Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow)

[Morris Schæffer]

This was 2010.

[dreamdead]

Insultingly generic cast of characters, nonsensical military angle, and idiotic moment-by-moment shifts between pathos and silly "look at the fun" for Khan. The younger brother was cast as a jerk for too much of the film (while likely a nod to the young girl in JP) and the best moments are luxuriating in a score that remains solid.

Ugly.

[Henry Gale]

SPOILERS ABOUND

It's the sort of movie that I like to think I liked but have so little passionate feelings about one way or another to really know. Even only two and a half weeks later.

The kind of movie I have seen, but when I see TV spots for it I forget I have and momentarily look forward to another version with the potential I still see.

A movie I so wanted to ignite the excitable kid in me that I still know is there with just the right special pieces of work, but seemed to have been all tuckered out and fallen asleep. (Anecdotally, as the end credits rolled, I turned around to see two of the kids in the row behind me had done just that. And one of them had a Finn & Jake T-shirt on, so I know he had good taste.)

It plays like a big-budget movie that was destined to have made $60 million that everyone would make the butt of easy jokes while I'd try to defend for the stuff in it that's actually pretty good. (ie. John Carter, Jupiter Ascending, Lone Ranger, Land of the Lost, etc. But even then I like those significantly more than this.) Instead, it's climbing towards ten times that (only domestically too), and it just kind of bums me out that it'll get to the point of making more than every truly great movie this year combined. My 8 bucks is just as much a part of it as everyone else's, but the movie's own failings are still its own problem.

Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus' big scene towards the end comes as such a welcome (if all too late) shock because it's an actually humourous(!) glimpse of a relatable(!) human beings(!) engaging in believable human error that works towards storytelling for a self-contained moment, rather than relying on cheap ignorance to propel it — for instance, no one being told the Indominus can completely camouflage, having one guard on it that doesn't even seem to care about it anything but his lunch (because he's a bit overweight amirite?!)— or throwing out awkward lobs at questionable character development without any resolution — Older brother has a girlfriend at home! He checks out many girls on the island! He flees from dinosaurs! The end. [/his arc]. The movie's a mess, and at its best I think it works in a very care-free way. But at its worst, it seems to know, but doesn't seem to care at the end of the day.

Irrfan Kahn's character might be the most consistently enjoyable performance because of just how much he plays into the absurdity of his role. When the movie should inherently be leaning into the fallacies of his character's views, providing all the leeway to really drive his end of the "corporation + militarization = bad" thematics.... instead he just dies (hilariously, and I'm still not sure it was intended to be as funny as it was) on those terms (simply to dispose of him since he's no longer needed) making D'Onofrio the easy villain for the remainder of it.

And speaking of all the corporate elements of it, it feels like it wants to go all the way meta with its ideas of art vs. commerce about Jurassic World: The Park in the film and Jurassic World: The Movie as one indiscernible entity, but just when we do get a bunch of product placement snowballing into Johnson's really amusingly sheepish dialogue about the need to brand everything with company titles after Howard's "Verizon Wireless presents the Indominus Rex" rightfully lands with a thud for everyone but Verizon Wireless, it completely seizes that self-aware commentary immediately afterwards and moves along with the product placement as not-so-subliminal mise en scène.

To and extent, it seems to feel slightly embarrassed about its own existence as such a corporatation-inflated, resuscitated, and even gleefully pandering franchise play, and leans so heavily on its 1993 elements (the score, the design of the action and characters of both species, and of course the script's detour to the original Jurassic Park grounds that for some reason are still there but I'll allow it since it may be the film's strongest sequence) that you'd think it'd all lead to something totally unexpected, transgressive and excitingly subversive to spin the whole thing on its head to make a stand for itself as the beginning of something modern and something brand new.

Instead, it literally unleashes the original Spielberg T-Rex when the characters and it as a film see no other viable options left for survival. The Splash Zone dinosaur that feeds on dead weight (of both shark and British assistant character varieties), maybe the most memorable animal in it, jumps out to put the movie's main original attempt at a dino antagonist to rest. The O.G. T-Rex then slinks back into his luxurious home that his 1993 work paid for, visibly annoyed that he was forced to get out of bed for this.

---

Post-script summary of sorts:

I did have mild fun while I watched it. (For real! Despite everything I said above!) But for analogy's sake, if it's a piece of paper, it's so thin that the tangible liquid excitement dripping from other stuff I've watched recently (and even memories of watching the original as a kid) is dampening this to the point near-disintegration in my mind. I'd have rated it about a 6 immediately after, and probably a 5 or lower now, but I'll give the enjoyment I had in the moment the benefit of the doubt and float back and forth between those two numbers as a rating.

So obviously the big take-away here is, if you need to watch one dinosaur-related Universal Pictures tentpole from recent times, make sure it's Land of the Lost! On Blu-ray and DVD now! (Subway promotional items no longer available)

[transmogrifier]

I honestly cannot believe that it has made this much money. Surely word of mouth is not that great?

[[ETM]]

Has to be one of those "oh, hell, I'll see it" things. It's the JP franchise, beloved actors, and all those saying how nothing special it is mention that they had "dumb fun". Once it gets rolling, it's the BO reporting that keeps people going to see it.

[Morris Schæffer]

I honestly cannot believe that it has made this much money. Surely word of mouth is not that great?

I understand your shock, but know that I alone have already seen it 456,879 times. I've discovered new things every single time. The last time it was a leaf tucked away behind another leaf for instance.

[D_Davis]

I honestly cannot believe that it has made this much money. Surely word of mouth is not that great?

Prepare for the never-ending onslaught of even more mediocre sequels.

Maybe they'll figure out a way to tie it into the MFU.

[Spinal]

Teenagers love Colin Trevorrow. That's the conclusion I'm drawing here.

[Dukefrukem]

[Ivan Drago]

Read over this thread and realized I never posted the first movies I saw in theaters.

The Lion King
Toy Story
Batman Forever
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
Can't remember if I also saw Batman: Mask of the Phantasm or Casper

[Dukefrukem]

Read over this thread and realized I never posted the first movies I saw in theaters.

The Lion King
Toy Story
Batman Forever
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
Can't remember if I also saw Batman: Mask of the Phantasm or Casper

I definitely saw Batman Forever and Power Rangers in theaters as well.

[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.

[Irish]

Holy fuck that's way too long, lol. That's embarrassing --- moving on!

[Skitch]

Hahaha thats a lot of thoughts about blandness.

[Irish]

Shhhhhhhhhh

Let's move on before this gets any more awkward.

[Dukefrukem]

Jurassic World 2 June 22, 2018

[D_Davis]

Shhhhhhhhhh

Let's move on before this gets any more awkward.

You've been writing a lot, lately, about a lot of stuff that you don't seem to really love.

[Peng]

OK, I didn't go into this expecting good characters or anything, but this bunch of people is beyond colorless. And the dinosaur action is not as fun as I hoped, all quick actions and no build-up to let much of it sink in or be too thrilling (saved for a few smaller set-pieces, like the kids' first encounter with Indominus Rex). I like it better than the third one, but I went in expecting more brainless fun and less watchable apathy.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Finally saw it. Figured I would be first in line originally on account of mothereffing DINOSAURS, but the reviews really put me off. $5 second-run 3D show tonight, and I have returned to say

This is a dumber movie than I thought. And a more cynical one too. A tonal misfire, with gruesome, cruel deaths interrupted by shitty sub-sitcom jokes. Trevorrow apes images from the series but never bothered to study how Spielberg stages action (you know who can stage action? Gareth Edwards). Every character sucks, except maybe Khan, who mostly made me long for the best possible version of his "lovable" CEO ignoramus, i.e. John Glover in Gremlins 2. The finale is preposterous. Howard's high heels are preposterous. Pratt is a terrible person, especially when he makes no effort to talk to the raptor about to eat the military guy. Everybody else is stupid. Supremely stupid. This park is run by idiots. Oh, and speaking of cynicism, how about the assistant who gets pulled from one dinosaurs to another like she's a dog treat? The reason the original park shut down was due to planned corporate espionage. Here, it's because the park has literally no meaningful contingency plans. The film never establishes groundwork for what the Indominus can do. Maybe they think this makes it unpredictable and mysterious (wild card, bitches), but instead it exists as a creature of convenience, doing whatever the story needs it to do at any point to keep the story from stopping.

Worst of the series. I know nobody likes JP3, but at least Johnston can put together an action sequence.

[Skitch]

I like JP3.

[Dukefrukem]

I like the first half of JP3. Sam Neil makes it work.

[Dukefrukem]

[Ezee E]

This has the same thing going for it that the Marvel movies have.

Easily predictable, somewhat likable, and rushes along at a fast pace the entire length. There's really not a scene that stands out, as there's never any buildup or a true sequence. Consider Spielberg's noteworthy Jurassic Park scenes of the T-Rex intro, the trailer scene, or the Raptor hunts... None of that is here.

Pratt and Dallas Howard are likable enough to be characters that I certainly wouldn't mind seeing again. Same goes for Khan.

But yeah, that was that.

Would be nice if the series could get away from the Raptors and move on to something else.

I won't even discuss the poor logic of the movie. The movie kind of glances right over it too.

[Grouchy]

Wow, this movie is a steaming pile of T-Rex shit.

[TGM]