CAUTION: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS, AWESOMELY PLACED REFERENCES TO UNRELATED MOVIES AND CLEVER TURNS OF PHRASE

By Andrew Sposato

This summer’s movies have kept the remake, reboot, sequel un-original train going. This weekend I bought my ticket for Jurassic World. I’m fairly divided on how I feel about these reboots and sequels. Not like North South divided, more like Professor Xavier and Magneto divided. Sometimes we’re good friends and sometimes they’re like an old weirdo in a funny helmet.

Any who, I loved the movie, it brought me back to that seven year old me, awe struck, imagination firing, no psychological damage from Robocop (damn you Paul Verhoeven and my boyhood best friend over who’s house I was exposed to mind-altering violence). Nostalgia and childhood trauma apart there were some things about this movie that bothered me. So lets get into that.

I’ll start with what I liked:

Chris Pratt is a dreamboat and I like Ron Howard’s daughter a lot. It was a fun movie with a predictable plot carried on the able and ever broadening shoulders of Chris Pratt. I’m a little late coming to the Chris Pratt party. I haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy (I know, I know, I’m gonna…) or much of his work on Parks and Recreation but I can see what the hubbub is about. He pulls off the square jawed rugged raptor wrangler believably and more importantly likeably. This guy perfectly plays the everyman… if you could grate cheese on the everyman’s abs.

Bryce Dallas Howard, what else can you say? Loveable. Every time she smiles an angel gets his wings, and a Little Debbie Nutty Buddy too. She plays the perfect ,charming emotionally aloof corporate leader, planner and manager of the park until things go horribly wrong.

Summary:

Same formula slightly different variables from Jurassic Park. Instead of John Hammond as the loveably eccentric and precocious millionaire in love with his newest attraction, they’ve pretty effectively split Hammond’s character into two new characters: Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard). Filling one of the shoes of the late great Richard Attenborough is no easy task, but Bryce does an affable and proficient job. Irfan Kahn fills the other shoe and he takes care of all the quirky millionaire stuff. I’d say it’s a bit like casting department saber metrics. You lose Richard Attenborough in this sequel reboot, you have to make up for his charm, and nuance so you replace it with two actors who can bring that power to your lineup.

The movie opens with us being introduced to two brothers being shipped off to Jurassic World to visit their overextended aunt Claire. Through the eyes of the brothers we’re introduced to John Hammonds dream realized on the grandest of scales. The production and set design for this movie was the perfect amount of awe inspiring and engeniously positioned for a whole lot of product placement (I’ll get into that in a minute). After a brief reunion with their aunt (who blows them off for her important meeting with her boss) we then meet the new fangled sin-against-nature: the Indominous Rex. We see only its eyes in the jungle of its enclosure as some intimidating dino specs are rattled off by aunt Claire to Mr. Masrani. Masrani then says he wants his wunderkind, ex-navy man turned raptor whisperer (one heck of a resume, skill sets include charming the pants off ferocious, scaled, killing machines) Owen Grady, played by the afore mentioned slice-o- hunk Chris Pratt, to look over the enclosure. We then find out that aunt Claire and he have been involved romantically (sort of) and that the Indominous Rex is smarter than everyone of In Gen’s higher ups, security personnel, structural engineers… basically everyone but Chris Pratt. It escapes, chaos ensues, Claire’s Nephews get lost in the park (shocker) and it’s up to Chris Pratt and his awesomeness to bail everyone out. Through it, the boys learn what it is to be brothers and how to deal with divorce (hard lesson kids, if Elle Sadler and Allen Grant can’t make it work, marriage really is hard), aunt Claire and Owen learn they’re both too good looking not to hookup, and hopefully In Gen finally learn not to play God. Maybe that last one’s not too “hopefully”, we need those arrogant, cock sure scientists to keep churning out these Frankenstein rejects for more summer thrills. I learned that even in high heels, Bryce Dallas Howard is faster than Jeff Goldblume, and a T Rex.

Why go see it?

First off, it was one heck of a ride. Solid fun, beginning to end, especially because they didn’t bother with all that pesky character development. The violence and people eating was sanitized just enough that you can bring the kids along (okay maybe slightly older kids, I saw Robocop when I was 8 so what do I know?) .CGI dinosaurs ripping through the landscape, cool cars, guns, escapes, and all the nostalgic curtain calls you could ask for (no one in the theater over 29 didn’t get all wistful when the boys discovered the very same night vision goggles Tim Murphy donned in the original).

Like a favorite old song, it hit all the usual disaster movie notes. The initial crisis, the operators in Jurassic World’s control room not realizing the catastrophe at hand, the obligatory takeover of the control room by some security heavies, a heroic rescue, some sappy brother bonding , even a baddy getting his comeuppance at the hands of a Raptor getting her “just desserts” (sorry I couldn’t resist). Take THAT Vincent D’ Onfrio, you chewed the scenery now we’re taking a chomp out of you.

What I didn’t like.

Firstly, it’s a sequel. A strange sequel because it feels like a reboot. It’s not necessarily a knock against this movie so much as it’s a knock against all remakes, reboots, reimaginings, sequels, prequels, warmed over rehashed tent poles… what was my point? Oh yeah. Originality. I loved the original, because it was, well original. It was novel, it was not overdone. Parts of this movie it felt like one of those over engineered, mutated monsters that were terrorizing the innocent park goers in this prehistoric West World.

 

In the film, the villainous, yet somewhat sympathetic Dr. Wu (BD Wong) opines when accused of creating a monster that it was the public that drove him to this. The public was bored with just dinosaurs (which I find hard to believe, I lose my mind over tigers at the zoo) and in order to keep their interest, newer bigger, more teethy, more scary abominations had to be spawned just to keep the hapless de-sensitized masses coming back.

In other words they had to continuously remake or re-imagine, reboot, these original dinosaurs because they couldn’t make a new attraction (see what I did there?). Jurassic World is the same basic principle of the original, but bigger, flashier, and less thought out (who would have thought that combining a T Rex with a Pteranodon is a bad idea?). I think Dr. Ian Malcolm might say “You were so busy wondering if you could re-make Jurassic Park you didn’t stop to think if you should”.

Where this film falls down is where the original was so successful. I remember when Tim got shocked on the fence in Jurassic Park I was on the edge of my seat, or when the T-Rex flipped the Explorer, it had suspense because they took the time to develop the characters and you cared about them. Jurassic World was as Robert Redford said in Spygame “twice the sex and half the foreplay”. For me, the story of these four people gets lost when you have 20,000 people being maimed and killed by ferocious Pteranodonasaurus Rexes or whatever those horrifying monstrosities were dubbed by In Gen’s marketing department.

Much of the movie felt rushed. For instance, the ending. Claire and Owen walk off into the sunset (as the maimed lay in a huge aircraft hanger like a scene from World War I) and Owen says “let’s stick together… for survival.” He says that now, but if you thought velociraptors were vicious wait until the plaintiffs lawyers come in. They’re going to need Daniel Kaffey and Vincent Gambino for their defense team, maybe even Atticus Finch, because much of this movie equates to criminal negligence. Class action.

My only other gripe with the movie was product placement. Usually this doesn’t bother me, but for one scene. So much attention was given to Jurassic World control room operator Lowery’s (Jake Johnson) spiel about corporate naming rights. Then in almost the very next scene Bryce Dallas Howard was speeding across the park in her Mercedes GLE. You could practically here Jon Hamm talking about how you shouldn’t have to sacrifice luxury for utility when cutting through a prehistoric nightmare to find your lost nephews trapped in a giant gerbil ball. Then there’s the scene where Chris Pratt looks like a Hugo Boss cover model working on his Triumph Motorcycle. Or when older brother Zack is tuning out his parents with his Beatz headphones. I’m sure he was listening to Aloe Blacc.

I don’t mind product placement in principle. I get it, huge movies cost a lot of money, huge actors, huge paychecks, music, okay. But I have to deal with commercials before the movie, my $14.50 should buy me some respite from the commercialism. Maybe a bit of subtlety (a Barbersol can for smuggling out embryos anyone?). I’m pretty sure that Marlin Firearms got into the act with Chris Pratt’s fancy chrome plated repeating rifle.

 

All that, the lack of originality and character development, the product placement, I still enjoyed the movie. I saw huge dinosaurs and learned no science, turned my brain off and I saw Jimmy Buffet running from rampaging flying monsters. It took me away from my mundane, dinosaurless life for two hours and took me to a place I’d been before as a child, only bigger, better and with more explosions.