scene that pops into my head is when the the kids, Zach and Gray (yes, Gray) show up and Gray immediately starts running ahead to feast his eyes on the wonders of Jurassic World. No, not the dinosaurs: the park itself, with its giant…buildings. The original John Williams score blasts in, and the movie wants so hard for you to feel something, but the scene is completely lacking in set-up. Plus, I find it hard to get worked up over a CGI Samsung center, no matter how iconic the musical score.

Compare that scene to the first shot of the Brachiosauruses in Jurassic Park. Instead of just showing them and letting the music do the work, we enter into the scene inside of a jeep, watching Grant and Ellie discussing plant-life. Partway through the scene, Grant looks out and sees the dinosaurs, but we still don’t. We stay with Ellie, as Grant stops her from talking and physically turns her to see the creatures that we still can’t see. We get both characters’ sense of wonder before seeing a gorgeous composition showcasing a creation that (in 1993) was groundbreaking enough to justify the characters’ reactions. Gray’s awe-of-computer-generated-buildings doesn’t compare in the least.

The same goes for the action and suspense staging. It’s not that Jurassic World’s sequences are bad, they’re just merely competent. There is little to no sense of build-up in any scenes, and the way that the movie is content to immediately reveal any dinosaurs is disappointing. Again, comparing these sequences to the work in the original Jurassic Park just makes them feel shameful. Before revealing the T-Rex, Spielberg plays with the audience in several ways. The camera never strays far from the jeep, we see the disappearing goat (along with some of its remains), the night-vision framing, the water glass…just so much suspense before the big reveal.

But perhaps it is unfair to compare Jurassic World to Jurassic Park in this way, even if the film’s producers and marketers themselves invited the comparison through their promotional material. Spielberg is one of the greatest filmmakers in history, a master with blockbuster and suspense filmmaking, and Jurassic Park is one of his finest works. Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World’s director, has only directed one film before this (the very clever high-concept indie film Safety Not Guaranteed), and likely left most of the action sequences to the effects teams and storyboard experts. However, I was hoping that Trevorrow would at least bring something special to the characters, like he did with Safety Not Guaranteed. This, unfortunately, was not the case.

Jurassic World has some of the worst characters and arcs I’ve seen in a blockbuster film outside of the Transformers movies. Everybody is one dimensional: Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire is uptight, Chris Pratt’s Owen is cocky, Gray is excitable, and Zach is girl-crazy. Every once in a while they try to expand on a character with some extra background, but each time the attempt falls completely flat.

Take, for instance, the fact that Zach and Gray’s parents are getting divorced. In theory, this is a major part of the kids’ character development, especially since Gray already knows about it. But instead, Gray mentions it in one single scene, and then it is never mentioned again. The writers (all four of them…yikes) try to use it as justification for why the kids are off at Jurassic World with their aunt in the first place, but the logic behind that never makes sense either. Their parents are getting divorced, so their thought is to send their kids off to a dinosaur park with the aunt who they have not seen in seven years, and not even tell them why? What horrible parents! And then their mother gets mad at Aunt Claire over the phone for letting her assistant show them around the park, because it’s supposed to be a “family weekend.” None of this makes any sense! You could remove every single scene in which the divorce is referenced without affecting the movie in the slightest.

The character “development” on the island is just as bad. I cringe just thinking about the “romance” between Claire and Owen. The first scene they share together is that awful sequence that Joss Whedon derided as 50s era Hollywood sexism when the clip went online months ago. It is just as bad in context as it is out of context: Claire is uptight and boring, and Owen is fun and cocky. This continues without any development until one scene where, trekking through the jungle area outside of the park, Claire slightly modifies her outfit to be more outdoorsy, a move that Owen mocks and the audience is invited to laugh at. Then, she shoots a single dinosaur during an attack sequence and they start to make out. There is no build-up, no arc. They just kiss because that’s the kind of thing people are supposed to do in these movies.

The secondary characters are just as awful, especially Vincent D’Onofrio’s Vic Hoskins. Hoskins is a one-note villain in every way. You know this right off the bat when he starts trying to claim that, because man brought the dinosaurs back from extinction, they are simply a commodity that we own. The way he bulldozes his way into the security response when the Indominus Rex gets to the park lacks any nuance whatsoever. We’re supposed to find him repulsive, just as Owen’s raptor pack does.

The black-and-white nature of this movie’s themes is at odds with the original Jurassic Park as well. While the original film ultimately settles on the idea that mankind should not try to control nature because nature will always find a way to reassert itself, the closest thing the film has to an antagonist is John Hammond, who is actually a likable character! It is easy to relate to his situation as a man who has always dreamed to make Jurassic Park a reality, who is completely right to marvel at his creation. There is an actual scientific benefit to having a park full of dinosaurs that can be studied first-hand, even if he is ultimately wrong to think that he could control such a scenario. The downfall of his park is not meant to be viewed as his comeuppance, but as the tragic death of a man’s lifelong dream.

Jurassic World is very clear in its messaging: dinosaurs are cool and we can totally train and control them, but dinosaurs that we engineered ourselves are dangerous and bad and we shouldn’t do that. Owen, the “voice of reason” for the film, is quite vocal on this. The raptors that he trains are living, breathing things that need to be respected as lifeforms. The Indominus Rex, on the other hand, is an abomination and we need to “smoke” it with helicopters and missiles.

Not only is this overly simplistic and never challenged, it actually fails the film’s internal logic. As the evil scientist who created the Indominus Rex for InGen points out, NONE of the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park are natural. They are all created using DNA strands that were completed using frog DNA as placeholders, so they are ALL genetic mutants created by mankind. Besides, even if the Indominus Rex is a mish-mash of various genetic sources, it is still a living being. By claiming that it is an abomination that must be destroyed, Owen is commodifying a living creature in the exact same way that the cartoonishly evil Vic Hoskins is. The movie just doesn’t realize it.

So, Jurassic World does a lot things wrong: the sense of wonder, the suspense, the characters, the theme, and many more that I would prefer not to go into (but for posterity: the product placement is overwhelmingly ridiculous and the brief section in the old information center is nostalgia without purpose). But what are some of the high points? Well, I think if Jurassic World had cared less about trying in vain to recreate the magic of the original film, it could have had a lot of fun with some of its more original conceits. Having Chris Platt play a trainer of a velociraptor squad, complete with codenames, conjures up images of a “Burt Macklin’s Raptor Squad” movie that I would love to see, but Jurassic World rarely does the concept justice.

There are also a few scenes toward the end that get absurdly silly, involving a T-Rex and a raptor partnering up against the Indominus Rex. It makes no sense from a biological standpoint, but it’s a fun sequence that shows what Jurassic World could have been if it had abandoned the grounded reality of the earlier films entirely for a more crowd-pleasing picture.

Since Jurassic World now holds the record for the highest grossing opening weekend ever, both domestically AND internationally, Trevorrow will absolutely have more opportunities to make the franchise his own. I just hope that World’s success pushes the creative team to achieve more next time, rather than encouraging mediocrity.