8. Competent Characters
These days even supposedly "smart" movie character seem to be dumbing down. And I don't want to get into the whole
Prometheus "dumb characters" thing, but the crew of that ship - who are presumably some of the most intellectually capable human beings alive - were seriously lacking in the brains department. Most of their decisions were... questionable, to say the least. And those are exactly the kind of characters were don't want for
Jurassic Park IV - the beauty of the original was that its main characters were, essentially, nerds, and they stayed nerds from the very beginning to the very end. What I'm saying really is that we want this movie to be about normal people trapped in a terrifying situation. And although it's certainly fine to bring some gun-totting brutes along for the ride (we've gotta have guns going off, right?), let's even have those guys acting rationally. You know, like real people. Ultimately, that's the key to assuring that this installment isn't just another throwaway blockbuster: competent, assured characters that we can actually respect and relate to.