Ranking Every ‘Jurassic World’ Character From Dumbest to Least Dumb 

Ranking Every ‘Jurassic World’ Character From Dumbest to Least Dumb

now holds the record for the biggest opening weekend in movie history, with over $208 million in the U.S. and $500 million worldwide in just three days of release. After more than a decade since the last sequel, 

 fans were clamoring for more dinosaur action. Director Colin Trevorrow gave them exactly what they wanted.

might have exceeded its financial expectations, it also fell a wee bit short of its intellectual ones. It has some insanely cool visuals and a couple of memorable set-pieces, but it’s also littered with some very dumb characters, many of whom behave so nonsensically that it’s almost like they’re trying to die at the claws and jaws of the park’s scaly residents. Most of ScreenCrush’s post-screening conversations about 

have focused on this subject; debating the relative intelligence of the characters and trying to determine who amongst them is the most brain-dead.

After much discussion, we arrived at this list, ranked from dumbest to smartest (or least dumb, since almost everyone in this movie makes at least one asinine decision). Some of those asinine decisions lead to characters’ deaths, so be aware that this piece contains plenty of SPOILERS. Enter at your own risk, like someone who decides to go to 

after a Tyrannosaurus Rex rampages through San Diego. Hold on to your butts, it’s about to get awfully stupid in here.

21. Zach and Gray Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins)

Almost literally too dumb to live. When the Indominus Rex breaks out of its paddock and the park goes into lockdown, Zach and Gray are cruising around Jurassic World in a gyrosphere. They’re given a warning message to immediately return their vehicle back to the loading dock, but they decide to ignore it. They

ignore a bunch of warning signs to take their gyrosphere through a hole in the fence that’s clearly been put there by dinosaur claws. They basically do everything they possibly can to get eaten short of covering themselves in barbecue sauce and stepping directly into the Indominus Rex’s mouth.

Pretty dumb, although some of that is by design. Fallon plays the host of the security video on the gyrosphere ride. A lot of his goofy pratfalls are staged for comedy and shouldn’t be held against him, but Fallon was foolish enough to give his name and likeness to the safety video on one of the unsafest attractions at the unsafest amusement park on the entire planet. When Jurassic World goes to hell, there are dozens of people inside those giant glass pinballs, and most of them are going to get eaten by dinosaurs. When they do, who do you think their relatives are going to sue? Jurassic World itself, certainly, but also the dope whose mocking, sarcastic safety video left their loved ones utterly unprepared for a real emergency. If he escapes the legal system with his fortune, he’ll still have to contend with all the bad PR (“Jimmy Fallon’s Antics Killed My Daughter!”), which will almost certainly cost him his job as 

Intensely idiotic. Hoskins works for InGen and covets the raptors that Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady is attempting to train to do, uh, things. Hoskins believes that Owen’s raptors have military applications, because if there’s one place raptors belong it’s on chaotic battlefields full of gunfire and explosions. Even after he witness the raptors nearly rip a man to shreds, he remains fully convinced that the raptor soldiers (or “raptoldiers,” as they should have been called) are 100 percent viable, and works to wrest control of the animals from Owen. In the end, he’s rightfully eaten by one of the very raptors he insisted would become the future of InGen. Nice work, moron.

He takes a job working with the deadliest creatures on the planet without any knowledge or experience. On his first day, he screws up the feeding procedure and falls into the middle of the paddock where he’s instantly surrounded by four raptors. He only survives thanks to the quick thinking and brave actions of Owen Grady. So, yeah, he’s pretty dumb.

 Frankly? She’s kind of dumb. Claire is the manager of Jurassic World, but she apparently possesses a very limited understanding of its animal population and displays zero concern about the creation of the Indominus Rex, even after it eats its sibling and nearly breaks out of its supposedly inescapable enclosure. (SPOILER ALERT: It breaks out about four minutes later.) She also refuses to take off her heels when she journeys into Jurassic World to rescue her nephews, Zach and Gray. She’s still wearing them at the end of the film, when she decides to run away from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. In heels. 

 Noticeably dumb, but to be fair, the Gyrosphere Operator is the only character in 

to be dumb. He’s the film’s stand-in for every dim-witted teen running the teacups ride at local carnivals, and his face has this sublimely empty-headed expression as he loads people into their spinning translucent death traps gyrospheres. When the ride shuts down, he freaks out and doesn’t know what to do. But don’t take it too harshly, noble doltish Gyroscope Operator. That was the role you were created to play, and you played it well.

We should cut her a certain amount of slack. After all, she’s a dinosaur. But Rexy (yes, it’s the same T-rex as the one in the original 

) still hasn’t learned not to chase flares, and Claire easily lures her into a suicidal fight with the Indominus Rex. C’mon sister! Will you ever learn that’s a trap?

 The CEO of a massive multinational company should be a pretty bright guy. But Simon Masrani sure acts like a boob. He doesn’t even seem intelligent enough to maintain a consistent personality. In one scene, he’s a whimsical and eccentric dreamer who loves flying his helicopter; in the next, he’s a coldly calculating businessman only interested in the park’s bottom line. In one moment he might push for the installation of the park’s new Indominus Rex attraction, and in the next he might scold the scientist who engineered it for doing exactly what he was paid to do. When the I-Rex goes on a kill spree, he makes the not-smart decision to keep it quiet. Then at the end of the film he pilots a helicopter as part of a mission to contain the Indominus Rex and promptly crashes it. Whoops!

13. Karen and Scott Mitchell (Judy Greer and Andy Buckley)

They send two unsupervised minors to the most dangerous amusement park on earth. They know their aunt is a workaholic, but are shocked when she chooses her job over spending time with her nephews. They also appear headed for a divorce, but they never say why, and at the end of the film they appear to be back together without any explanation why.

 He willingly works as the guy who Jurassic World sends in to kill dinosaurs when they break out of their cages. Which, at Jurassic World, basically happens every single day. On the scale of dangerous jobs, Katashi’s ranks pretty far toward the dangerous end of things, right between professional wing walker and poison taste tester.

Well, he works with Owen training Jurassic World’s raptors, a boondoggle that seems about as intelligent as teaching a bear to do your laundry. But he also seems to defer to Owen, and doesn’t underestimate the intelligence or ferocity of the raptors. So at least he’s got that going for him.

To his credit, Lowery never leaves the relatively safe confines of the Jurassic World command center. But he also wears inappropriate T-shirts to work, litters his work station with dinosaur toys, and totally misjudges his relationship with his co-worker Vivian (Lauren Lapkus). When the control room is evacuated near the end of the film, Lowery willingly stays behind because someone has to help Owen and Claire in their quest. You might call this a heroic act. I call it a very dumb one.

For turning a bunch of laid-back tunes about chilling in the Caribbean into a restaurant and lifestyle empire, Jimmy Buffett deserves kudos as an unqualified genius. Or at least he did, until he decided to install a Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville at Jurassic World, and to oversee its operation personally. Buffett makes a brief cameo looking “rather preoccupied with saving his margaritas” during the Pterosaurs’ attack. Jimmy, I know loving margaritas is your gimmick and all, but at a certain point you need to put down the booze and run for your freaking life from giant flying dinosaurs. Otherwise, you’re going to become a Pterosaur’s Jimmy buffet.

Zara makes one mistake; she’s so focused on her job as Claire’s assistant that she loses sight of Zach and Gray, who wander off into the park to try their damnedest to fulfill their dinosaur death wish. But otherwise, Zara’s a bright woman. She works hard, and spends most of her time answering emails and phone calls. So naturally she receives the film’s most brutal death, getting thrown around by pterosaurs and then eaten by the enormous, aquatic Mosasaurus. It’s almost like

ld exists in a universe of reverse natural selection, where only the dumbest survive to reproduce. Sort of like

Obviously Dr. Wu is highly intelligent. He was smart enough to help create the original Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, and to lead the new Jurassic World lab team. But he’s also dense enough not to think there’s anything potentially dangerous (not to mention ethically troubling) about engineering the Indominus Rex, and to make it out of all the scariest parts of all the scariest dinosaurs. Giving credit where credit’s due, though, he does get the eff out of dodge when the park starts to go to hell, sneaking out on a helicopter before he can get gobbled up by one of his creations. Anybody whose managed to emerge unscathed from two of these Jurassic Hell Holes deserve a small amount of intellectual respect.

Osterly is one of the businessmen interested in sponsoring Jurassic World’s newest attraction. The film makes a joke about the “Indominus Rex, presented by Verizon,” and it does seem like poor form on the part of some cell phone conglomerate to brand a tourist-devouring monster with a corporate logo. But 

just had the biggest opening weekend in film history. Millions of people are learning about the Verizon Indominus Rex. So this Hal guy must be smarter than he looks.

holed up in the park’s control room. But she distinguishes himself from her colleague in at least two ways: She doesn’t make an awkward and ill-timed pass at him in the midst of the worst dinosaur-related tragedy in 65 million years, and when InGen evacuates Jurassic World, she doesn’t hesitate in making like a tree and getting out of there. Good for you, Vivian. You’re better than this place.

Zach’s girlfriend appears in just one scene in 

, kissing him goodbye as he and Gray leave for their vacation. She never goes to Jurassic World and is never menaced by dinosaurs and therefore she is automatically one of the smartest people in 

Pretty damn smart, or at least a hell of a lot smarter than most of the human characters. The original 

showed raptors’ incredible intelligence; they could open doors and work in teams to hunt their prey. 

suggests that under the right environment they might even be taught to work with a human to perform basic tasks. I like to believe, though, that the raptors are so smart that they’re just pretending to listen to Owen in order to escape from captivity. It works too! Clever girls.

Not dumb. Owen is seemingly the only person in all of Jurassic World who immediately knows the Indominus Rex is a bad idea, and that Vic Hoskins’ plan to weaponize his raptors is equally foolish. He’s the only guy to (rightly) suggest an evacuation of Jurassic World (they don’t) and to recommend vaporizing the I-Rex with a missile strike (they don’t). He probably trusts his raptors too much (shockingly, as soon as they’re let out of captivity they immediately try to eat him!) but let’s cut him a little slack; surrounding yourself with this many nitwits is bound to rub off on you a little. By the standards of 

The I-Rex is awesome. She outsmarts the security measures in her enclosure,

the CEO of a global corporation. She rips out the tracking device implanted in her back because, according to Owen, “she remembered where they put it in.” I’m reasonably sure she’d score higher on the SATs than every human character in this movie. She’s so smart she’s really

’s hero, and the end of the film is less of a triumph of the human spirit that a tragedy about a brilliant creature being dragged down and destroyed by the world’s ignorance.

Filed Under: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Colin Trevorrow, Jake Johnson, Jimmy Fallon, Jurassic World

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