10 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From Jurassic World

4. Don't Set-Up New Character "Traits" At The Exact Moment They're Utilised

One of the scenes in Jurassic World has two of its central characters, teenager Zach and his kid brother, Gray, stumbling upon some of the old '92 Jeep Wrangler vehicles from the original Jurassic Park. Despite the complaints from fans, it's a generally cool moment - one that nicely ties the old movie together with the new one, albeit somewhat obviously. But then the movie decides that it wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants its characters to drive one of the vehicles, despite all of the issues that go hand in hand with that (namely: would that Jeep really work after twenty years? What about the tyres?). Still, with that, it might be possible to suspend your belief, because - okay - it's a movie. But Jurassic World makes a crucial mistake when it has Zach suddenly reveal that, hey, "remember when we used to fix cars with grandpa?" as some sort of half-assed reasoning behind how the kids are suddenly going to be really great a fixing cars. It's bad enough that these kids happen to have car-based fixing skills, but to reveal this at the exact moment when they need to fix a car - it's just lazy. If the screenwriters absolutely had to give Zach and Gray this trait, it should have been established earlier on: like in the opening scene. Couldn't Zach have been seen briefly fixing a car back then?