His character Owen Grady, an ex-Navy sort of Velociraptor-whisperer in the vein of dog whisperers you see on TV, is unusually pro-nature and open-minded for the typical bag-of-meat hero, but it’s Pratt who gives a soul to a movie easy to dismiss as soulless. Jurassic World will age terribly, a Transformers-esque clunky action movie all CGI that often already looks a few years past its prime. If that’s true, Pratt might be World’s fountain of youth. If he believes he’s running from a gigantic, hybrid, albino T-Rex-like mutant dinosaur, then hell, I do too. If I return to World, he’ll be what makes the sure-to-be-dated effects believable.

The other three principles, Bryce Dallas Howard’s cold-faced capitalist Claire Dearing (who doesn’t want kids) and her nephews Gray (Ty Simpkins) and Zach Mitchell (Nick Robinson), struggle to find a distinguishing identity. She’s bad with kids and they’re kind of annoying (Gray is the overexcited kid you hope you never have to babysit and Mitchell is a hormonal teen punk), so wanting everyone to get along is a non-goal. And unlike the analog, robust theme park from Jurassic Park, Jurassic World is more than a fully functional worldwide phenomenon. It’s proudly modernist. Lots of glass, lots of stainless steel, but also lots less personality. The already artificial-looking locale of Jurassic World was brought to life with questionable CGI, and the impersonal, anti-tactile aesthetic undercuts the original’s thrilling sense of actually being there. Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg, ever the master of audience manipulation, knew how to activate senses beyond the frame, including the sophisticated arousal of imagining what a gigantic pile of Triceratops shit smells and even feels like.

This is also a message movie but not a very good one. An early version of the title was probably Jurassic World: An Intermittently Fun Cautionary Tale of Capitalism. Evolving from Jurassic Park’s themes of greed, family and the chaotic states of life, screenwriters Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Colin Trevorrow, and Derek Connolly try to unite World’s many disparate narrative strands through subtext. There’s contrasting examples of wanton capitalist enterprise, the diminishing returns of YouTube instant gratification, and the military industrial complex. Howard’s character ties into that clumsily strewn web through the edge of sexual politics. If that sounds like a sour stew of ideas, it’s because it totally is, and seeing Claire’s anal obsession with end-of-year figures “up 2% from last year” shoulder to shoulder with Vincent D’Onofrio’s security man that wants to militarize raptors—really, that’s a thing—is nothing short of bizarre. If Jurassic Park is full of the “Spielberg face”, where characters gaze offscreen in awe and wonder, Jurassic World might make you experience the “confused face” or the “perplexed face.”