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FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Well, it's finally happened. :) Jurassic World, after over a decade in development hell, has finally been released. Personally speaking, this has to be the most anticipated movie of my entire life; I've been waiting for this since 2001! I went to see it on Saturday, making it a little too late to make the "first impressions" compilations I've traditionally posted on that day, but now I'm ready to share my thoughts.
I already did a whole essay on my blog about my expectations for this movie, which you can read here if you're curious. Just to reiterate, I am a huge, *huge* Jurassic Park fan. In the case of the first instalment in the franchise, it's probably the only case where both the book and the movie are in my top five all-time favourites respectively; I absolutely adore them both. The Lost World, as a novel, was a worthy follow-up: still a thrilling adventure, and much better than its subsequent film adaptation, which I personally think is flawed but still enjoyable. And then there's Jurassic Park III. The less said about that, the better.
And now we have Jurassic World. I'm not sure how many people were anticipating this movie as much as I was, but I personally wanted it to at least trump the second and third movies and hopefully reinvigorate the public interest in dinosaurs by presenting them in a new light.
…But I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but Jurassic World is a disappointment.
Now, I usually tend to keep my "first impressions" reviews to no more than 250 words. But this is a series that's so dear to me that I couldn't help but get more passionate than usual. So this is one of very few times you'll see me let loose and say pretty much everything that's on my mind.
But before we get started, let me make it clear: I didn't dislike this movie. I just have several major gripes with it.
First let's look at the story.
Twenty-two years after the events in the first movie, John Hammond's vision of a theme park centred around dinosaurs has finally come true: the new park, Jurassic World, is flourishing.
But then an emergency situation develops in the form of a new genetically engineered hybrid predator, nicknamed "Indominus rex". It was intended to be a new attraction to spark the public interest once again, but everyone underestimated it. It escapes from its enclosure and heads straight towards the occupied area of the park. Claire Dearing, the park's operations manager, realises her two nephews are in particularly grave danger, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to find them and get them to safety.
The plot is perfectly serviceable for what it is; it's really the only way a story about a fully functional park could have gone. It's little more than a B movie when you look at it: a thinly scripted string of misadventures, more concerned with cheap thrills than genuine grandeur. Why else do you think it focuses almost exclusively on the carnivorous dinosaurs, with the herbivores reduced to mere extras? Now, granted, Jurassic Park III did the same thing, but this is a far more focused kind of blast than that movie; it makes more of an effort to tell a cohesive story, it's not just ninety minutes of running away from dinosaurs.
The characters are pretty boring, but let's be honest: the characters in the Jurassic Park movies have never been anything to write home about. They're archetypes at best, planks of wood at worst.
I half liked Chris Pratt's central performance. Guardians of the Galaxy was the first time I saw him (I'm sure I'm not alone on that), and whereas his humorous turn just annoyed me in that movie, here it actually was kind of effective; he did make me laugh a few times. I think the difference is that here it was comic relief, whereas in Guardians of the Galaxy it was an extension of that movie's overall humour, which I just found really awkward. But then there were the deadpan serious moments that were really prominent in the trailers. I suppose the character is to be commended for knowing when not to joke around, but to me it just seemed like two entirely different people.
Still, though, it was pretty cool to see him as the alpha in a hunting pack of Velociraptors! :D That hunt was one of my favourite concepts presented by the story. I also like how, even from the start, the raptors aren't fully tamed. During the scene where a worker is rescued from their pen, even though Owen is able to command them to a certain extent, they still go for him as soon as he turns his back on them.
One thing I really didn't like was how the child characters are treated – not just by the movie itself (I'll get to that in a minute), but by the other characters as well. These two brothers, Zach and Gray, are high school age and around nine or ten respectively, but everyone constantly talks to them like they're five. The parents babying Zach as they're setting off kind of came across like they were joking with him (a joke that a teenager wouldn't appreciate, by the way), but their aunt Claire greeting them in a similar manner when they arrive is just absurd. It just seemed like the writers didn't understand how people within families talk to each other. The scene with the mother tearfully saying goodbye was so over the top that it just reminded me of a very similar scene in Transformers 2 – and believe me, Transformers 2 and Jurassic Park should never be uttered in the same sentence! The point is: just because they're children is no reason to treat them like babies!
But on top of that, their role in the story is confused as well. They take centre stage at the beginning, making it seem like they're going to be the main characters. (Which would actually have been a clever nod to Michael Crichton's original draft of the Jurassic Park novel: initially it was written from the point of view of a child.) But as the movie progresses, they become less like characters and more like a MacGuffin, just there to advance Claire's storyline. They try to add some drama with Zach promising to never leave Gray, but it just rings hollow.
And on a side note, their parents' divorce is brought up once and never referenced again. A couple of lines in that scene prove consequential later on, but the divorce might as well have never been brought up in the first place. It's like they added it just because divorce has always been a staple of Jurassic Park, both the books and the movies; you can't have Jurassic Park without it.
But now let's move on to the major, major problem with this movie. It turns out I had every right to be apprehensive about the special effects. In comparison to the previous movies, these are way beyond subpar! Just like most every other blockbuster these days, Jurassic World makes the mistake of relying too much on CGI. Whenever the dinosaurs were on screen, I didn't feel any sense of awe or wonder whatsoever; I just felt like I was watching a cartoon. And that really pisses me off because the earlier movies didn't rely exclusively on CGI; they blended it with practical effects almost perfectly. That's what made Jurassic Park – and the CGI revolution as a whole – so groundbreaking in the first place. To see a franchise that formerly had us believing those dinosaurs were real, reduced to little more than video game graphics… it's about as disappointing as you can get.
Though, to be fair, the issues with the CGI may simply be the result of a rushed schedule. Production only began on April 10th 2014 – just fourteen months before the release date. I don't know how long a big-scale movie typically takes to complete production, but I'm willing to bet they needed longer than that.
There are some animatronics used in the movie, but not nearly enough. They're only used for scenes where the actors have to actually touch a dinosaur, like the raptors in the stand and the dying Apatosaurus. You're not going to see anything like the full-sized animatronics from the first three movies. There's not nearly enough of a compromise to make the dinosaurs as a whole seem real.
And that really is the one factor that constantly drags the movie down: the fact that it's pure CGI means nothing packs any kind of a punch because it's all so obviously fake. Even as I'm writing this, I just can't get over that.
Now let's talk about the Indominus rex, this movie's biggest addition to the franchise.
Now, let's face it: the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park have never been real per se; they've always been somewhat mutated. From the very start, they were created by blending dinosaur DNA with modern frogs'. And the I-rex is just the crowning achievement of that: making them no longer dinosaurs but simply theme park monsters. There's even a line in the movie: "That's not a real dinosaur." Its whole point is that it's a composite of several different animals. But rather than being awesome, I just found it dull because, again, the special effects never had me believing it was real.
Also, the reveal of the mystery animal in its DNA structure… I kind of saw it coming from a mile away. I mean, with the level of intelligence the I-rex displays, what else could it be? And the more I think about it, the stupider a plot device it seems. Blending T-rex DNA with raptors'? Who… just… who the FUCK thought that was a good idea?!!!
One thing I really wanted to see addressed in this movie was the lack of feathers present in these dinosaurs. But it didn't happen. The closest we get is a scene where Dr Wu brings up what I just did: that the presence of other animals' DNA means none of them are real dinosaurs. Though there does seem to be a clever reference to that fact in the way the raptors have been redesigned: they have blue stripes along their backs very similar to some modern lizards or salamanders.
And, speaking of Dr Wu, he disappointed me too. He was barely in the first movie, but was a major character in the novel, so I was really hoping he'd finally live up to that potential here. Also, I seem to recall he was a somewhat sympathetic character in the book; he actively helped out in the efforts to get the power back on. In any case, here they turned him into an arrogant, condescending jerk, and later on essentially an antagonist.
Another question that's never answered: where did they get the DNA to clone that mosasaur? I asked that question of Jurassic Park: The Game and it still applies here. With the other animals, they extracted blood from mosquitoes preserved in amber, but that would hardly be possible with a marine creature.
The movie is rated PG-13 (or 12 here in the British Isles), and it definitely exhibits the traits we typically associate with that dreaded rating these days. The violence seems very tamed down so as to appeal to a younger audience, whereas in the other movies the dinosaur attacks felt legitimately intense and visceral. Spoilers here, but the only death that I felt came close to matching those standards was Zara's, mostly because of how drawn out it was. Even though, as a character, she was almost a nonpresence that never earned our sympathies, you couldn't help but feel for her in the moment: how those pterosaurs didn't finish her off right away, but just kept playing with her.
Now, let's end with some more positives. They all involve spoilers, though, so if you don't want to know, skip to the final paragraph, where I draw my conclusion.
There's a great scene in the middle of the movie where Zach and Gray come across the ruins of the old Jurassic Park. As they walk through the overgrown Visitor's Centre entrance hall and the classic music plays, it makes you feel sentimental; it really does.
Another scene that springs to mind is when the raptors are chasing a minivan with its doors hanging open, which seems to be a nod to a similar scene in the Lost World novel.
But the main thing the movie did for me was the final scene: a massive three-way brawl between the I-rex, the raptors and the unexpected return of everyone's favourite Tyrannosaurus rex. :) That whole scenes seems to be one big rebuttal to the T-rex/Spinosaurus fight in Jurassic Park III – hell, there's even a moment where the T-rex destroys a mounted Spinosaurus skeleton. And the knowledge that this is actually the same T-rex from the original park just makes it that much more awesome. :) The only disappointment is that the T-rex doesn't actually kill the I-rex. It certainly fights back, but it's the mosasaur that ultimately takes it out.
To sum things up, the movie was okay. If I were to form a scale from one to ten, where Jurassic Park 1 is the pinnacle at a perfect ten and Jurassic Park III is rock bottom at one, then this movie would join The Lost World somewhere in the middle: a six, maybe. Conceptually it's not bad; it tells the story of a working park going awry well enough. I just wish they would have used more practical effects, shown more respect for the child characters and addressed the progress in our reconstructions of dinosaurs. It's a well-meaning addition to the franchise, but it was quite a letdown after a fourteen-year wait.
Both the novels are great, but as far as I'm concerned, the only one of the movies that's really worth a damn is the first one. It will never stop being one of my all-time favourite movies. Much like The Lost World, this one may still be a fun adventure with some good ideas of its own, but ultimately it's not essential viewing.
My rating: 65%
