I'm so sick of reading takes on Jurassic World: Rebirth where people say the writer and director don't care about the original films. David Koepp, the screenwriter, wrote the script for the first two films in collaboration with Michael Crichton. Gareth Edwards, the director, is a huge fan of the entire franchise and has spoken in interviews about what a big deal it was to be offered a chance to direct the film. Steven Spielberg also played a major role, collaborating with Koepp on the story that eventually became the screenplay.
The film is full of homages and references to previous films in the franchise. It brings in elements from Michael Crichton's novels that didn't make it into the first few films. And a lot of the structural and trope things that people are criticizing are directly modeled on tropes from the previous films. Having a family and two kids of different ages play a major role in the film, even if they seem awkwardly shoved in there, is a classic Jurassic Park trope. Having cheesy, somewhat surface-level character arcs is also a Jurassic Park thing. We're talking about a film series where Ian Malcolm's daughter snuck into a trailer before it left for the dinosaur island, and then used her previously alluded-to gymnastics skills to kick a dinosaur in the face. A film series where Alan Grant got hoodwinked into going to the dinosaur island by William H. Macy and Téa Leoni because their son got stranded there while parasailing, and then he had to sit there and listen to their divorced parent drama for half the trip. In both cases, this involves a surface-level character arc involving fatherhood, or non-fatherhood, much like the one we see in the original film.
It's totally understandable if people don't like the movie, but the assumption that the creative team had no interest in the original franchise is simply incorrect. A quick read of the film's Wikipedia page, or a single interview with the screenwriter or director, immediately makes it clear that the opposite is true.
Can we just normalize having different opinions about the film and not having one opinion be more right or associated with being a "better fan"? There are a lot of us who love the franchise, and most of us rank the films in a completely different order from others. Some people prefer dinosaur realism. Others prefer less realistic Hollywood-style dinosaurs. Some people prefer the films in the series that skew more toward horror. Others prefer ones that skew closer to action-adventure. Some people think the scene where the dinosaur said "Alan" in the third movie was the worst moment in the entire franchise. Others think it was one of the best moments in the entire franchise. That doesn't mean that some people are wrong. It just means it's a franchise with a wide-ranging group of films that check different boxes, and so the fandom naturally includes a range of well-informed diverse perspectives.
