I think all your character placements are spot on. Honestly, I think that the parents are superfluous, the important thing is the relationship between the boys and Claire. Whenever the parents turned up I just switched off. And ESPECIALLY with Zach's girlfriend - did she even get named? Claire's assistant should also have been removed - she served no purpose other than as a red-shirt to get eaten. Both of the trickster characters - Hoskins and Wu, should have been merged into a single character. I totally didn't understand the interaction between the pair of them. I would have rather had a single point of reference between Owen, Claire, and the traitorous components. I also had the "dont care" problem with these characters. Owen and his relationship with the Raptors was my big care factor - and Claire with the boys. Honestly the whole Claire-Owen ex-love affair should have been ditched. It wouldn't be too bad to develop over the movie (people in high danger situations and all that - like in Speed) but we never saw any of the old relationship, so everything was "telling" and it totally didn't make sense... I mean what did Owen, the practical action man, see in the cerebral, over-organised Claire? That relationship didn't make sense before the shared experiences of dinosaurs!

I also agree with the archetype structure. It is very interesting how all the marketing for JW has Owen promoting the movie and Claire not getting much; perhaps, mostly from female demographic talk shows, when she is clearly driving the story. So, based on the definition of a Protagonist, who is an active protagonist, I would also say Clair. However, it did not appear she had enough at stake (setup exposition did not reveal much) to justify needing to contain Indominus-does she feel personal responsibility for letting this situation happen, was she bullied in a corporate situation in her previous job history and did not speak up. I didn't feel the writers gave her enough personal stakes to make her want to turn this Indominus situation around. It was obvious she did not want the patrons killed but that was all. Perhaps she needed to feel more guilt. I'm not sure if Clair and Owen could have been dual protagonist, at least officially. They of course teamed up in the second act but Clair was clearly driving the story but her character appeared not to believe it and needed help from Owen. Clair had to get T-Rex and not Owen....interesting. (Maybe Owen had no clue how) Interested in hearing comments from others....

Kenny, sounds like you and I, had we seen the movie together, would have been nodding, then shaking our heads at pretty much the same spots. I'm glad you mentioned the whole Zach girlfriend thing because that was another subplot which seemed like more of it was filmed, but got cut. Remember the girls he was ogling as they were about to get into the traveling ball vehicles? Thought that was going somewhere. Nothing. And like you, I didn't buy the Claire-Owen romantic connection either. Compare that to the well-drawn dynamic in the original JP between Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, how she was pressing for them to have kids, and he was not nearly there yet. Enter Tim and Lex. Their entire physical journey together, the three of them - Alan, Tim, Lex - served a psychological purpose: To show Alan he HAD a paternal capability and instinct. Moreover he discovered he actually kinda liked kids. So at the end in the helicopter with the kids asleep leaning against Alan, he shares a look with Ellie and we KNOW that couple has moved forward in their thinking because Alan has changed. They try to mimic something like that in JW and as I suggested, the Claire-Gray-Zach subplot is a pretty good one. But the emotional resolution is with her SISTER, not with Owen, so we are left to believe he and Claire bonded in some substantive way involving a healthy dose of romantic inclinations. I didn't buy it.

Marc, good points. I actually think Claire DID have some guilt at work in her, once she received a call from her sister exposing the fact she (Claire) was not spending time with the boys. And THEN when the shit hits the fan, the guilt elevates combined with fear about the boys' safety. It's really only when she is with her nephews that the guilt and fear become secondary as she develops an actual relationship with them. I think you could make an argument suggesting this is a Co-Protagonist story with Claire and Owen, however Owen doesn't have a whole lot going on in terms of his deeper emotional life. There is that bit with he and Blue (raptor), and that pays off in a way, but not much going on there emotionally.

These plot-driven movies are interesting, aren't they? They usually make boat-loads of money, people will gush all they can and then there's that small minority of movie-goers shaking their heads in frustration because they want a little more than just cardboard cut-outs acting as if they were on the wrong set and nobody told them. To me, the characters are everything that's wrong with JW. Is that a fair judgement for this kind of movie? Most people would probably say no and to that, I would respond simply with: "JURASSIC PARK." It IS possible to create believable characters and interesting dynamics even on a (relative) surface level. A blockbuster doesn't need the same kind of depth that a drama but it does need something for the viewer to latch on to, or rather someONE. And we don't get that here (I hated Claire from the moment we met her and never warmed up to her) but to me, the confusion felt more like they had cut out lots of stuff because the subplots were still visible: Claire <3 Owen, the divorce thing, Zach's girlfriend vs. New flirt... Granted, I haven't read the script but I'm pretty sure those things were a little more fleshed out. And all that editing out of "boring character stuff" is what's wrong with Hollywood, isn't it? :) I often refer to another recent example, EVIL DEAD the remake. The script was pretty good, actually (for a horror movie and a remake to boot) - the first act took the time needed to introduce every character and especially have them interact with each other. Then the movie was released and oh boy... That first act had been cut down to maybe ten minutes - the hero's girlfriend got maybe three lines of dialogue on screen, etc. Only horrible deaths remained = not interesting, even for horror fans, because we don't get to know anyone apart from the protag. I'm in the middle of preparing a plot-driven movie and it is very difficult to just shoe-horn in the characters because characters are what we need to enter the world of the script. So, despite understanding the difficulty (and having sympathy for the writers), I still believe that the character dynamics need to make a minimum of sense and that it's better to cut out something completely rather than leave it in half-baked. Easy to say, though, from the safety of my armchair which is a long way from Hollywood :)