10 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From Jurassic World

6. Avoid On-The-Nose Dialogue

Here's an actual line of dialogue from Jurassic World, which comes courtesy of Chris Pratt's Navy SEAL turned dinosaur trainer (?), Owen Grady:

"It depends on what kind of dinosaur they cooked up in that lab."

Who would actually say something like that, in this modern day? Not only is it horribly cheesy (people laughed in the theatre, didn't they?), it just doesn't ring true. Worse still, the exchange could have been wholly improved had it been stripped back, like so:

"It depends..." "On what?" "The dinosaur."

In this specific case, less is certainly more. The job of the actor is to sell the line, and had Chris Pratt solemnly glared and just said "The dinosaur," audiences would have know exactly what he was referring to without all that awful stuff about cooking and labs. The lesson, then, is don't be afraid to strip back your dialogue: don't just over-explain exactly what it is you want the audiences to know all the time because you're afraid they won't get the point. Give them the benefit of the doubt - they're always smarter than you think.