Now that I have seen it a couple of times and have had time to mull it over, I can officially say that while it has some scenes that are good in a vacuum, it was not a good film.
This article on Cracked articulates a lot of the problems I had with it and some of this I mentioned in the giant thread from the Summer. Among other things, some of what bugs me:
The entire plot undercuts the point of the book and the first movie. The whole point was, as amazing as live dinosaurs would be, Jurassic Park was a bad idea. It was dangerous and doomed to failure.
The first movie used the musical swelling fanfare “money shot” to show us living Dinosaurs. This one shows uses it to show use 20,000 people on line for souvenirs. Not sure if this is a problem with the filmmakers or society though
As the linked article outlines, the two “heroes” of the movie have no arc at all and don’t learn anything. And the moral lesson they are supposedly fighting for is completely undercut by what they do. Owen is disgusted by the fact that someone wants to use Dinosaurs as weapons. How does Owen survive the movie: by using Dinosaurs as weapons.
It’s pretty obvious from all of the discarded plot threads that this movie was 17 different scripts and the pieces the makers liked best were just clipped together.
So yeah, the dinosaurs are cool and I despite everything, I will be on line for Jurassic World 2 but the jury has reached its verdict and the movie is not good.
Isn’t that exactly what happened in this movie? What was D’Onofrio’s line “The park will be Chapter 11 come morning” ?
The movie purposely hits the whole commercialization of entertainment as one of it’s themes. That’s why Claire was ferrying around the Verizon reps to get them to sponsor the Indominus Rex. I think it was as tongue-in-cheek as anything - such as Jimmy Buffet running away from Margaritaville holding a pair of margaritas.
And besides, the park had been open for 10 years. Everyone knew there were living dinosaurs. Making that the big framing shot of the movie would have been stupid.
Meh, it was a popcorn action movie. I don’t expect the heroes to progress much beyond surviving, and possibly hooking up.
What discarded threads? The divorce? That was dumb I agree, but more a nod to the original where Tim & Lex’s parents were getting divorced. Dr. Wu flying off with the embryos? Clearly sequel material.
Who cares? They’re action heroes in an action movie.
I enjoyed the movie. I liked that they made the dinosaurs particularly brutal. I especially enjoyed all of the nods to the original movie, subtle or otherwise.
Amen. The producers have realized that the movie-going public will turn out in droves for CGI dinosaurs, and thus no attempt at creating sympathetic, engaging heroes, or a logical story-line (let alone a story with any attempt at broaching the ethical/moral issues Michael Crichton originally wrote about) is necessary. And the story really did nothing but rehash elements from the earlier films.
The Editing Room parody script points out a lot of the film’ biggest flaws, and is about a million times more entertaining.
I don’t think there’s an issue with Owen using the raptors. There’s a difference between having a personal relationship with some dogs and they defend you in a crisis versus you agreeing to open the Attack Dog Puppy Mill & Training Facility. He was showing them respect and bonding, the military just wanted to throw raptors at terrorists, yadda yadda.
Not that I think it was a great movie at anything more than the popcorn level.
I saw that article too, and I would like that movie with the assistant being the hero. Or the heroes could have actually been sympathetic. It wouldn’t have taken much to make Bryce Dallas Howard more sympathetic, as the driven manager who’s trying to keep everything safe and working while her boss is just trying to make money, and she has to try to work in stupid product placement at a dinosaur park. And let Chris Pratt be a bit more charming/goofy Star Lord, and less arrogant guy. Then they would have been more fitting as heroes of the movie.
But the music swelling money shot wasn’t for the park goers, it’s for the movie audience. We haven’t seen the Jurassic Franchise dinosaurs in years. I haven’t seen Jurassic World since it came out, but I don’t remember thinking that the shot was done in an ironic way to comment on commercialization. There were comments on commercialization, like with the Verizon reps, but not when the sweeping views of the park were shown with the soaring music.
The commentary stuff felt like a victim of the rewrites of the script. Like the scene where Bryce Dallas Howard chides her employee for wearing a vintage Jurassic Park t-shirt because it’s crass because of the deaths that happened. I could imagine at one point in the script there was some actual commentary on how she disapproves of the t-shirt but doesn’t care about how they built a bigger park where the deaths happened and set conditions so that many more deaths will happen. They could have had a few lines there and it would be more obvious that the scriptwriters were self-aware, but as it is, it just seems like they only care about spectacle and call-backs.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s a bad movie, it was fun to see at the theaters, but it was disappointing, because it could have been so much better. I think it’s a movie that will be somewhat forgotten as time goes on, while people will keep watching Jurassic Park.
It seemed like a standard-issue modern blockbuster where the audience is given exactly what they expect (dinosaurs rampaging around, call-backs to the original) and not a smidgen more.
My biggest issue was the kids. I don’t like them, I don’t like how they were used, and I thought they were essentially pointless MacGuffins to be chased after. They annoy me, they should have been eaten
Kidding…sorta. It’s not like the first movie had some big point to make beyond warmed over “what hath science wrought” tropes. Ooh, Mr. Grant learns to like children. Its best try was the lunch scene before the tour.
The central moral of the series is silly. Bringing dinosaurs back isn’t bad because they’ll break out and eat people. Zoos know how to contain dangerous animals. Maybe the moral should be about paying your overworked IT staff.
In the first book, more attention was paid to the suffering of the animals because they were mismatched with the environment, they’re genetic mutants, and people don’t know what they’re doing. The larger dinosaurs wheezed constantly because the oxygen levels were too low. They had the shits because the park didn’t know what to feed them and (I forget if this was explicitly pointed out) their gut microbiota and immune systems would be all wrong. Not to mention all the ones that died because they weren’t viable for whatever reason. But that would be a depressing story: a tour through a park of raspy, shitting, half-blind, sick dinosaur-frog hybrids. I’d rather see a T. rex eat a lawyer off the toilet or Muldoon get his face eaten. Clever girl!
JW was a little too cute with its self aware meta commentary, but it’s the 4th movie and they were doing Godzilla parodies by the second one. Just the nature of the beast. The biggest issue I had is most of the characters were blah. But all the dinosaur parts were great. It was like two hours of fan service for raptor fans.
Seriously? The military wanted to use raptors as antiterrorist weapons? Was this idea explored to any extent in the movie? It sounds like one of the dumbest ideas in movie history.
Can I add that I hate the “Life finds a way” bullshit? If life was that great at finding a way, we wouldn’t be losing a kajillion species per hour in the name of low priced teak patio furniture and rare earth metals for iPhones. Hey, Yangtze river dolphins – just, you know, magically change your DNA to make yourself immune to pollution and overfishing something and you’ll find a way to stop being extinct.
(I don’t actually care about it in Jurassic Park where it’s just handwaving to advance the plot. It’s people who run with it outside the film that annoy me)
That’s OK with me. The original book’s and movie’s moral was an overdone hackneyed trope. Living dinosaurs would be worth a few deaths. Sure, correct the problems, but keep going.
People die rock climbing and horseback riding and scuba diving and canoeing and skydiving and motorcycling and nobody stops doing those things.
Not really “explored”. The park’s corporate overlords or whoever were working with the military-industrial complex to train raptors to fight on the battlefield. Hence Owen’s job training them and seeing if they can be trained to respond to a human master.
When the big dino breaks out, the military dude is all “Let’s use the raptors” and Owen is all “That’s a bad idea” and the military dude is all “overruled!” and they use the raptors and it works out shitty because you need pure love in your heart to not be eaten by raptors and military-industrial guys are inherently deserving of being eaten by predatory fauna.
Also, the military dude was teasing the raptors and shit because he’s a moron.
I actually liked the swelling music for the park reveal. They used it in Jurassic Park for the dino reveal because it was the climactic “OMG, they actually created a dinosaur with DNA” along with a first use of newer CGI methods.
But the premise of JP was that they were going to open this awesome theme park on the island but we never got to see the dream come true since everything went wrong. And we were always left wondering what the fully operating park might look like.
So in JW they give the climactic reveal to the park. You get a sense of awe with “OMG, they finally did it, there it is, the park that was dreamed about for so many years that we never got to see.”
I would say the movie was good. Not great , but good.
I say a movie is good if it succeeds in being exactly what it was trying to be, not what YOU wanted it to be. JW seemed to know exactly what it wanted to be and succeeded in doing so.
