All the elements fans criticize in the sequels — protagonists doing idiotic things, dinosaur spectacle over story, and a Green Aesop that felt a bit contradictory — were all present in the the first movie, where those elements were either reasonably justified or kept in check:
- The main characters behaving idiotically and being outsmarted by dinosaurs was part of the first movie's Aesop that no one can truly can contain or predict wildlife. For example, both Tim and Lex made stupid choices that ended up causing harm and death, but they were both kids well beyond what they were ever supposed to be dealing with. Meanwhile, the adults, while smarter, were not at all people equipped to handle dinosaurs, hence why you had things like Malcolm running with the flare instead of throwing it. And sometimes, even then it wouldn't be enough, as Robert Muldoon, the park warden and the one best equipped to dealing with the dinosaurs, is still outsmarted and killed by them in the end (by putting bait down to lure a Velociraptor, only for the pack leader to ambush him from the side where he least expected it). It made sense that people would make mistakes. The sequels run on the same logic, but the mistakes the protagonists feel far more contrived, even compared to Muldoon's death above. The Lost World: Jurassic Park had Sarah Harding, a supposed animal expert who accidentally and indirectly causes the deaths of many people by bringing a T. rex chick to the truck to treat its broken leg, causing its parents to come looking for their child and setting off a chain of Disaster Dominoes. Jurassic Park III had Amanda Kirby, a character whose idiocy would be tolerable if she had any more redeemable traits, but aside from the genuine worries she expressed in regards to her son being lost on Isla Sorna for weeks, came across as a generic Screaming Woman who does practically nothing the entire movie unlike her husband Paul who at least has some badass moments. Jurassic World has a questionable subplot of weaponizing dinosaurs, and the fall of the new park is due to an Obviously Evil man-made dinosaur. It also makes it seem to the audience that the humans make the same mistakes every single film, despite encountering the same animals again and again.
- The dinosaurs being nothing but spectacle for audiences to be wowed at was always a part of the franchise's appeal. However, the first film at least tried to tell a serious Science Fiction movie first and dinosaur movie second. The Lost World, on the other hand, ends with a T. rex rampaging through San Diego and only two out of the four main heroes, these being Ian and Sarah, trying to stop it. Then Jurassic Park III was criticized for being nothing but dinosaur spectacle with an extensive focus on how cool and epic the new Spinosaurus was, to the point that it infamously killed a T. rex. Fallen Kingdom has also been criticized for the having the T. rex from the first installment do nothing but stop a Carnotaurus from eating the heroes, have its blood drawn to heal a wounded Blue the Velociraptor, and eat Eli Mills, the film's main human villain, while also stepping on the Indominus rex bone used to create the Indoraptor and therefore preventing InGen from making more superhybrid dinosaurs, as well as the Mosasaurus escaping at the beginning only to factor absolutely nothing into the film's story, nor its sequel. Dominion takes this flaw to an absolute peak because nothing about the story involves dinosaurs, and all the dinosaur scenes are ultimately superfluous and could be removed without affecting the overall conflict (involving Maisie being kidnapped and a super-locust swarm problem). Even the new cool new "dinosaur villain", the Giganotosaurus ultimately seems contractually obliged rather than necessary.
- The Green Aesop of the entire franchise feeling more like a Broken Aesop was present in the first movie, with the moral of man playing god by resurrecting prehistoric lifeforms being somewhat undone by the fact that the collapse of the titular park was caused by The Mole, Nedry, hacking the park to shut off its electricity and causing the dinosaurs to come out. The Velociraptor paddock was the only one he left running in his shutdown... but then Hammond had Dr. Arnold shut the power down completely to undo everything Nedry had done, unleashing the raptors too. However, when Hammond acknowledges hiring Nedry and relying on automation was a mistake and plans to correct things with the park's next incarnation, Ellie Sattler isn't remotely satisfied, pointing out that Hammond never really had control of, nor proper respect for the monsters he'd created, and Ian Malcolm echoes this by pointing out how even a theme park's expected malfunctions lead to deaths when that theme park is built around dinosaurs. Hammond's arc in the first film was about him realizing that his ego and the corners he cut while building the park partially caused its collapse, made the Green Aesop feel more natural. It helped that it's revealed that the dinosaurs were breeding despite being engineered to all be female and that things went badly because a storm hit when Nedry shut off the power, supporting the idea that nature is unpredictable while also making clear the errors of mankind's actions by having Hammond dismissing the storm and Dr. Wu thinking he can stop life from carrying out one of its vital functions just by denying each specimen a chemical. As more sequels were made, however, the moral about the dangers of unchecked science became difficult to maintain because the series relied on dinosaurs. The Lost World has Hammond wanting to protect the dinosaurs by keeping them on Isla Sorna being portrayed as the right thing to do, even though the first movie was all about how dangerous they were and that they shouldn't have been created in the first place. By the time Fallen Kingdom was released with a twist revealing that one of the new human characters, young Maisie, was actually a clone, which is used to justify said character saving the dinosaurs when the animals are put in a life-or-death situation from a gas leak and a fire, many complained about the franchise's lack of consistency and self-awareness.
- The Artistic License – Paleontology of the franchise was there in the original, with a lot of elements being noticeably speculative even when you take Science Marches On into account (i.e. frilled-necked poison-spitting Dilophosaurusnote ). But the overall impression was still pretty accurate to the science of the era, and the film even got some acclaim for pushing the imagery of the Dinosaur Renaissance into the public eye and torpedoing discredited theories that still lingered in the popular imagination (such as sauropods needing to stay in water because they couldn't support their own weight or dinosaurs in general being sluggish, dimwitted eating machines). The succeeding films, though, have become generally abhorred by paleontologists for refusing to move on from that early '90s Prehistoric Monster look, leaving long-outdated depictions in the public eyenote . World onwards used the justification of them being genetically modified to look exactly like early '90s dinosaur depictions for the sake of intentional in-universe crowd pleasing, which largely failed to win favor, as it seemed to reflect the franchise's total disinterest in showing off the wonders of prehistoric life in favor of pandering to nostalgic adults, while also not actually using that concept for anything aside from one-per-film Big Bads. Jurassic World Dominion would sink it to a new level with a prologue showing dinosaurs as they lived in the actual Mesozoic era still having inaccurate anatomical features and throwing in a bit of Anachronism Stew and Misplaced Wildlife as well.
- The dinosaurs being designated heroes and either killing the film's human Big Bad or being portrayed as something very close to outright "good guys", to the point where the series started to look like a Villain-Based Franchise, was criticized thanks to Fallen Kingdom having the Big Bad and his lackeys getting Cruel and Unusual Deaths that were meant to be cathartic for the audience.note Every movie in the series had similar issues. Nedry and Gennaro have deaths that were meant to be karmicnote , the "Hunters" from Lost World had several die in ways caused by the heroesnote , while Jurassic World gave Zara an unnecessarily cruel death for a minor character who wasn't even one of the villains.note In most of the movies, however, these moments were Played for Horror first and foremost, and you were not supposed to find any sort of glee beyond spectacle about themnote . Nedry's death, for example, is karmic, but still plays like an encounter with a monster would be, while even Zara's death is still framed as a horrifying moment. Fallen Kingdom, however, makes the villains' deaths seem like moments the audience is supposed to cheer for, making them come across as tonally strange and hard to find enjoyment in. There's also the issue in that "villain dispatched by getting killed by dinosaur" gets incredibly repetitive and predictable when used in every film in which there is a human antagonist, as while Jurassic World: Dominion tried to bring back how it worked like a horror movie encounter in Jurassic Park with Lewis Dodgson dying to a pack of Dilophosaurus similar to what happened to Dennis Nedry, it was the third film in a row with this mentality.
- The dinosaurs' Plot Armor, at least in regards to humans being unable to kill them, was foreshadowed in the first film, where despite the presence of Robert Muldoon, the island's size-able security detail seen in the opening, and the iconic use of the SPAS-12, not a single dinosaur is directly killed by humans, and all the action revolved around running or hiding from them instead of fighting them. This was a notable deviation from the book, but served to keep the dinos threatening and also avoided glorifying killing what are, at their core, animals, not monsters, and made in-universe sense because it was a small group of isolated characters, only one (Muldoon) of which actually knew how to use guns (who is also killed off despite surviving in the book to make things more difficult for the other survivors). Subsequent installments seemed to make it a rule that no human, especially not heroic characters, could kill dinosaurs, and not with firearms. This seriously limits the type of action the series can have, can make the heroes Unintentionally Unsympathetic when dealing with dangerous dinos, and makes instances of incompetence on the parts of both heroes and villains inevitable, because they always have to either not bring guns, bring ones too small to do the job, or conveniently lose or avoid using available ones, and even creates serious Fridge Logic with how well these "animals" can apparently survive modern weapons. In The Lost World the "Heroes" steal the bullets out of Roland Tembo's elephant gun, resulting in the deaths of several Ingen mercenaries who simply fire their guns wildly into the air while chased by Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, and (less forseeably) the Tyrannosaurus buck's rampage though San Diego, which Malcolm and Sarah still insist on ending without killing the dinosaur (whom the San Diego police simply run from). Jurassic Park III had all the heavily-armed mercenaries dispatched offscreen in seconds by a single dinosaur (but not before the Spinosaurus seemingly No Sells or avoids multiple close-range shots from an anti-material rifle). Jurassic World started making some exceptions with Owen insisting they go after the Indominus with live rounds, when one of Vic Hoskins' forces shoots a Dimorphodon and another destroys Charlie the Velociraptor with a missile launcher and Simon Masrani's helicopter crew takes out a few Pteranodon with a minigun, but also introduced genetically engineered dinosaurs somehow explicitly Immune to Bullets with the Indominus shrugging off a point-blank rocket blast. Fallen Kingdom continues this new direction with Blue the Velociraptor being shot and needing to be operated on to save her life, despite the Indoraptor taking several direct gunshots from Owen and not dying (which was to be expected, being a direct clone of the Indominus), but Dominion would largely go back to playing it straight with the French secret service choosing to run while attacked by Sayona Santos' Atrociraptor pack, as well as dinosaurs becoming invasive around the world with no way to stop it, and apparently hunters or militia couldn't wipe them all out, despite being a few hundred in number at best, because... just because!
- A common criticism of Jurassic World is that the film portrays Claire and Zara as cold and uncaring for not liking or wanting kids. The thing is, this has roots as far back as the first movie, as a significant part of Alan's character development was going from a Child Hater to a Papa Wolf. The distinction is that Alan was portrayed as genuinely disliking kids, with an early Establishing Character Moment showing him scaring a mouthy child at one of his digs. However, once the chips are down, Alan becomes protective of Hammond's grandchildren and forms a bond with them over the course of the movie. Also, the only character who gives him any major flack about it is Ellie, his partner, who lightly teases him about it rather than being pushy. In contrast, Claire and Zara are just Workaholic businesswomen who wouldn't have time for them and are uncomfortable with the idea of being relegated to glorified babysitters. Additionally, the dynamics are different: unlike Alan who is a male scientist being teased by his partner in a relatively inoffensive way, Claire is a woman in control of running the entire park whose sister is sincerely trying to convince her to stop being Married to the Job and start a family, which has different connotations. Zara is also given an Asshole Victim framing, complete with a Cruel and Unusual Death, despite not really doing anything wrong other than accidentally allowing the boys to ditch her.
