Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow)

[TGM]

JURASSIC WORLD

Director: Colin Trevorrow

imdb

[Barty]

A big meh. There's some enjoyable stuff, and Chris Pratt does his best to be fun, but my god that screenplay needed a rewrite. Underdeveloped plot-lines, generic characters, poor structure, etc.

It did make me want to watch Jurassic Park again, which of course is so far superior in every way.

[Wryan]

Mostly agree. This was sort of bland. It overplays nearly every hand it has (stiff exec's clothes and hair get progressively dirtier as she loosens up and gets out in the field, Beergut McMilitaryMan, the pack hunter alpha stuff), giving it a really obvious vibe. As Peter Griffin would say, it insists upon itself. Pratt is just okay. I was hoping to have more fun, and there was some fun to be had, but even the climax was hobbled a bit by people not getting the fuck out from underfoot the rampaging dinosaurs and some silly slow-motion. Also, dunno what was going on with the close attention paid to the teenager and his wandering eyes--"lol boys gonna be boys even with a girlfriend he might have broken up with in a deleted scene, who knows! what fun!"

Original is unimpeachable. But I admit this movie had a hard road to begin with, considering how much I love JP. It seemed like the trailers gave away the best bits...until you realize they were actually just showing the few good parts. Mostly everything else felt like filler or just felt weak.

EDIT: Wait, I liked Irrfan Khan. There we go.

[Irish]

Original is unimpeachable.

Oh, it's peachable. I can peach it.

But first: I watched about half of Jurassic World wondering why and how they had made Jessica Chastain so unattractive (ahem). That reflects my level of involvement in this movie.

Assorted comments on everyone's comments:

- It's bland, yeah. There aren't any good set pieces. What annoys me the most are the interviews I read in the build up to release. Bullshit about a "whole new story," etc from guys like Spielberg. That was a lie. There was no story outside "dinosaurs go chomp." That wouldn't be a problem if the movie had enough spectacle, but it doesn't have spectacle either.

- The second biggest annoyance (out of many, many) is that they introduced plot points to fit a particular scene (Rex has camoflauge on demand!) and then dropped them once the scene was over.

- Seeing this did make me want to view the originals again, which I did, or tried to do. I barely made it through the second one and didn't bother with the third.

- The character writing was uneven and awkward, but it wasn't necessarily more awkward than the Jurassic Park or Lost World. The characters in those movies have maybe one or two lines of backstory at most. Several of them are brushed off or disappear without warning (Goldblum in JP, Vaughn in LW). Goldblum is ignored after the TRex attack in JP; he's got maybe 2-3 lines in the rest of the movie and none of them are significant. Laura Dern is introduced in one role and then kinda sorta serves another (the movie says that she's some kind of paleo-botanist but then she spends are great deal of JP's runtime playing vet to sick dinos. Uh, what? Vince Vaughn tries to passively murder a dude by taking the ammo out of his weapon in the middle of the jungle, and then sorta hightails it out of the movie before the climax.

- The teen kid's arc in Jurassic World is supposed to mirror Sam Neil's arc in the first film and Jeff Goldblum's arc in the second film. At least, that's what I think they were going for. He starts out as a self-involved shit. He's annoyed at the family trip. He's constantly brushing the little kid off. Over the course of the film, he comes to realize that, gee, family really is important when you're about to become dino-chow. Little kids are lovable when they're not being eaten alive. Trauma forces him to reconnect with his brother (awwwww).

- Similar to that is Khan. I think he was supposed to be the movie's super-ego. Sorta the Jeff Goldblum of the piece. Half humanist and half comic relief. It doesn't really work because he's a billionaire dude and everybody's boss, which makes him unrelatable. A poor workaday schnook can't fly a helicopter, his attempt might be charming or funny. But a super rich dude? He's just an asshole.

- There are a lot of visual call outs to Jurassic Park and Lost World, but the last scene here is supposed to mirror the ending of JP. In that first movie, the three raptors threatening our heroes fail to take down the big Rex (who appears out of nowhere and saves the day). In JW, the opposite occurs: Star Lord's custom trained raptors successfully (more or less) attack Big Rex while Little Rex lends a hand. Yeah, it's dumb. But you can see hints of the idea someone had during what must have been endless spitballing conference calls.

- I didn't find the military angle so dumb because there's a precedent there. First, there's the historical one: The US government, in its infinite wisdom, have actually trained animals and fish (?) to help out on military maneuvers. (Granted, nobody is running around with grey wolves and spitting cobras as they infiltrate insurgent villages, but still.) Second, there's the thematic precedent: We can argue that these movies are all about the American reliance on technology over common sense, on a variety of levels. Finding a military use for InGen tech doesn't seem all that far fetched, especially as the second movie had a horde of characters who were interested in capturing and exploiting the dinos as much as they could.

- The first two movies start on a jungle island and involve dinosaurs attacking humans. Jurassic World starts with a suburban family driving two teenagers to the airport. I haven't seen a blockbuster with that little sense of its opening since the brutally dull, unending courtroom scene at the start of Iron Man 2.

- I think all of these movies are bad. The started out as thin, stupid summer action movies and got thinner and stupider from there. Like a lot of popular stuff from the 80s and 90s (Terminator, Aliens, etc), there isn't enough of a premise to support a decade spanning franchise.

- The first one sort of works because Spielberg is clever in the way he pastes over the shortcomings in the script. He's relentless with his pacing and his edits. He hammers the ever living shit of of William's score to goose what are otherwise visually dull scenes. He pulls every trick he can out of the cheap horror movie playbook-- messing with perspective and the limits of the camera-- to create suspense. If you can step back from Spielberg's skill a bit and see what he's doing and how he's doing it, it's a shitshow of a movie. The first hour is almost wall to wall exposition, explaining and re-explaining how we brought dinosaurs back from extinction. The plot is non-existent. There are two subplots, one of which is resolved about thirty minutes in. The movie introduces more than a half dozen named characters in the first twenty minutes. It has three separate introduction scenes before anybody steps foot on the island. The characters make little to no sense. Most of the actors can't create a full fledged performance because their characters are so thinly drawn. Instead, they fall back to aping a personality (cf Goldblum, God love him). The ending is pure ass deus ex machina in a movie where the human characters did little to solve their own problems over the entire runtime. It's basically a PG-13 slasher movie, and a cheap one, with dinosaurs instead of Freddy or Jason. The sequel doubles down on almost every badly element in the first.

- That all said (ugh), JP is a dumb summer action movie made when dumb summer action movies were smarter. One of the more interesting things about it is that everyone in the film is either highly educated, highly skilled, or both. I mean, outside the little kids, everybody in that memorable TRex attack scene has an advanced degree! They all went to grad school! How often does that happen in a summer blockbuster? It at least allows them to have weird, interesting conversations an, on the surface, seem like interesting people. Compare that to Jurassic World, where most of the characters are either bland or incompetent. The paleo meets chaos theory heroes of the first film become workaday Navy stiffs and console jockeys in the the reboot.

[transmogrifier]

It's a mess. The whole entire military weapon angle is completely half-arsed with unclear motivations and relationships at its core (and not helped by being just a terrible idea to begin with in a practical sense; there's a reason the army currently doesn't use trained tigers or alligators or whatever the hell), while the velociraptor training is just as poorly sketched, amounting to a couple of reversals to build cheap suspense and that's about it. There are a tonne of poorly realized secondary characters - e.g., the assistant who is supposed to be looking after the kids, Judy Greer, David Wallace, the weird smugness of Wong, even Khan's character is all over the place - in support of the stereotypical leads and a grand total of 0 exciting set-pieces. I don't like The Lost World much, but that scene on the cliff with the trailer is 100 times better than anything this film has to offer.

Oh, and having Howard's character run around the whole movie in high heels actually started to piss me off by the end.

[Morris Schæffer]

Wow! Projected estimates were way short. Not 100 million or 120 million, but close to 190 million.

[Irish]

Wow! Projected estimates were way short. Not 100 million or 120 million, but close to 190 million.

I've heard $200MM domestic US, $500MM worldwide (biggest Friday ever?).

Which means there will be a dozen sequels and this franchise will never die.

[Morris Schæffer]

I've heard $200MM domestic US, $500MM worldwide (biggest Friday ever?).

Which means there will be a dozen sequels and this franchise will never die.

That's okay. I had a lot of fun. Although not quite sure what sequels are gonna be about seeing as another park has basically flopped yet again. I wish they would have fashioned a genuine action scene around the Mosasaurus rather than having the thing pop up at conveniently timed intervals. Moreover, the Gyroscope is the worst idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas.

[Ivan Drago]

That's okay. I had a lot of fun. Although not quite sure what sequels are gonna be about seeing as another park has basically flopped yet again.

Call the next one Jurassic Universe.

I want to see dinosaurs fight in space.

[transmogrifier]

I've heard $200MM domestic US, $500MM worldwide (biggest Friday ever?).

Which means there will be a dozen sequels and this franchise will never die.

Let's hope the next few ones are good.

[Mal]

It could overtake Avengers for the biggest weekend ever once tickets are counted, which is crazy.

Too bad the film isn't better, the Dino action was satisfying- but the people action was meh, with Jake Johnson being the only occasional beacon of enjoyment. An ok summer popcorn film.

[Morris Schæffer]

Crap. 100 million in China alone. How can forecasted grosses be so way off the mark for the USA? I've been following box office receipts for tentpole films and most predictions are usually more or less on the money.

[Watashi]

They need to take the Jurassic Park franchise into Planet of the Apes territory. Get off the island. I want to see dinosaurs actually ruling the world.

[Skitch]

This was just...damn...fun. I knew every spoiler going in and still had a lot of fun. Easily the best since the first. I will minus one entire point for her heels. That was so irritatingly dumb, even in THIS movie. Especially when they had the perfect opportunity (in original JP building) to swap out for some boots or anything. Plenty of other faults, but who cares, its a monster movie about dinosaurs aimed at teens, and it works just fine for that.

[Lazlo]

I had fun with this. Plotting and characterization is a mess but the action is exciting. I am pretty well convinced that you can play John Williams' theme over almost anything and I'd be on board.

[Dukefrukem]

"No one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore"... Okaaaaay? So this movie doesn't take place in our modern universe. If you're going to try to convey an idea like that, you need to be a little more subtle. There was enough confidence for three humans to enter her cage the Indominus Rex when they have no idea what types of dinosaurs it is made up of it? The whole special weapon plot is stupid. Domesticated raptors is stupid. So terribly stupid. This movie is stupid.

[Morris Schæffer]

Domesticated raptors is stupid. So terribly stupid.

I think there's a line between what you want to see and what is genuinely stupid. Raptors are animals, it is therefore not inconceivable they could be trained. "Domesticated" is a big word as their ferociousness is never truly taken out of the equation as an earlier scene makes reasonably clear. Furthermore, [

Show Spoiler

later on the whole thing is turned upside down indicating it isn't quite clear cut

]

It worked for me, but if I had to choose, I'd prefer them as villains.

[Dukefrukem]

Furthermore, [

Show Spoiler

later on the whole thing is turned upside down indicating it isn't quite clear cut

]

Yes it was clear. [

Show Spoiler

There's basically a shot of Chris Pratt thanking the last raptor for its help as it turns and runs away.

]

[Spinal]

"No one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore"... Okaaaaay?

Yeah, that makes no sense considering people are still impressed by lions.

[D_Davis]

I'm still shocked people are actually watching this. Especially SO DAMN many people.

[Watashi]

I'm still shocked people are actually watching this. Especially SO DAMN many people.

It's been 15 years since the last sequel. People are in the mood for another Jurassic Park movie. The marketing have been playing heavy on the nostalgia factor. It also helps to star the hottest current actor right now.

I haven't seen it yet. Probably won't. I don't like the director and the trailer looked boring.

[Morris Schæffer]

I'm still shocked people are actually watching this. Especially SO DAMN many people.

Of course you're not. We live in an age where millions flock to Michael Bay movies and this movie isn't nearly as dumb or obnoxious as them other movies. Although there is some dumbness.

[Dukefrukem]

Oh and btw, Trans and I agree again on his Lost World line. That scene is so much better than anything in this movie. There was no T-REX scene in Jurassic World. There was no Cliff scene. There needs to be a climax of some sort. Jurassic World had nothing.

[Ivan Drago]

Sure, Claire's progression is in-your-face in the beginning, and the kids are inconsistently written, but I was willing to forego all that once I got what I paid for, and that's dinosaurs creating chaos. In the end, I was entertained by this more so than The Lost World and Jurassic Park III combined.

Although, I was thinking to myself that Irrfran Khan's character would have been a better villain.

[transmogrifier]

The trailer IS the film, pretty much. It has the same depth of characterization, plot coherence, and thrills.