"Jurassic World" was a letdown. The dinosaurs
look as real as cinematic dinosaurs have ever looked. The storytelling is
thuddingly dull. I loved the Steven Spielberg / Michael Crichton 1993
"Jurassic Park." During this film I kept looking at my watch. Even
the music is used badly here, something you notice in the first five minutes of
the film.
The plot: Jurassic Park has been updated to Jurassic
World. Two cute boys visit without their mother. Their aunt is Bryce Dallas
Howard, spokeswoman for the park. Vincent D'onofrio wants to weaponize the
velociraptors, to use them in the fight against Al Qaeda. Chris Pratt is a
velociraptor trainer. Jurassic World has genetically modified dinosaurs into
indominus rex, a larger version of a tyrannosaurus rex.
Chris Pratt is hot and masterful and deserves a better
movie. Bryce Dallas Howard is pretty but lacks charisma. Vincent D'Onofrio's twitchy,
creepy opportunist is the single most interesting and menacing performance in
the movie, and that includes the dinos.
None of this – the two cute boys, the absent mother, the
aunt-nephew relationship, Pratt's animal training skills, the weaponization of
velociraptors – matters worth a darn. Each subplot is given approximately five
lines of dialogue and four minutes of screen time. BD Wong pops up at the last
minute and he acts like a mad scientist for about ninety seconds; that subplot
goes nowhere like all the rest.
There are many scenes of people in a control room staring
at a large video screen. Sometimes onscreen action is presented in a color-bleached
format, to resemble the image on a computer screen. This control-room-point-of-view
device serves only to break up the action into smaller, shorter bites, because
in the internet age we all have shorter attention spans and we see reality as
on a computer screen, don't ya know.
The opening scenes show visitors enjoying the park. Then
of course something goes wrong and the I-rex escapes. The I-rex eats a bunch of
people. Some escapees find a twenty-year-old Jeep from Jurassic Park days and
drive it away from the I-rex. I don't know much about cars but I do know that
there is a car in a local parking lot that's been there for three months and
two of its tires have gone flat. I would believe that you could make dinosaurs
out of amber before I could believe that a twenty-two-year-old Jeep could be
driven.
People outrun dinosaurs, if they are people the movie
wants to survive. If they are extras or bad guys, no such luck. And why is it
such a bad idea to use velociraptors to fight Al Qaeda?
Bryce Dallas Howard outruns dinosaurs while wearing spike
heeled shoes. Really.
It's amazing that dinosaurs have one goal in life – to
eat as many people as they can – given that dinosaurs and people didn't inhabit
the earth at the same time. An aviary containing pterodactyls is broken. The
pterodactyls swarm out of their aviary and have one goal – to eat people. All
the pterodactyls immediately fly to the park full of humans and start snapping
them up as if they were potato chips – you can't eat just one. This is
especially ridiculous given that pterodactyls were lightweight dinosaurs who
evolved to eat fish.
Animals in nature kill to eat, to defend their young and their
territory, and to establish dominance. Killing is hard work and animals conserve
their energy. They don't burn up any more precious calories than they
absolutely need to. Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen years annoying one of
earth's largest land carnivores, Kodiak bears, before one couldn't take it any
more and finally broke down and ate him. Dinosaurs in Jurassic World race
through forest, swamp, and parking lots, top speed, mile after mile, passing up
other potential prey, in order to eat one particular human being. No real
animal has ever behaved that way.
I just didn't care about this movie at all. I missed the
original. Wayne Knight, the obnoxious fat guy, and Jeff Goldblum, and his
priceless pronunciation of "chaotician." I missed Spielberg's magic
touch in moments like the impact tremor in the footprint and "objects in
mirror are closer than they appear."
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